One would ordinarily have thought our way of understanding other people’s mental states, say, whether someone did something intentionally or unintentionally, should be somehow independent of morality. What our research is showing is that instead our initial moral judgments are actually changing our very understanding of whether the person did it on purpose or not on purpose.
Margaret Adams Parker at the Washington National Cathedral
Ruth Gledhill reports on the bishop-elect of Northern Michigan praising his ability to meditate as a needed skill for the office of bishop in that
Christians are annually asked to refrain from eating meat on Fridays and to pray more regularly during Lent, but the church has apparently gotten hip to the hold that technology has on its brethren. The diocese of Modena-Nonantola in Italy in particular is calling for text-messaging-free Fridays as a way for the faithful to at least temporarily rid themselves of reminders of “material wealth,” but the church is also calling for such digital abstinence in the name of human rights.
A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help. The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.
Suppose you see a small child drowning in a pond. If you save him you will ruin your expensive suit. Do you save him? Of course you do. Now think about the world’s extremely poor children who are going to die unless you give enough to a charity designed to help them, such as Unicef or Oxfam. Do you save them? Not often enough.
Now, a week later, after a wonderful whirlwind weekend of teaching, barely recovered from jet lag, I look back on that time on the patio as a quiet example of what the Transfiguration story gives us: a lamp shining in the darkness, the letter of Peter calls it; a moment on the summer patio, sipping tea, resting in the quiet of a Sabbath morning on the harbor, reflecting on what it means to be invited into the presence of the living Christ and seeing, just for a moment, that it’s all true.
These are the words of Jesus taken from St Mark’s Gospel: ‘Anyone who wishes to be a follower of mine must leave self behind; he must take up his cross and come with me.’ Now we meditate to do just that: to obey that absolutely fundamental call Jesus makes, which is the basis of all our Christian faith, to leave self behind in order that we can indeed journey with Christ in His return to the Father.
A mysterious stranger with a conscience left a cashier’s check for $3,255 at Dallas’ Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, explaining in a note that he was trying to atone for crimes of his past. Two other times this year, the financially strapped church has had scatterings of $20 bills turn up unexplained in the vestibule, apparently stuffed through a gap in locked front doors.
What dawned on me during the retreat was that these men shoulder the awesome responsibility of rebuilding Sudan after 21 years of horrible war. In the southern part of Sudan, where most are based, the Episcopal Church of Sudan (ECS) is the largest non-governmental organization in the country. In some areas, 90+ per cent of the population belong to the ECS.