Reverent, pompous, attentive, energetic, bored, sloppy: it’s remarkable how one community can project a completely different ethos from another even when many of the other elements are the same.
The National Cathedral has begun to remove parts of the building damaged by an earthquake last August including stones weighing up to 2 tons each.
A service in memory of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers student who took his own life, was held last night at St. John the Evangelist Church in New Brunswick, NJ. It was part of a campaign in the Diocese of New Jersey called “Red Door=Safe Haven.”
For seven weeks, I had people showing up on my doorstep most evenings bearing food. Some were good friends, but many of the church volunteers were people I had never formally met. A friend asked me if it felt weird to have people, especially near-strangers, feeding my family. Yes, it did. Particularly since I didn’t look or feel terribly sick. It took some getting used to. But it turned out to be really welcome.
I’d visited Joe in the hospital several times before he fell into the coma. The cancer was taking him quickly. Joe had co-chaired the parish search committee that had taken the big risk of calling me, a divorced twenty-nine year old priest from across the country, to be their rector. It hadn’t worked out as he’d hoped, I guess.
Shifting demographics have left TEC with too many small congregations in geographic areas in which the population is at best stable and often declining. Conversely, TEC has often failed to plant new churches, or to plant them effectively, in growing suburban and urban areas. Worship attendance, not the number of worship facilities is the objective measure of vitality in any Church.
It is said that dogs have masters but cats have staff. At the Washington National Cathedral, a cat is a member of the staff, and this weekend there will be a changing of the guard.
Breaking The Rev. Canon Dr. Jane Alison Shaw has been appointed as the next dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.
Perrin argued that it was Jesus’ enactment of Isaiah’s feast for all people’s, the divine banquet where God welcomed all, including the unworthy, the unprepared, the unfit, in sum all the ‘wrong’ people prompted some Jewish religious leaders and local Roman authority (for different reasons and different understanding of the threat Jesus posed) to work together in a conspiracy to stop and eventually kill him.
“I do not think going off in a little partisan group with all of your exact, like-minded friends and proclaiming yourself right and everyone else wrong, or yourself saved and everyone else damned, is particularly courageous.”