What saddens me these days is how many Christians I meet who identify themselves as “heretics”—jokingly if they are still in churches and defiantly if they are not. For some, the issue is that they believe less than they think they should about Jesus.
The Telegraph covers—very cheekily—a report that says the decline in young women’s attendance at church has to do with the church not being relevant to them. On the upsurge, they note, is their attraction to Wicca, glamorized in pop culture such programs as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Headline aside, the study underscores that the recent brouhaha over women bishops’ in the Church of England may drive some people out for theological reasons, but it may help address why people have been leaving all along.
Richard Sloan, writing an op-ed column in today’s LA Times, waxes trenchant over the California Supreme Court ruling earlier this week that it was discriminatory for a medical group to refuse a woman treatment for her inability to get pregnant. At issue wasn’t the artificial insemination procedure itself, but rather the fact that the woman in question is a lesbian. Sloan reminds readers that “Freedom of religion is a cherished value in American society. So is the right to be free of religious domination by others,”
Episcopal Bishop Jerry Lamb sent a letter dated yesterday to the active clergy in San Joaquin who have not yet recognized his authority within the Diocese—giving them the benefit of the doubt that perhaps they are still undecided, but also giving them a date by which they need to make up their minds or face consequences
It began to dawn on me that my overwhelming desire to finish or at least “fix” the Cathedral was akin to the quest of some to fix the present crisis in the Anglican Communion through any number of means, as though the Anglican Communion can be fixed or cleansed by sand-blasting, the empty porticoes filled in with saints hewn from stone who will guard us from all that is heretical and undesirable.
You, too, daughter of Canaan, conquered the Unconquerable One by boldness for that justice. The Just One set a boundary for the land of the Gentiles that the Gospel might not cross over. Blessed are you who broke through the fence fearlessly.
CANA holds their Council 2008 this weekend in Akron, Ohio. The group continues its plans to set up a separate Anglican Province in North America.
Updated Saying that they don’t want to choose between “competing Anglican bodies,” the Chapter of Trinity Cathedral in Pittsburgh will vote on a plan that would allow the Cathedral to serve both the remaining Episcopalians in the Diocese of Pittsburgh and those who would separate from the Episcopal Church at this fall’s diocesan convention.
Father Patrick Malloy, Rector of Grace Church, Allentown, PA, reflects on the violence that visited his congregation and neighborhood when Jameel Clark was murdered in the parish’s parking lot.