The year is 1907. The month is October. There is a run the banks. What does most influential financier of the day do? Spend 30 days at General Convention which was the celebrating 300 years of Anglicanism in the USA.
The pivotal assumption on my part is the centrality of the Incarnation – the God-man, Jesus Christ. Here, my Incarnation theology is more in the tradition of the Wisdom literature of the Scriptures, the
Church Fathers and the Orthodox tradition (in contrast to that of Anselm). The Incarnation is the
very reason for creation, so that God might graciously share the Divine life with the “other”.
Here’s the reality check. Before you accuse someone of being a “centrist” and use that as code for lack of faith commitment, ask these questions: Does it matter at all where the center is? Does it matter at all where the center could and should be?
That’s the thing about therapy: It’s about real people, and they don’t necessarily fit your grand theory or mine. Conservative evangelists are arrogant and wrong to assume that therapy can alter a patient’s sexuality. Don’t repeat their mistake by insisting that it can’t. — William Saleton in Slate.
God has placed the US church in a situation of enormous risk brought on mostly because of policies and attitudes rooted in a conviction of exceptionalism. Two by-products of the resulting anxiety, denial and despair, have resulted in a variety of strategies aimed at exclusionary absolutism, based on the fearful assumption that elimination of the “other” will ease that anxiety and bring well-being and security.
After long years of waiting on Heaven-commissioned men, who ought to have acted for us with alacrity, we at length obtained the Episcopate for America! But the condition of things here had been so long that of a Presbyter-Church, it was not an easy matter to put the Bishop in his right place. He had been imported for only two things, Ordination and Confirmation!
When my aunt said to me one evening while watching television, “Well, you know your grandfather was gay, right?” it shook my core to realize that, yes!—I am, too. It was all the more reason then, that coupled with my self-inflicted rigid beliefs and my own sexual epiphany, I was utterly wounded the morning in Sunday school when my teacher lectured on the sin of homosexuality.