I ask you to prayerfully consider making the sacrifice of not returning as Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania for the benefit of many who want to believe that the Episcopal Church can be safe.
I’ve fasted since I was a child, and the practice has continually strengthened my self-control and improved my ability to make better choices and avoid things that are not good for me. It promotes the acute God consciousness called taqwa, which reminds me to more caring, sharing and compassionate throughout the day.
When clergy blur the lines between the touch of the shaman—God’s conduit to be physically present in the liturgy and in pastoral settings—and the touch of an individual—it is inherently dangerous. It’s why the Episcopal Church has training in sexual exploitation of both minors and adults.
… the clergy who have been the focus of extensive CREDO research reflect higher negative emotions about work (mainly due to stress), but ironically, also higher positive emotions about work when contrasted to the general population.
“We need to remember those dark times from your past for many reasons,” +Kimsey said to Navajoland members during the ceremony. “Not just for your sake but for ours.
It seems that priests are being explicitly used as handy scapegoats for the deeper issues of our day – issues whose presenting symptoms are the economic woes of the wider church; the turning of a mostly latent anti-clericalism into its ugly, active counterpart; the desire by some to exercise more and more control over the nature of priestly identity and ministry; a cultural opposition to any form of institutional authority; and, compounding all of these, the decline of involvement in organized religion.
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It is a very great incentive to mercy to share in others’ misfortunes, to help the needs of others as far as our means allow, and sometimes even beyond them. For it is better for mercy’s sake to take up a case, or to suffer odium rather than to show hard feeling. So I once brought odium on myself because I broke up the sacred vessels to redeem captives