An interview with Gene Robinson:: Anglican Journal

" He spends the majority of his time in his office in Concord, N.H., on day-to-day diocesan affairs, he said. “I spend almost none of my time on this issue,” he said. "

To my ears, that does not ring true.

Church worships together for last time :: My Texas

Members of St. Nicholas' Episcopal Church and supporters from churches around
the city, state and nation began to fill the pews nearly an hour before Sunday's
service.

By 7 p.m., chairs spilled out into the sanctuary's foyer until
there was standing room only. It was the final Sunday many of St. Nicholas'
parishioners would gather together in the building they built only four years
ago.

Nearly 90 percent of the congregation is leaving St. Nicholas' to
begin Christ Church Midland (Anglican Communion) after Bishop Wallis Ohl of the
Episcopal Diocese of Northwest Texas told those who were dissatisfied with the
direction of the national Episcopal Church to leave the St. Nicholas church
building by June 1.

The headline is true; those members of the church gathered together were worshipping together as a church for the last time. The third sentence quoted above isn't literally true, although you know what the intended meaning is. Ten percent will continue to worship together at St. Nicholas'; most of the rest will worship together at Christ Church.

I admire the spirit reflected in the quotations of the persons interviewed for the article. When you believe something is taken from you and that you are in the right, it is hard not to let bitterness consume you.

Catholic Church uses beer mats to recruit priests :: BBC NEWS

And in another sign of desperation,

The cardinal will tell people that the sharp decline in the number of priests means that church-goers must play a bigger part in running their parishes....Catholic priest Father Ray Lyons told the BBC News website: "Involvement of the laity is a right and responsibility because of their baptism, regardless of the decline of priests."

If you can't tell, I believe that those in the priesthood tend to be too controlling, undercutting the accountability of the laity to be responsible for the work of the church.

Bishop pulls the plug over Eurovision :: The Local

Clowns abound at Episcopal church service :: New York Daily News

Trinity Wall Street

No, it's not an op-ed piece written by someone alienated from the Episcopal Church.

Read the whole thing. Don't stop when you get to the chain saws at the sermon.

Pictures here. Clown Eucharist resources here.

'Star Wars' helps churches connect with young congregations :: Lexington Herald-Leader

---QUOTE---
At All Saints Episcopal Church in Lexington this week, churchgoers celebrated Star Wars Sunday, complete with interplanetary prayer and song. A few miles away, at CenterPointe Christian Church, the minister is giving a series of seven sermons on "The Force."

The two churches are new: CenterPointe opened in November, and All Saints was launched in January. Both have youthful preachers and an unusually high percentage of young people in their pews.

Neither minister endorses all of the movie's spiritual tenets, but they say the film can help them teach spiritual truths to churchgoers -- young and old.

At All Saints, some members of the church board weren't even born in 1977, when the first movie came out. "We all grew up with Star Wars," said the church's 33-year-old pastor, the Rev. Emily Richards. "Star Wars is about the struggle of good and evil, it's about redemption, it's about discipline, it's about a spiritual quest. All of those are important facets of Christianity."

On Sunday, All Saints parishioners sang Jedis for Jesus and prayed for the leaders of "the universe, galaxy, star system, world, country, state and city." They also asked God to make Lexington Bishop Stacy Sauls and other Episcopal leaders "as wise as Master Yoda ... as brave as Luke Skywalker and as fair as Obi-Wan Kenobi."

...

Christians took a pagan winter solstice celebration and turned it into Christmas, and now they're transforming Star Wars and other Hollywood hits, notes Good News Magazine editor Steve Beard.

When the first movie made its debut in 1977, some conservative preachers denounced it.

"The fact that The Force was never (clearly) defined made some conservative evangelical Christians obviously very wary. Magic and power that is not definitely from a divine origin is a spooky subject," said Beard.
---UNQUOTE---

Revenge of the Sith :: Movieguide

Strong, contradictory New Age pagan worldview with mixed elements, such as a monistic explanation for the afterlife and the supernatural world, and strong moral elements that include a strong warning about resting too much political power in one man as well as a warning about trying to gain god-like powers and that also include redemptive attempts to save and redeem someone from evil, as well as light occult reference to a human being returning from the “netherworld of the force” (this occult element is even stronger in the novelization of the movie), and some politically correct implications such as a possible (but subtle) allusion of criticism aimed at President Bush’s War on Terror, the Iraq War and Republican control of the executive, legislative and judicial branches, plus a PC line of dialogue contradicts the movie’s moral elements (“Only a Sith deals in absolutes”) and indicates that only evil people believe in absolutes and that truth is never black and white (this is more clearly stated in the novelization and seems to be an attack on conservatives and religious people who believe that there are at least some absolute truths and absolute moral laws).

One conservative religious man's attempt to summarize the religious content of the movie in one heck-of-a-long sentence.

