Last week’s chat focused on professional and personal boundaries in social media. I mentioned how when I left a congregation as vicar, I would “unfriend” parishioners on my Facebook page. “When you leave, you leave,” I tweeted. Not everyone agrees.
He knew that joy flowed from honesty, rather than around it—sound familiar? In a similar way, Christians, whose identity is found apart from our ever-changing and often hopeless abilities and attributes, are free to laugh at ourselves. This is part and parcel of Christian joy.
It would be odd, therefore, not to acknowledge some sadness over the passing of something so central to Catholic life as what will soon be called the “old” Sacramentary. Even if you are eagerly anticipating the new translations, something significant is moving into the past, and is being lost.
Traditionally, when commentaries discuss this story, the tree is described as being barren. But in that flip-flop way of the Hebrew tradition, is this a story less about the barrenness of the fig tree, and more about it covering absolutely nothing with its showy leaves?
“If we think we are feeding anybody on $31.50 a week, we need to think again.”
The abandonment canon (Title IV, Canon16) is quite specific, designating only three courses of action by which a Bishop is to be found to have abandoned the church: first, “by an open renunciation of the Doctrine, Discipline or Worship of the Church”; second, “by formal admission into any religious body not in communion with” the Church; and, third, “by exercising Episcopal acts in and for a religious body other than the Church…
How does the church confront the fact that by any worldly calculus it has too many units, and this surplus appears to be driving up overhead and diminishing its capacity to spread the gospel?
The mission is daunting. We start from zero in a neighborhood new to us in a fairly broken-down old building. Our assignment from the bishop is to maintain the former church’s heart for the poor and to engage young adults as ministry leaders in the new mission work.
The Associated Press is reporting that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military is thus far causing less unrest than, say, allowing them to serve as bishops in the Anglican Communion.
Religious leaders are playing a central role in the potentially pivotal UN-organized global climate conference that gets underway today in Durban, South Africa. At stake is whether industrial nations will agree on how to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.