The GAFCON primates have said a little bit about the Lambeth Conference, as have the border-crossing bishops they ordained. Mark Harris provides excellent analysis.
A few months ago the Supreme Court in the State of California ruled that laws which made same-gender marriages illegal were in violation of the state Constitution’s equal-protection clause. The resulting scramble to change existing regulations has resulted in a few bumps along the way. The state’s Department of Corrections has responded by deciding to now recommend that prison chaplains stop performing any marriages for inmates.
As a couple of commentators have pointed out, despite a half-serious attempt to call down rain on Barack Obama’s “parade” last night, the sky was
Why is there so much at stake in the dispute about gay folk and their lives that it threatens to split the church and deepen the rift in American society? Here are some of the responses I have been working on: it isn’t really about sex, it’s all about power. It feels safer to wrangle about sex acts and tease out the sticky threads of disputed interpretations of Leviticus and the authority of the Bible than it is to talk about systems of privilege.
The first recommendation tonight is: don’t let us waste much time gazing at ourselves. A deepened and enriched sense of God is far more important than increased and detailed knowledge of the self. God, our redeemer and sustainer, is all and does all, and is the one Reality. Life comes with such thoughts. Plunging more deeply in him with faith and love will do more than self-concerned efforts. We can do nothing of ourselves but depress ourselves and get fussy.
In a Religion News Service article appearing on Crosswalk, Kirsten Campbell discusses the double bind that can hit churches in hard economic times: For faith-based
We’ve done a little bit of reading, searched a few Web sites, but we still don’t quite get this Greenbelt business. The festival (if that’s the right word) drew 20,000 people to a race track in Cheltenham, England, for three days of what seems to have been innovative worship and intriguing conversation–and the Church Times takes is seriously!–so we feel we should understand it better than we do.
The Humane Society of the United States is announcing its 2008 “All Creatures Great and Small” campaign, which involves a pledge to either switch to
Bishop Josiah Fearon: “For us in Kaduna State, we realised that to live peacefully, we need to understand the religion of each other and so, we are convinced that the best way to promote peace and encourage it, is to know the well-being of your neighbour and the well-being of your neighbour is dictated by what he or she believes in. The well-being of the Muslim is dictated by Islam and so, we are concentrating on the Christians learning about Islam”.
At Lambeth’s final press conference, Rowan Williams attempted to offers some clarity on what he means by a moratorium on same sex blessings. A reading of the transcript suggests that in his view, the proposed moratorium on “same sex blessings” is on the authorization of rites for same sex blessings, not on the practice of providing such blessings. But not so fast…