For several weeks one Spring I joined a group that went birding in Central Park with an expert from the American Museum of Natural History. At the end of the time, I could tell a white-throated sparrow from a chipping sparrow. And when I saw the difference between a female pine warbler and a female ruby-crowned kinglet (the female isn’t ruby-crowned), I thought I might be getting somewhere.
The remarkable characteristic of Bartholomew is his low profile. We cannot even be sure who he was. Early sources suggest his full name was Nathanael bar (son of ) Tolmai—later, Bartholomew—the Nathanael who was the friend of Philip and who questioned, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46).
Art design by Jan Neal, Marilyn Dale & Zhongxian Tang
What saddens me these days is how many Christians I meet who identify themselves as “heretics”—jokingly if they are still in churches and defiantly if they are not. For some, the issue is that they believe less than they think they should about Jesus.
It began to dawn on me that my overwhelming desire to finish or at least “fix” the Cathedral was akin to the quest of some to fix the present crisis in the Anglican Communion through any number of means, as though the Anglican Communion can be fixed or cleansed by sand-blasting, the empty porticoes filled in with saints hewn from stone who will guard us from all that is heretical and undesirable.
You, too, daughter of Canaan, conquered the Unconquerable One by boldness for that justice. The Just One set a boundary for the land of the Gentiles that the Gospel might not cross over. Blessed are you who broke through the fence fearlessly.
The practice of exorcism by rituals and prayers was common in the ancient world, among Jews, pagans, and Christians alike. Today we are blessed to have other means of treating the physical and mental ailments that our ancestors termed “possession.” But I doubt that this is the whole story; I suspect that exorcism still has a place in our lives.
Icon painter and writer mailto:amni_jane@hotmail.com
A. C. Grayling writes: When Labour cabinet members were asked about their religious allegiances last December, following Tony Blair’s official conversion to Roman Catholicism, it