I suspect even the jolliest vicar at Christmas feels like an accountant at the end of the tax year. This is not simply fatigue, but frustration with the gap between what we think we are doing and what those unwonted full houses think they are doing.
Religious tolerance is a necessary but overrated virtue. Its practice comes easiest to the religiously indifferent and to the condescending: “You know this is a Protestant country,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt reminded two non-Protestant members of his administration, “and the Catholics and the Jews are here on sufferance.”
‘Tis the season of Christmas and Santa Claus, it seems, is everywhere. Children anxiously await his gift-bearing arrival, but some Christians are worried that most of those children — and their parents — don’t know who “jolly old Saint Nicholas” really was.
The Rev. Susan Russell will be among those on Fox News this morning discussing Barack Obama’s decision to have Rick Warren offer the invocation at
Even among evangelicals, a branch of Protestant Christianity identified with the idea that an individual must be “born again” into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in order to be saved, nearly as many Christians said many religions can lead to eternal life (47 percent) as those who believe theirs is the one true faith (49 percent).
Heavenly Father
you chose the Virgin Mary
to be the mother of our Lord and Saviour:
fill us with your grace
Because we wanted much that year
and had little. Because the winter phone
for days stayed silent that would call
our father back to work, and he…
Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker writes: “There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that?” The article focuses on quarterbacks and teachers, but what of priests? How can you tell ahead of time whether a candidate will succeed?
Allow us to recommend the lively, insightful conversation sparked by Holy Chaos, or : What Episcopalians can learn from Baptists, Emily M. D. Scott’s essay