“The church is the body of Christ, and each church is part of that body. To get to know someone from a different culture who shares the same beliefs and liturgical practices is mind-broadening and spiritually invigorating.”
Bishops of The Episcopal Church offer pastoral letters this week as Haiti marks one year since the devastating earthquake
“I get a sense that the Haitian people are trying to get their lives back together,” said Serio. “There’s still a very long way to go.”
“We hope for significant and measurable progress in the coming months in improving the lives of Haitians, helping to restore livelihoods, and stabilizing the institutions of communities and the nation.”
I’d visited Joe in the hospital several times before he fell into the coma. The cancer was taking him quickly. Joe had co-chaired the parish search committee that had taken the big risk of calling me, a divorced twenty-nine year old priest from across the country, to be their rector. It hadn’t worked out as he’d hoped, I guess.
Human beings long for happiness, and human existence has happiness as its natural end—so Aelred of Rievaulx believes. To put this another way, the happiness for which humans long is the fulfillment of their nature as human beings.
Jon Stewart on learning from tragedy
Online anonymity is most frequently associated with the cruelty of masked trolls, seduction by gender dissimulators, and financial scams. We forget too easily that online facelessness also facilitates the sacred possibilities of the masked ritual, the voting booth, and the therapist’s couch.
At the same Dallas address, St. Matthews’s Episcopal Cathedral, that once held an Episcopal college for young women of wealth and privilege – among them Lady Bird Johnson – low-income Hispanic women now prepare to take the GED.
The brutalised body on the cross rather than the innocent child in the manger, or Jesus, the radical incarnation of mercy and love, became the dominant icon of Christianity. The sadistic and sacrificial manner of Jesus’s death, rather than his gracious, benevolent and merciful life, became the dominant narrative.