There is a report from the Diocese of Pittsburgh that should Bishop Duncan be brought to a church court for his actions, the Standing Committee of his diocese intends to continue his policies. Additionally there is a report that the Bishop has now been granted land from the Diocesan trust for his retirement home continued employment even if he is deposed.
I have little doubt that the covenant will be accompanied by some means of addressing membership and issues of inclusion and exclusion. The stunning failure of past drafts to produce a widely acceptable section or appendix on canonical provisions concerning inclusion or exclusion does not mean that that effort will not go on or that it will not be part of the final product.
O Lord, bright as is the sun, and the sky, and the clouds; green as are the leaves and the fields; sweet as is the singing of the birds; we know that they are not all, and we will not take up with a part of the whole.
End-time thinking – the belief in a world purified by catastrophe – could once be dismissed as a harmless remnant of a more superstitious age. But with the rise of religious fundamentalism, prophets of apocalypse have become a new and very real danger, argues Ian McEwan in The Guardian.
More than 275 congregations of a wide variety of faiths in all 50 United States and the District of Columbia will display an anti-torture banner on the exterior of their buildings during June, which religious and human-rights organizations have designated as Torture Awareness Month.
In the coming days, we urge all Americans to pray for peace in the Sudan and to call for strong action from the international community to restore stability in a land whose people have been entangled far too long in violence.
The nation’s campaign to get more teenagers to delay sex and to use condoms is faltering, threatening to undermine the highly successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy and protect young people from sexually transmitted diseases, federal officials reported yesterday.
Bishop Michael Smith writes to his diocese: I am pleased to announce that Bishop Carol Gallagher has accepted my invitation to assist in providing episcopal pastoral care in the Diocese of North Dakota. She has agreed to reach out especially to congregations and clergy who feel alienated and hurt by me due to different understandings of human sexuality.
Did the National Geographic and a team of well-known scholars botch the translation of the Gospel of Judas? The Chronicle of Higher Education makes a compelling case in an exhaustive article on how the text was discovered, preserved (badly) and finally translated and marketed.
From a lawyer’s point of view especially, the procedures in the Appendix to the Covenant for resolving disagreements raise very serious issues about the real purpose of the procedures, whether the procedures are “fair,” and whether they would be workable and appropriate in light of the polity and governance structure of The Episcopal Church.