The intrepid Simon Sarmiento alerts us that the anti-gay Anglicans holding their conference in Jerusalem will be sharing the city next Thursday with a gay pride parade.
Having failed to gain entry to Jordan, Peter Akinola unveils GAFCON’s new book, bearing an essay under his name, that the Church Times demonstrated last August was actually written by Martyn Minns.
A young person defends the moral fitness of young people in an intriguing post that is more explict than our usual fare.
Bible stories can be similarly horrifying. Just look at a few from Genesis. Abraham offers his wife Sarah to a foreign king. Lot’s daughters seduce their father. Jacob steals Esau’s birthright, so Esau tries to kill him. Even stories like Noah’s Ark are hardly G-rated. Who can really dwell on the way it begins? In the flood story, God proposes to kill’em all and start over.
Recognizing our origins in earth and in God prepares the ground for our understanding of our place on this planet. It saves us from the terrible hubris, or pride, which is the source of so much of our destructiveness. When we feel disconnected from our bodies, from our earthiness, we are also disconnected from the rest of creation.
Bishop Smith and Laura will be traveling to the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury England from July 10 to August 4, 2008. This blog has been created to communicate with the folks back home in the Diocese of Arizona about what is happening day to day at the Conference.
Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria has been denied entry to Jordan. This is an embarrassing beginning to the GAFCON conference of conservative Anglicans who now plan to leave Jordan for Jerusalem three days early. Readers of the Café will remember that Akinola, a fierce critic of Islam, has refused to answer questions about his knowledge of a retributive massacre of some 700 Muslim in the town of Yelwa in northern Nigeria in 2004.
In Zimbabwe today falsehood has almost become a national disease. Some newspapers and electronic media thrive on spreading falsehoods. They twist the truth for falsehood. All forms of persecution – torture, killings, arrests are done by those for whom falsehood has become a doctrine that keeps them to sustain their status quo…
The Archbishop of Canterbury himself has rightly recognised that celibacy is a vocation to which many gay people are simply not called. Which is why, it strikes me, the church ought to be offering gay people a basis for monogamous relationships that are permanent, faithful and stable.
The Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser
‘You describe the result as “familiar words reordered and reconfigured carrying new meanings.” I note that the order of service, which I have now received, includes the phrase “With this ring I thee bind, with my body I thee worship”. At first sight this seems to break the House of Bishops Guidelines….’