“We need to remember those dark times from your past for many reasons,” +Kimsey said to Navajoland members during the ceremony. “Not just for your sake but for ours.
It seems that priests are being explicitly used as handy scapegoats for the deeper issues of our day – issues whose presenting symptoms are the economic woes of the wider church; the turning of a mostly latent anti-clericalism into its ugly, active counterpart; the desire by some to exercise more and more control over the nature of priestly identity and ministry; a cultural opposition to any form of institutional authority; and, compounding all of these, the decline of involvement in organized religion.
Prejudice based on looks rather than performance violates principles of equal opportunity and social justice that this nation has fought hard to establish. Beauty bias is the last frontier of acceptable bigotry. Except in a few localities, it is now perfectly legal. That needs to change. In schools and workplaces, people should be judged on how they perform, not how they look.
As religious leaders for this new millennium, our task is to provide authentic spiritual anchors that will make the members of our many and varied faith communities feel safe and secure, while simultaneously offering them exciting, eclectic, and innovative approaches to living religious lives that will speak to them in a language that they will find accessible, enriching, and, in the end, transformational. We owe them no less.
“With the closing of this short-term loan the imminent financial crisis that GTS faced has been temporarily eased, thanks to the good work of Board member Sandra Johnson, Executive Vice President Maureen Burnley, and Associate Vice President Frank DiMaiuta, we have bought some breathing room,” wrote President Lowrey to trustees.
We regret to inform you that Charles Crump, longtime Chancellor of The Diocese of West Tennessee and 17-time deputy to the General Convention of The Episcopal Church, died last night at the age of 96.
After the eighth ballot, a motion was made to suspend the Rules of Order for the Nominating Synod and to nominate three candidates instead of four. The motion passed by the required two-thirds majority of the Clergy and Lay delegates voting.
I understand rage at the church’s injustices, external and internal. As the saying goes, if Jesus were still in his grave, he’d be turning over in it, seeing what we have made of him and his message. The problem is, you can’t do the Jesus thing alone.