Category: The Lead

Archbishop of York Speaks Again

John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, has become quite vocal on the current crises facing the Anglican Communion. Most recently, he was interviewed by Stephen Crittendon of the Australian Broadcasting Company, where he said concerning Lambeth, “So those who now say, for example, that they don’t want to come to the Lambeth Conference in 2008 because there may be people from ECUSA , well all I want to say is that church history has always taught us that churches have always disagreed. I mean, over the nature of Christ, the salvation of Christ, there were bitter, bitter, bitter disagreements in the early church, but everybody turned up at those ecumenical councils to resolve their differences. So my view would be, if you’re finding this quite difficult, please do not stop the dialogue and the conversation.”

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Why Prosperity?

The New York Times published an article about the rather innovative and provocative theories of economic historian Gregory Clark about how humans made the transition from poverty to relative prosperity during the Industrial Revolution. Clark’s theory is that the surge in economic growth occured due to a change in human beings. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, we began to adopt behaviors that lead to more productivity:

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Is the New Atheism New?

As readers of The Lead are well aware, there has been a rush of best selling books challenging religion by several noted atheists. Are these books saying anythng different from atheist tracks of the past? Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield thinks that the New Atheism really is new. While atheists in the past attacked the church, these new atheists are attacking religion itself.

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Jesus in the Talmud

Scholars for years have focused on what Christians have thought and sad about Jews throughout history. It is not a pleasant story. Very few scholars have asked an equally interesting question: what do classical Jewish texts say about Chritianity? Peter

Schäfer has published a new book, Jesus in the Talmud, that examines this question.

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Striking a balance

Today, the New York Times has a feature on Pastor Dan, the UCC minister who writes on faith and politics for Daily Kos at a community blog called Street Prophets. The article notes Pastor Dan’s primary challenge: living out a “strikingly unlikely double-life, one part as the small-town preacher in a socially conservative spot of the Midwest, the other as an abrasive and confrontational voice of the religious left in the blogosphere.”

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Church and customer service

The Rev. Tom Ehrich, writer for On a Journey, suggests that churches declare August customer service month in his most recent column for the Indy Star. The reason? Churches are competing for “business” in much the same way that banks and hardware stores. It’s not that salvation is a commodity, he notes, but he was inspired by customer service agents poised to meet his needs from the moment he walked in to his new bank.

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Helping the Holy Land

George Ghanem, a Fulbright Scholar at George Washington University, is an Arab Christian. He speaks plaintively and honestly about life as a Christian in the Holy Land, and about how all the violence there has affected Palestinian Christians. The Centreville, Va., resident volunteers with the Holy Land Christian Solidarity Cooperative, appearing at churches in D.C., Maryland and Virginia with nativity scenes, crosses, and other items, all handcarved from olivewood.

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More on Va. ruling

From ENS: Virginia’s Fairfax Circuit Court ruled August 10 in favor of the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia in denying the claims of 11 separated congregations that the court should not consider the Church’s Constitution and Canons in deciding property disputes.

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