On Speaking of Faith (whose site won the Religion and Spirituality Webby award, it should be noted) this week, Krista Tippett has repurposed some interviews from 2003, before the program was syndicated nationally through Public Radio International, and used them to create a program that examines prayer as a global phenomenon that takes place in many religious and even nonreligious traditions.
The Washington Post covers a story we’ve discussed earlier. The hearing on the constitutionality of the law in question will be held on Wednesday in Fairfax County.
Jason Byassee, writing for the Christian Century, makes a wry observation about the complexity of Anglican fragmentation. Even at the local level, he writes, “it takes a long memory or a flow chart to keep straight all the Episcopal-Anglican divisions and acronyms that have developed in the well-heeled suburbs of DuPage County, just west of Chicago.” Part of the problem is that most people tuning into the situation are under the impression that homosexuality is the most important issue, but Byassee notes other factors.
One of the greatest challenges to us as church is to go against the culture’s use of time as a commodity, its business model of program evaluation, and its focus on production and consumption. God loves us. God saves us and makes us whole. God rests on the seventh day. If we decide to embody this as church, what will the shape of our time look like? How will we operate differently from the culture around us?
Jackson Kemper’s ministry it tied up with the organization called the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, which in turn is tied up with the story of Episcopal expansion in areas west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River. As early as 1792, the General Convention considered a proposal to send Episcopal missionaries to the frontiers of the United States.
There’s news today in the Jacksonville Sun of a priest who has been reinstated to the ministry by his Ugandan Anglican bishop. The reinstatement is due to the priest’s “modeling true repentance for a real failure”. The priest was removed for having an inappropriate relationship with a parishioner in his former parish.
All Saint’s Church in Pasadena, one of the largest congregations in the Episcopal Church has announced that, in response to the recent California Supreme Court ruling, they have decided to “treat equally all couple presenting themselves” to be married at the church.
People who follow no religion compose about fourteen percent of the American population. Their numbers more than doubled–from 14 million to almost 30 million between 1990 and 2001. Together with those who profess a faith other than Christianity, they compose practically twenty percent of the American population
In one of the apocryphal Christian books, the Acts of St. John, we learn that after the Last Supper our Lord, Jesus Christ, came down from the table and danced a sacred round with his twelve disciples and ‘Having danced these things with us, the Lord went forth. And we, as though beside ourselves, or wakened out of deep sleep, fled our separate ways.’
Andrew Gerns is thinking that he sees evidence that there’s a plan unfolding for this summer’s Lambeth conference. But he’s thinking it’s not going to be business as usual, since doing things the “normal” way is what has gotten us to the loggerheads we’re at today.