Thanks to Mary Getz and the Episcopal Public Policy Network for a handy summary of the actions of our just-completed General Convention on public policy issues. Resolutions call upon Congress to act on the following issues:
Let the foghorn leghorns go on with their patronizing lectures until the woman has a meltdown on national television, while the cameras pan the senators, seeing but not comprehending those things they have left undone and those they ought not to have done — leaving it to the venerable Book of Common Prayer to observe that “there is no health in us.”
Like so many other Englishmen, Canon Giles Fraser has heard about enough of the American right’s misrepresentations of his country’s National Health Service:
Brother Ron, as he likes to be called, is a monk. He’s a member of the Brotherhood of Saint Gregory, a Christian community that’s part of the Episcopal Church. Brother Ron helps to run the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, a day center that provides food, medical care and case management to the homeless.
The Anglican Diocese of Cape Town today agreed to a resolution asking the church’s bishops to provide pastoral guidelines for gay and lesbian members of the church living in “covenanted partnerships,” taking into account the mind of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
What rankled most was the hypocrisy, the fact that the Bible’s scattered and random words on homosexuality were uncontestable for all time and yet, somehow, divorce – which Jesus himself appears from the Gospels to have condemned – was somehow only a minor and changeable transgression.
NIFCON (the Network of Inter Faith Concerns for the Anglican Communion) is one of the main sponsors of a petition being drawn up asking the government of Pakistan to repeal the law against blasphemy. In recent years the threat of this law has often been often been used in unjust attacks upon the country’s vulnerable Christian minority.
“People are thinking that Islam is an issue in Africa and Asia, but you in the West are sitting on explosives.” What people in the West don’t understand, he said, “is that what Islam failed to accomplish by the sword in the eighth century, it’s trying to do by immigration so that Muslims become citizens and demand their rights.”
An estimated 140,000 people of faith gathered on a national conference call with President Barack Obama yesterday. Sponsored by more than thirty religious denominations and organizations, the call helped launch a massive “40 Days for Health Reform” campaign to mobilize people of faith to press Congress to finish work on health care reform when they return after Labor Day Recess.
Tobias Haller, Mark Harris and the Modern Churchpeople’s Union have all written essays worth reading recently.