To discuss the religion of the founding fathers means to discuss religion in the United States of their time. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were born and baptized in what Virginians of the time called “the Church,” “the Church of England,” “the Established Church,” or “the Church of Virginia.”
Listen as Stephen Crittenden of ABC radio’s Religion Report interviews Thomas Oden of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, Jim Naughton, editor of Episcopal Cafe and others for a program on the roots of the recent GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem and its implications for the Anglican Church in Australia.
The Rev. Michael Dowd writes: July 1st marks the 150th anniversary of the theory of evolution. For years, I believed that Darwin was of the devil. Now, I deeply honor his contribution to religion and my walk with God. Indeed, other than Jesus, no one has had a more positive impact on my faith and my ministry than has Charles Darwin.
The New York Times examines Barack Obama’s courtship of evangelical voters who cast their ballots for George Bush, and notes that it has been met “by an increasingly intense reaction from the religious right.”
Bishop Tom Butler of Southwark: “It is maintained that there is a North/South division. This is nonsense. The African primates attending Gafcon came from a narrow tropical belt. The majority of African primates were not there and the language of the manifesto would be anathema to other influential African church figures such as Desmond Tutu.”
We’ve never broken 400,000 page views in a month before, so permit us a moment of celebration.
Wheeee! Oh, yeah, our Facebook group just hit the 500 mark. Okay, back to work.
The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (an acronym too far) “uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.” So let’s have a look at them.
The fact that its essential activity is poaching shows that GAFCON is too weak to sustain schism at the level of the Communion and that right wingers in the US and Canada are too weak to sustain schism without help from abroad. The best that can be done–after five years of turmoil–is a redoubling of efforts to create a vampire, a province in North America.
“You want me to ride on the back of the scooter all the way to Moody’s?” I looked at this man on my deck with whom I’ve spent my entire adult life and with whom, God willing, I’ll still be eating dinner long after our sleepers have cleared out. And I said, “Okay, but no splaying of my body on the roadway.” The things we do for love.
I can illustrate an important part of what I have learned from Simon Peter in a story about something that happened to a friend of mine. His young son had eagerly begun kindergarten and, in October of his first year of school, the teacher said to his class, “Would you like to make something with your own hands to give to your folks for Christmas?