All the major Anglican sites listed that are hosted in Brian Reid’s garage in Palo Alto went dark for much of yesterday. These include Thinking Anglicans, Anglicans Online and the House of Bishops/House of Deputies listserve (aka “HOBD). Palo Alto was knocked offline because of some fiber cuts which has left much of the Bay Area is in the “dark”.
Maundy Thursday is a foot-washing day for Christians, emphasizing mutual service. But a bishop has given the tradition a new twist by shining boots at St Pancras station to raise funds for Zimbabwe.
The mainstream media has an ongoing fascination with Jim McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey who resigned his office after acknowledging that he had cheated on his wife with a man and then enrolled in an Episcopal seminary. It is, one must admit, a difficult story to ignore, but it is also proving to be a difficult story for the press to get right.
Almost every recent document dealing with Anglican governance speaks of the Instruments of Communion as though they are well-established and widely supported. Yet the attempt to invest these instruments with ecclesiastical authority is barely a decade old, has never been examined in any formal way by the member Churches of the Communion and has never even been approved by the so-called instruments themselves.
In a comment on the blog Titus 1:9, Ephraim Radner, a member of the Covenant Design Group has suggested that the word “Church” was used in the Ridley Cambridge Draft of the Anglican Covenant rather than the word “province” to provide for the possibility that schismatic churches and individual dioceses could “request recognition and participation.” The question is, why wasn’t such an important point made clear in the text?
The Episcopal Church has filed a brief with the Virginia Supreme Court, asking it to reverse a Fairfax County Court judge who ruled that the Church’s property now belongs to congregations affiliated with the Anglican Church of Nigeria. The Diocese of Virginia has also filed an appeal.
All the meals Jesus shared with his followers, and not merely the Last Supper, were seen by the early Christians as expressing not only human fellowship but also the divine acceptance of the participants in the present and the promise of their ultimate place in God’s kingdom.