If we think the 19th century (for example) was full of great hymn-writers, it’s just because our hymnbooks today include only the highlights from that entire century. And let’s face it, even the highlights are usually pretty atrocious. Hymns typically suffer either from painfully bad lyrics or from a trivial, no-less-painful sentimentality.
The NCAA’s Selection Show airs this evening, and Episcopal Cafe has caught a case of March Gladness. We are offering a $100 bonus to the MDG-related charity chosen by the winner of Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation’s March Gladness competition. The only catch is that you have to register your name with us as a commenter before the first tournament game is played. Find out more.
It’s often suggested that religious charities must be self-interested. Either they proselytise, or they discriminate to the advantage of believers, or both. It’s also suggested that the people who give to them are really being selfish, because they want to put themselves right with God, and so to benefit from their actions, rather than being truly altruistic. Are these accusations fair? And are secular charities, or state provision, morally superior?
If you read enough right-wing criticism of Mainline Protestant religious denominations such as ours, you will run–repeatedly– across the unsupported assertion that our membership numbers
A daily roundup of what bishops are blogging from their meeting in Kanuga.
There could be no law, and so no civilization, absent the imputation to persons of responsibility for their wrongful acts. But the sum of a million cases, each one rightly judged fairly on its individual merits, may nevertheless constitute a great historic wrong. This is, in my view, now the case in regards to the race and social class disparities that characterize the very punitive policy that we have directed at lawbreakers.
Here is a collection of a few of the good things that Episcopalians and their congregations have done that made the news this past week. And other news fit to print.
Archbishop Peter Akinola reports that Martyn Minns and Robert Duncan are among the bishops at the Church of Nigeria House of Bishops meeting.
Minns and Duncan have the opportunity to speak out against the support Akinola and his church have given to a bill persecuting gays. Unless they do so, they are directly implicated.
In his new book The Evolution of God, Robert Wright leans on the first gospel–that of Mark–to suggest that later gospels present a Jesus who is less historically authentic, but more palatable to modern tastes, especially on interfaith issues.
Defense of Marriage laws, now in place in over thirty-seven states, are actually a form of religious violence; they violate sacred texts, are idolatrous, and scapegoat a powerless group.