The Vatican has decided that there is more to be lost than to be gained by moving now to create a safe-haven within the Catholic Church for Anglo-Catholics who feel they can no longer remain part of the Anglican Communion but who wish to remain within distinctive forms of Anglican worship and theology.
In the middle of the wonderful, bright, flashy displays that I see while walking the streets of New York, I struggle. I want to find a place within myself to enjoy that which I see without forgetting the other part of my life, the one grounded in serving Christ in a faraway place where we don’t have enough of anything, much less the extra needed to decorate lavishly.
Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts. But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that he speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that he gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that he gives.
I am profoundly disappointed by President-elect Barack Obama’s decision to invite Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church to offer the invocation at his inauguration. The president-elect has bestowed a great honor on a man whose recent comments suggest he is both homophobic, xenophobic, and willing to use the machinery of the state to enforce his prejudices—even going so far as to support the assassination of foreign leaders.
The Café has expressed its own doubts about Warren who has linked arms with the most outspoken homophobes in the Anglican Communion in their campaign against the Episcopal Church.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited the Bishop John Walker School for Boys in southeast Washington, D. C. last week. The Nobel-prize winner described himself as an “ambassador” for the school, which is operated by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. Founded in September, the school offers a free education to boys in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the District.
As Christians, church leaders and bishops in the Episcopal Church, we urge the General Assembly to act to abolish the death penalty As Christians, we are guided by the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Here he specifically rejects retribution by stating that even the teaching in the Old Testament of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is to be rejected in favor of the teaching that calls for reconciliation.
As Christmas draws near, please consider making a gift to support the Bokamoso Youth program in Winterveld, South Africa. The videos inside attest to the powerful effect the program is having in the lives of South Africa’s young people.
The sun has disappeared.
I have switched off the light,
and my wife and children are asleep.
The animals in the forest are full of fear,
and so are the people on their mats.
Many Episcopalians are refugees from other denominations, painfully excluded because of who we are or what we believe. For a long time, we left the Church. When we came back, we knew we needed to be part of something progressive, where we would never be told that God’s love excluded us. We also live with a visceral reaction to the language of the church we grew up with. We can’t bear to be around anything that feels like that place where we were so badly wounded.