He's right. Someone out there right now is thinking "not necessarily." Because it is inherently contradictory for a non-Sith to utter a simple declarative sentence like "only a Sith deals in absolutes." But of course, "generally speaking, only Siths tend to deal in absolutes" doesn't make for good movie dialog.

I guess Lucas's point is that they're only absolutes if they're something you believe is wrong.

I wonder what readers of holy books think of the movie, and whether they even notice the sentence might apply to them.

A Natural Alliance - New York Times

David Brooks:

... when I look at the evangelical community, I see a community in the midst of a transformation - branching out beyond the traditional issues of abortion and gay marriage, and getting more involved in programs to help the needy. I see Rick Warren, who through his new Peace initiative is sending thousands of people to Rwanda and other African nations to fight poverty and disease. I see Chuck Colson deeply involved in Sudan. I see Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals drawing up a service agenda that goes way beyond the normal turf of Christian conservatives.

I see evangelicals who are more and more influenced by Catholic social teaching, with its emphasis on good works. I see the historical rift healing between those who emphasized personal and social morality. Most of all, I see a new sort of evangelical leader emerging.

Millions of evangelicals are embarrassed by the people held up by the news media as their spokesmen. Millions of evangelicals feel less represented by the culture war-centered parachurch organizations, and better represented by congregational pastors, who have a broader range of interests and more passion for mobilizing volunteers to perform service. Millions of evangelicals want leaders who live the faith by serving the poor.

Affordable Family Formation :: VDARE

It's the marriage gap, not the gender gap

As I first reported in VDARE.COM last December, the single best correlation with Bush’s share of the vote by state that anybody has yet found is: the average years married by white women between age 18 and 44: an astonishing r-squared = 83 percent.
...
Bush carried the top 25 states ranked on "years married."
...
According to Greenberg, the exit poll showed Bush carried merely 44% of the single white females but 61% of the married white women—a 17 point difference. Among white men, Bush won 53% of the singles and 66% of the married—a 13 point difference.

Bringing back the chestnut and the elm :: Instapundit.com

That would be so cool.

Three crosses burned in Durham on one day :: News 14 Carolina

"Police found the first cross burning around 9:20 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church."

Authentic Faith Community :: ECN

Authentic Faith Community (AFC)

A missional community of six to eight households (single or family) that studies scripture and worships together, serves and disciples one another, all while striving to reveal the gospel of Jesus Christ within a specific, unreached culture or cultures.

Thanks to CMC of Orkney for the tip.

What's their denomination? Or is that the whole point?

Blogs generating buzz

o SarahLaughed. Dylan's lectionary blog.

o aGenerousOrthodoxy. A conversation about Generous Orthodoxy, a book by Brian D. McLaren. Subtitled: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN

Thanks to CMC of Orkney for the tips.

Whither Christianity in Scotland? :: Scotsman

For a while in the 1980s, it looked like circling the wagons might keep the injuns at bay: the two extreme wings of Scottish Christianity - the conservative Catholic Church and the conservative Protestant sects - seemed to be holding up. But their support is now collapsing. With hindsight, we can see that their success was an accidental consequence of having larger-than-average families and being marginal to affluent, industrial, liberal society. Catholics were socially marginal; the Free Churches were geographically remote. The upward movement of Scots Catholics and the outward movement of Highlanders and Islanders has made both populations better integrated. When the social barriers came down, so did the distinctive piety.
...
The Kirk's loss of 60 per cent of attenders since 1960 is dramatic enough, but the full extent of secularization becomes clear if we take a longer time span. In 1851, about half of Scots regularly attended church, most had some formal Christian instruction, and basic Christian ideas were taken for granted. Now, only 10 per cent attend church and the proportion familiar with Christianity is barely larger. In 1900, being Christian was expected; in 2005, it is exceptional.
...
many surveys tell us that adult conversion is rare; if people are not socialised into a faith in childhood, they are very unlikely to acquire one later. We know a lot about family dynamics. When parents belong to the same church, their children have a one-in-two chance of acquiring the faith. When parents are not the same faith (even if both are churchly), the odds on successful transmission are halved again. And the Christian population in many parts of Scotland is getting close to being too small to reproduce itself. Young Christians can either not marry (and, hence, not produce the next generation) or marry out (and, hence, not produce the next generation).
...
People do not accidentally become religious. Being a Christian is not "natural"; it is an acquired characteristic. Like a language, it must be learned and, if it is not used in the home, in everyday conversation and in public life, it dies out. As the population that speaks a minority tongue shrinks, decline does not slow; it becomes faster. There is no natural obstacle to the death of a language. I do not see why the fate of a religion should be different.

• Steve Bruce is professor of sociology at the University of Aberdeen and author of God is Dead: Secularization in the West. [Follow the link to read the first few pages.]

