The trial court ruled in favor of the local church; the Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the national church. The dispute has now arrived at the Supreme Court.
The “closed heart” is a striking image for our condition. It is as if our selves are normally encased in a hard rind, in a tough shell. Why is this so? Why do we commonly have closed hearts?
Talking with preaching colleagues and with lay people about the parables we’ve heard in church these past few months, I’ve noticed how hard it is to break our habit of interpreting rich landlords, slave owners, kings, and fathers in Jesus’ storytelling as stand-ins for God, even though these authority figures in the parables consistently act foolishly, arbitrarily, or dangerously toward people who are dependent on them for wellbeing.
Religious people are shown in interviews and film clips only as gullible and fanatic, as fraudulent and nutty. There’s one exception that proves the rule, a Catholic astronomer priest who shows that a scientific worldview can only be post-enlightenment and that therefore the biblical view of creation cannot be seen as scientific. Alas, he gets two minutes.
My five-year-old daughter asked me at breakfast one morning about her bedtime prayers. She wasn’t really sure, she admitted, just what to say to God. (Now this is the sort of opening I like: “Mom, teach us to pray.”)
A statement from the President of the House of Deputies, Bonnie Anderson. The Episcopal Church spent two days in solemn observance and belated repentance for
Does the church ‘mean business’? Do we accept that our main business today is with meaning, the struggle to find meaning, and the mission to help people discover the gift of meaning through the good news that has Christ at its heart? Are we still in the business of being saved and saving others? I wonder sometimes because of the negativity or indifference with which many Episcopalians react to the very concept of being saved.
The availability of printed Bibles in the language of the common people helped bring about what has been called a “Copernican revolution” in the history of spirituality. Although statistics are notoriously unreliable, there was clearly a symbiotic relation between literacy among the laity, Protestant piety, and the reading of the printed Bible.
A statement from the President of the House of Deputies, Bonnie Anderson. The Episcopal Church spent two days in solemn observance and belated repentance for