“An entire California diocese of the U.S. Episcopal Church voted to secede on Saturday in a historic split following years of disagreement over the church’s expanding support for gay and women’s rights.” In these words, Reuters misinterprets today’s vote in the Diocese of San Joaquin.
Bishop John David Schofield of the Diocese of San Joaquin has apparenlty been consulting the same lawyers as the Bush-Cheney administration and has received the same advice: the constitution allows you to claim whatever powers you desire. How else to explain the curious argument he presented to delegates at his convention today in urging them to vote to secede from the Episcopal Church?
For much of its history, the United States has largely avoided the religious conflicts that have cost other nations countless lives. Our ability to escape such conflicts is grounded in the Constitution’s First Amendment, which requires government to maintain as neutral an attitude as possible toward religion, writes Ethan Fishman. Today, however, the Bush administration seeks to repudiate it.
“I would never denigrate any civilized response of anyone for harm he may have done or misbehavior he may have engaged in,” writes Gorman Beauchamp in The American Scholar. “But apologies offered by people to their contemporaries for actions taken long before any of them were born strike me as vacuous and more than a little exhibitionistic.”
Bonnie Anderson, the President of the House of Deputies (a body of the General Convention), has issued a statement today after a long consultation with
Bishop Christopher Epting is the chief ecumenical officer of the Episcopal Church. In a recent post on his blog, he talks about how the recent actions of the Episcopal Church’s General Convention have effected the conversations the denomination has with other denominations and draws a lesson about the need for Anglicans to gather next year in Lambeth.
San Joaquin, one of the dioceses associated with the theologically conservative Network within the Episcopal Church, is meeting in annual convention this weekend. One of the orders of business it has will be to consider taking the final actions that could attempt to take itself of the Episcopal Church and join it with another Anglican Province.
Even at the very beginning of the 20th Century sermons were often reported in newspapers like “The Times” in extraordinary detail. Soon however the gatekeepers who controlled the new popular press decided that the mass market did not want to be treated to dense reasoning, copious quotations and a Niagara of dependent clauses and qualifications. In consequence, we have all had to learn to some extent or another to be ecclesiastical Ernest Hemingways.
Recent advances in AIDS treatments have lowered concerns about the disease, and AIDS education efforts, whether they emphasized abstinence or condom use, have flagged. Perhaps as a result, teenage sex rates have risen since 2001 and condom use has dropped since 2003. Abortion rates have held steady for a decade, although numbers from 2005 and 2006 are not available.
To believe in an absolute religious truth is to believe that the object of my belief is not vulnerable to the contingencies of human history: God’s mind and character cannot be changed by what happens here in the world. God does not fail because I fail to persuade others or because my community fails to win some kind of power. In plain English, religious violence suggests religious insecurity.