If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity? This is a small amount compared to rich-government budgets. But if we could set aside an extra $10 billion, we could achieve an awful lot.
Equipped with a variety of subtle ways to move the Anglican Communion toward a fuller understanding of human sexuality, he can initiate imperceptible advances on one front while publicly taking a hard line on the other. There are wheels within wheels, and he can make them all spin. He is the Archbishop of Canterbury. But I am not. And neither are you.
Americans may be poised to nominate a black man to run for president, but it’s segregation as usual in U.S. churches, according to the scholars. Only about 5 percent of the nation’s churches are racially integrated, and half of them are in the process of becoming all-black or all-white, says Curtiss Paul DeYoung, co-author of “United by Faith,” a book that examines interracial churches in the United States.
Time let John McCain and Barack Obama to describe their faith. Each used the opportunity to offer a very different take of the issue of the importance of faith in their lives.
“In the fourth watch of the night he came to them walking on the sea.” That is to say, Jesus has been on the way to his disciples for a long time already, long before they notice it. “But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’”
With the Olympics going on, much attention is gathering around the China’s policies on religion. Speaking of Faith took a look at China and its religious identity crisis of sorts a couple of weeks ago when Krista Tippett talked to professor and documentary director Mayfair Yang: “Put the words “religion” and “China” in a sentence together, and Western imaginations may go to indifference at best, to brutal repression at worst. Yet in grand historical perspective, China is a crucible of religious and philosophical thought and practice. Anthropologist and filmmaker Mayfair Yang says that the upheavals of the 20th century created an amnesia — in the West as in China itself — about this rich, pluralistic spiritual inheritance.”
Dr. Bernard Ratigan, writing in Comment is Free over at the Guardian, is a member of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and observes that the “gay issue” is thorny for many reasons, not the least of which being a strong distaste for it coming up again and again to the detriment of, as some see it, more important work in the church. Dr. Ratigan comes at it from a more clinical point of view, noting that gays who remain in a church that is hostile toward their sexuality have a greater rate of mental illness.
The Telegraph is today covering–as in writing about, not paying for–the shortfall faced by Lambeth organizers now that the £6 million price tag is coming due. The Archbishop’s Council of the Church of England is lending £600,000 of the £1 million that the Lambeth Company urgently needs to raise to cover expenses, including the three-week rental of the University of Kent campus as well as feeding and transporting hundreds of bishops and their spouses.
Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has a long-view column in the Guardian. Her conclusion: “The Anglican communion’s present reality reflects a struggle to grow into a new level of maturity, like that of adult siblings in a much-conflicted family….