Coming on the heels of the story about the gay blessing service at St. Bartholomew’s Church in London, the extravagant publicity garnered by Gene’s appearances here, makes it increasingly untenable for an English bishop to argue, as Tom Wright does, that the controversy over the morality of gay relationships is a North American concern.
How do we get to know each other better, so that we can understand each other better? One answer is to go live and move and have our being with each other. To send people from each side to serve as representatives of their churches in those areas of the world where the disagreement is strongest. In other words, to send missionaries forth, not just from the Global North to the Global South, but from the Global South to the Global North as well.
Once upon a time a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came along and devoured them. So he put his seed pouch down and spent the next hour or so stringing aluminum foil all around his field. He put up a fake owl he ordered from a garden catalog and, as an afterthought, he hung a couple of traps for the Japanese beetles.
The Bishop of New Hampshire’s day ended with Chinese food and chocolate ice cream. He sat with some 15 friends in a second floor conference room in St. Mary’s Church in Putney, talking about nothing in particular, as though he had passed a normal day, with another on the horizon.
The BBC reports that as Bishop Robinson began his sermon at St. Mary’s, Putney, a heckler interrupted the sermon and was escorted from the congregation.
When the Chinese government instituted the policy in 1979, it touched off a wave of sex-selective abortions as pregnant couples decided that if they could have only one child they would benefit most from having a boy. That helped leave modern China with the largest gender imbalance in the world. Today, there are 37 million more men than women in China. As the first generation of one-child boys have reached adolescence, the youth crime rate in China has more than doubled.
Just four years ago, during the last Presidential election, leaders on the religious right were the only white evangelicals whose voices were heard in the public arena. This year, however, is very different.
Just so you know the proper protocol.
As Lambeth nears, we are starting to notice some interesting items in the U.K. Press. Here are a few items that caught our attention this morning.
The Telegraph finished its series on the 50 most influential Anglicans with the list of the ten most influential Anglicans. No big surprise here: the Archbishop of Canterbury tops the list. But guess who comes in second.