For the next 6 weeks or so I’ll be teaching a seminary course I call “Contemplative Writing.” This year’s run coincides almost exactly with the season of Lent. It teaches a discipline that can help us “word-people” – teachers, preachers, bloggers — to let our words take us beyond words, and center our lives more fully in God.
The perennial question, centuries old and ever new, harries us: What is the spiritual life? How do we develop it? Is it real? Is it possible? Is it even desirable? Isn’t earth about earth and heaven time enough for heaven?
Given that they have been marrying people for centuries, the clergy ought to know a thing or two about weddings. So it may come as a surprise to learn the Scottish Episcopal Church will be represented for the first time at the country’s biggest wedding show.
Writing in City Journal, conservative thinker James Q. Wilson examines why Jews mistrust Evangelical Christians, who are perhaps the strongest supporters of Israel next to Jews themselves.
The Archbishop of Canterbury said today sharia law should be introduced in the UK for Muslims.
Rowan Williams told BBC Radio 4’s World at One the introduction of the controversial system of Islamic justice in the UK was “unavoidable.” Read the interview.
The mainstream media greeted the release of the St. Andrew’s Draft of the proposed Anglican Covenant with a yawn. Coverage in the United Kingdom was light, coverage in the United States nonexistant. The media’s lack of interest in the ongoing struggle for control of the Anglican Communion has both an upside and a downside for the Episcopal Church.
Please visit our multimedia meditations and scroll down to the Stations of the Cross. Or explore the offerings at Anglicans Online and elsewhere.
Bishop James Jones of Liverpool writes: Traditionally people have given up things for Lent. Last year in the Diocese of Liverpool many parishes took part in a Carbon Fast. Through it we were able to focus on God’s Earth and its poorest people in whom, Jesus said, we were to find him. This year, in Lent 2008, we invite as many as can to join us in a Carbon Fast.
If prayer is something important to us, then much more of our time will be directed to trying to bring about possible conditions for prayer than to actually doing it. I have several times compared the act of prayer with the act of writing, and here once again the comparison holds true.
The first media reports have appeared that interpret the St. Andrew’s draft of an Anglican Covenant. Jonathan Petre, religious correspondent for The Telegraph writes, ‘An international “court of appeal”, with the Archbishop of Canterbury at its centre, is to be created to avert the collapse of worldwide Anglicanism, it has been announced.’