Williams says that he concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.
All ten videos that were used to introduce the daily themes at the Lambeth Conference are now available at the Trinity Wall Street web site.
But, most worryingly, the Archbishop’s position gives ammunition to those regimes where institutionalised homophobia and misogyny have truly tragic consequences. Two of the bishops who’ve been vocal in their lambasting of the liberals hail from Uganda and Nigeria, states where punitive laws against homosexuals are still on the statute book…
While homosexuality has come under attack in many cultures at different points in history, the irony is that this particularly immoveable form of hate and intolerance, expressed by Orombi in the name of Christian love, was institutionalised by colonial law.
It’s a rather peculiar gesture that involves making the sign of the cross with the first two fingers of the right hand while simultaneously sucking the right thumb. While I’ve not seen it in Ritual Notes or any other liturgical guide, I have an extraordinarily good vantage for observing it; it’s the sign my newly-five-year old daughter makes as she leans her head on my shoulder while I hold her during the Eucharistic prayer.
Transfiguration is a central theme of Christianity, the transforming of sufferings and circumstances, of men and women with the vision of Christ before them and the Holy Spirit within them. The language both of vision and of transformation is found in the Pauline, Johannine, and Petrine writings in the New Testament, and the language tells of Christian experience which recurs through the centuries.