St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond Virginia agreed to host an event put on by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans. The event was to be a roundtable discussion on the topic of “Debunking the Myth of the White Confederate Military”. But sometime on Friday, the day of the event, the church canceled.
There’s an ongoing dispute at the UN Human Rights Council about the limits to the persecution of LGBT people. In a speech in Geneva this evening, the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke out strongly against any decisions that would countenance laws criminalizing gay and lesbian people.
The apocalyptic genre was often used in that day to say what was not safe to say, to speak truth to power. But a new book by Elaine Pagel’s argues that the critique was not of the Roman Empire, but of the Pauline Church’s decision to allow Gentiles to become Christian.
In the turmoil of the present moment in Mainline Christian life, it’s common to hear people talking about the start of a new Reformation. For most of the more conservative voices, the new Reformation has the issue of human sexuality and/or gender as the “flash-point”. But that particular issue might cause problems in the near future for break-away groups choosing it as their litmus test.
Dorothy Sayers says it nicely: “God did not abolish the fact of evil. He transformed it. He did not stop the crucifixion. He rose from the dead.”
There are a number of accounts this morning describing the scene as the police moved into the clear the #occupyLSX protestors encamped at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London last night.