Ruth Gledhill reports that five Primates came to talk with the Archbishop of Canterbury about the goings-on in the Anglican Communion and, presumably, the events in Wheaton. She says nothing happened.
It is journalistically irresponsible to continue to write that the breakaway bishops represent 100,000 people and that these people have left the Episcopal Church when the bishops have provided no evidence that this is the case, and there are so many reasons to doubt the accuracy of their claim.
The incredible overreaction of The New York Times to the news that five or six percent of the members of a church that accounts for one percent of the U. S. population were leaving to found their own denomination continued to reverberate through the media world yesterday but glimmers of hope emerged for Episcopalians who are tired of the press treating their church like a punching bag.
The members of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Peoria, Ill., in the schismatic Diocese of Quincy, have spurned their standing committee and Bishop Gregory Venables of the Province of the Southern Cone. By a lopsided margin of 181 to 35, they have elected to remain in the Episcopal Church. Four hundred of the tiny diocese’s 1850 members belong to the cathedral parish.
Can we please stop pretending he’s America’s pastor and the next Billy Graham and all of that nonsense now?
“Why is there any evil at all in God’s creation?” Nadler explains: “It is not that everything will turn out for the best for me or for anyone else in particular. Nor is it necessarily the case that any other possible world would have been worse for me or for anyone else. Rather, Leibniz claims that any other possible world is worse overall than this one, regardless of any single person’s fortunes in it.”
Jeffrey Weiss, the award-winning religion writer at The Dallas Morning News, throws the penalty flag on Bob Duncan, Jack Iker and company for their unauthorized use of the words Anglican, province and Episcopal.
This radical innovation in church polity by Bob Duncan and his followers not only contravenes the ancient Christian councils of Nicea (325), Constantinople (381), and Chalcedon (451), but also goes against Lambeth Conference encyclical letters of 1878 and 1888, as well as Lambeth Conference resolutions 1897:24, 1908:22, 1988:72, 1998:V.13, III.2.
Members of the Diocese of Quincy who want to remain loyal to the Episcopal Church will meet on December 13 to take the first formal steps to reorganize and reconstitute the diocese. Attendees plan to organize a steering committee to guide the process and lay the groundwork for a special synod meeting, likely to be held in January.
Updated with Jeff Sharlet of the Revealer, who writes: Even as these Anglicans create something new — a church actually founded on its rejection of