Shouldn't the subtitle be Secularization in Western Europe? Click here.

Ensemble of the North

What's life about? The Ensemble of the North shows us that beauty is an essential ingredient. The beauty of God via human voices and inspired composing.

Follow the link in the headline above to give the Ensemble a listen. Also, listen here to O Magnum Mysterium sent by Mark of Saluda. Your patience in allowing it to load for a minute will be rewarded.

Evangelicals go Ivy League - NYT

Most pollsters agree that people who identify themselves as white evangelical Christians make up about a quarter of the population, just as they have for decades.

What has changed is the class status of evangelicals. In 1929, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr described born-again Christianity as the "religion of the disinherited." But over the last 40 years, evangelicals have pulled steadily closer in income and education to mainline Protestants in the historically affluent establishment denominations. In the process they have overturned the old social pecking order in which "Episcopalian," for example, was a code word for upper class, and "fundamentalist" or "evangelical" shorthand for lower. Evangelical Christians are now increasingly likely to be college graduates and in the top income brackets.
...
While working for Campus Crusade, Mr. Bennett had discovered that it was hard to recruit evangelicals to minister to the elite colleges of the Northeast because the environment was alien to them and the campuses often far from their homes. He also found that the evangelical ministries were hobbled without adequate salaries to attract professional staff members and without centers of their own where students could gather, socialize and study the Bible. Jews had Hillel Houses, and Roman Catholics had Newman Centers.

He thought evangelicals should have their own houses, too, and began a furious round of fund-raising to buy or build some. An early benefactor was his twin brother, Monty, who had taken over the Dallas hotel empire their father built from a single Holiday Inn and who had donated a three-story Victorian in a neighborhood near Brown.

To raise more money, Matt Bennett has followed a grapevine of affluent evangelicals around the country, winding up even in places where evangelicals would have been a rarity just a few decades ago. In Manhattan, for example, he visited Wall Street boardrooms and met with the founder of Socrates in the City, a roundtable for religious intellectuals that gathers monthly at places like the Algonquin Hotel and the Metropolitan Club.

Those meetings introduced him to an even more promising pool of like-minded Christians, the New Canaan Group, a Friday morning prayer breakfast typically attended by more than a hundred investment bankers and other professionals. The breakfasts started in the Connecticut home of a partner in Goldman, Sachs but grew so large that they had to move to a local church.

Like many other evangelicals, some members attend churches that adhere to evangelical doctrine but that remain affiliated with mainline denominations.

Via Kendall at titusonenine.

Basilique de Notre-Dame-du-Cap - Church of the day

Cap-de-la-Madeleine, Ontario, Canada


Thanks to Virginia of C-ville for the link.

The Rt. Rev. Robert Hargrove - he found the Episcopal Church :: Shreveport Times

The second bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana, the Rt. Rev. Robert Hargrove, died Thursday at his home in Pineville. He was 67.

Hargrove was raised in Kentucky and began his ministry career as Baptist pastor. But in the mid-1960s he found the Episcopal Church and he and his wife, Linda, converted. He entered Seabury Western Seminary in Evanston, Ill., and was ordained in 1967.

I know many former Baptists who have made terrific Episcopalians. Some are even bishops. Their stories are often similar: it is a story of finding the Episcopal Church and feeling like they've found a home. Converts like these have the clearest understanding of the strengths of the Episcopal Church.

We're not for everyone. But we do welcome you.

Blogger quits Episcopal Church to join Catholics

In a statement, Bishop Robert W. Duncan Jr. of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, wished Kimel well. "From my discussions with [Rev.] Kimel about this matter, I know that he has agonized over this decision, especially as our Episcopal Church has continued its slide into disorder," the statement read.

Kimel, married with four grown children, faces at least a two-year process to be ordained as a Catholic priest.

Economists (and political scientists) talk about the mechanisms of voice and exit as means used by members of an organization to communicate dissatisfaction with the organization. Will the Episcopal Church respond and change when clergy and parishes exit? And, could it be that the dissenters that have stayed behind are pleased to see exit because they believe that voice isn't working?

The Left, the Right and the Bible (3 Letters) - New York Times

Kristof's Bible-thumping liberal op-ed has generated three letters to the editor. I tend to agree with all three; if that's possible.

Link via titusonenine.

Meanwhile, on the other coast, the LA Times is printing letters to the editor on it's piece "Evangelicals are carving niche in the workplace."

These links also come to us via titusonenine.

There's a connection here, isn't there? Kristof argues that liberal Christians should not compartmentalize their faith from the rest of their life, including their political selves and their engagement with conservatives. Meanwhile Evangelicals take their faith to the workplace, and that makes people uncomfortable. Are liberal Christians self censoring because they do not wish to be alienated from colleagues and friends who believe religion should only be done in private?