Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent for the Guardian writes: The discontent at Wycliffe Hall, an evangelical Anglican college which is part of Oxford University, has
Perhaps this centenary year of Li Tim-Oi’s birth is a good time for the Anglican communion to speak out with one voice against traditions and practices that harm and discriminate against women and to affirm the ministry of women to all orders: deacon, priest and bishop. The greatest tribute we could pay to Florence Li Tim-Oi – and Florence Nightingale – is for our church to accept that God calls women just as God calls men.
As the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado closed in on alleged financial wrongdoings, the Rev. Don Armstrong was shredding documents and records so furiously that a shredding machine broke down, according to a countersuit filed Thursday.
The two Episcopal churches Bristol, Connecticut are headed down different roads. One, Trinity Church on Summer Street, is among five parishes at odds with Bishop Andrew E. Smith. The other, St. John’s Church on Stafford Avenue, less than 3 miles from Trinity, once was in that group but, since its rector left and was then deposed by Smith, is again on good terms with the bishop and an active member of the diocese. Trinity’s stance in opposition to the bishop will be made all the more stark Saturday, when Deacon William Hesse is ordained a priest at Bishop Seabury Church in Groton by a conservative bishop from Pittsburgh.
A linguist who worked on the Aboriginal Bible translation, said the phrase “to love God with all one’s heart” was a special challenge. He said: “The Aboriginal people use a different part of the body to express emotions. They have a word that is, broadly translated, ‘insides’. So to love God with all your heart was to want God with all your insides.”
Akinola’s action “seems to lay out a claim that he has a better sense than the Archbishop of Canterbury, and that’s a bold claim,” said Mark Sisk, the Episcopal Bishop of New York. Last week’s events are more than just another tremor on an existing fault line, Sisk said in an interview, and what may be very significant is that the Archbishop of Canterbury tried to stop Akinola. His is “a new public voice in this and welcome from my prospective,” Sisk said.
The Panel of Reference has always had a very limited primary brief – “to
supervise the adequacy of pastoral provisions made by any churches” for a dissenting
group within its diocesan or provincial life. The Panel has now been operating for close to two years. It has received five references, of which three have remained within the Panel’s brief, and two were recalled by the Archbishop. All three reports have been published, and it has no further references from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
According to organizers of the installation ceremony, Archbishop Akinola is already in the United States.
The head of the Anglican Communion is displeased, his spokesman says, that the leader of the Nigerian branch plans to make a bishop of a Fairfax City minister who left the Episcopal Church.
“This is clearly not a development that the Archbishop would wish to encourage,” said a spokesman for Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Church of England’s most senior black cleric Dr John Sentamu warns that if people fail to vote they will be sleepwalking into “a wall of hate”. The advert comes after criticism that he and other bishops in the church may be playing into the hands of extremist parties, by urging the defence of Britain’s ‘Christian culture’.
One of my favourite satirical websites is The Poor Man, which, some years ago, felt it was suffering from a lack of gravitas, and changed its name to The Poor Man Institute for Freedom, Democracy, and a Pony. The Pony was added on the principle that no wish-list of wonderful things could not be improved by adding “and a pony” to the end. Who would have thought this joke could have been independently discovered by such earnest parties as Lord Carey and Dr Ephraim Radner?