The Alban Institute discusses the work of afterpastors, who are interim pastors specifically trained to deal with congregations who have experienced a betrayal of pastoral trust. The work is often very stressful for the afterpastors themselves as they absorb the unresolved and unnamed emotions of the congregants.
The Rt. Rev. Victoria Matthews begins her new ministry as Bishop of Christchurch, New Zealand. She reflects on her ministry as Bishop in Canada and her new call as well as her experience at the recent Lambeth Conference.
He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium. “If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”
The class of 2012 has grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, and colleges no longer trumpet the fact that residence halls are “wired” and equipped with the latest hardware. These students will hardly recognize the availability of telephones in their rooms since they have seldom utilized landlines during their adolescence.
The lessons learned from the trial and condemnation of Galileo in the 1600s have guided an era of scientific caution and hesitancy within the Vatican. Today the Vatican’s approach to science is a complex undertaking involving nearly every facet of Church life. Housed in a building several centuries old deep inside Vatican City, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences is a surprisingly nonreligious institution as well as one of the Vatican’s least understood.
In 1600, Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori, now a nice plaza lined with cafés, was one of the city’s execution grounds, and on Ash Wednesday of that year Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and former priest accused of heresy by the Inquisition, was taken there and burned. As Ingrid Rowland writes in “Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27), the Church thereby made Bruno a martyr. But “a martyr to what?” she asks.
The Telegraph covers—very cheekily—a report that says the decline in young women’s attendance at church has to do with the church not being relevant to them. On the upsurge, they note, is their attraction to Wicca, glamorized in pop culture such programs as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Headline aside, the study underscores that the recent brouhaha over women bishops’ in the Church of England may drive some people out for theological reasons, but it may help address why people have been leaving all along.
Richard Sloan, writing an op-ed column in today’s LA Times, waxes trenchant over the California Supreme Court ruling earlier this week that it was discriminatory for a medical group to refuse a woman treatment for her inability to get pregnant. At issue wasn’t the artificial insemination procedure itself, but rather the fact that the woman in question is a lesbian. Sloan reminds readers that “Freedom of religion is a cherished value in American society. So is the right to be free of religious domination by others,”
Episcopal Bishop Jerry Lamb sent a letter dated yesterday to the active clergy in San Joaquin who have not yet recognized his authority within the Diocese—giving them the benefit of the doubt that perhaps they are still undecided, but also giving them a date by which they need to make up their minds or face consequences
CANA holds their Council 2008 this weekend in Akron, Ohio. The group continues its plans to set up a separate Anglican Province in North America.