Before I do so, however, there are other objections to my analysis that deserve a response. Bishop Whalon and others often argue that Dioceses are “created” by General Convention. This claim, however, is an example of wishful thinking that ignores the legal precision of Article V of TEC’s Constitution. This article is entitled “Admission of New Dioceses,” and not “Creation of New Dioceses.” The first sentence specifies General Convention’s role in the process. It is to “consent.” The wording indicates at the outset that the role of General Convention is secondary, not primary. It consents to actions initiated elsewhere.

The following sentences in Article V elaborate this process. The proceedings “originate” with a convention of “the unorganized area,” not with General Convention. It is the unorganized area that “duly adopts” its own constitution. Article V then describes the legal entity created by the duly adopted constitution not, as before, as an “unorganized area,” but as a “Diocese.” Then the “new Diocese” submits its constitution to the General Convention for consent; and upon receipt of this consent, it enters into “union with the General Convention.”

In this articulation of the steps involved in the creation of a new Diocese, Article V reflects the civil law. When an unorganized area adopts its own constitution, by definition it is no longer “unorganized.” It is a legal entity. In the terminology of Article V, this entity is called a “new Diocese.” This step, furthermore, occurs before the constitutional involvement of General Convention. What happens when the new Diocese obtains the consent of General Convention to its application is that it is “admitted” into union with the other dioceses in General Convention. The transformation from “unorganized area” to “new Diocese” occurs when the diocesan constitution is duly adopted. When General Convention gives its consent, another transformation occurs, but it is not the creation of a new Diocese. It is the transformation of unaffiliated “new Diocese” to member diocese of General Convention.

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Like an unwatched pan of milk, readers of the Church Times have seethed up and boiled over in response to an analysis of the Church of England by the ever-controversial historian Jonathan Clark.

Professor Clark, once the enfant terrible of Peterhouse and All Souls, now wields his scalpel from remote Kansas, but it cuts as sharply. The Church of England, he argues, is “losing command of its history”, thus losing its identity (as if a man had lost his memory, one might say).

In the 20th century, he notes, “Anglicanism was powered by German theology rather than by Anglican historiography”. One result is a loss of authority, which “is ultimately historically grounded”. That’s why, he says, “feminism and gay rights should today occupy so much of the attention of Anglicans”.

Read it all.

Perhaps we are seeing three devel­op­ments, overlapping and reinforcing each other. First, increasing numbers of able ecclesiastical historians in England have for some time been Roman Catholics ”” Aveling, Bossy, Duffy, Gilley, Hastings, Ker, Mayr-Harting, Morrill, Nockles, Questier, Riley-Smith, Scarisbrick, and others ”” and the Church of England has found no adequate reply.

This cannot just be chance. Increasingly, the Anglican history of the years since the 1530s is implicitly emerging as a phase, not a norm.

Second, the Church of England is increasingly indifferent to its his­torical dimension, neglecting the teaching of its history, unconcerned at the fate of ancient libraries, actively resistant to promoting scholarly clergy who might have historical views that would threaten a reigning consensus established on other evidential grounds than the historical.

Third, the few Anglicans who are historically aware now often depict the Church of England as essentially a radical Protestant denomination with a revolutionary foundation in the early 16th century, and revolutionary implications for morals and manners in our own day.

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Almighty God, by whose grace thy servant Elizabeth of Hungary recognized and honored Jesus in the poor of this world: Grant that we, following her example, may with love and gladness serve those in any need or trouble, in the name and for the sake of Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Two great English Cardinals, the Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) and Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500-1558), the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury appointed by the Holy See, were commemorated in Oxford during the evening of Monday November 17 2008.

A memorable and ecumenical reception and dinner was hosted by Oriel College to mark the completion of the publication of The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, described by scholars as the greatest collection of letters of its kind in the English language.

The series was begun by Fr Stephen Dessain, the distinguished Newman scholar and a member of Cardinal Newman’s Birmingham Oratory, during the late 1950s. Volume Xl, the first in the series to be published, and covering the start of Newman’s Catholic years, was published during 1961. Volume XXXII, the last to be published, appeared on October 9 this year, the anniversary of Newman’s reception into the Catholic Church in 1845.

Read it all.

I sometimes wonder what life in the church would be like if we had never ever developed the concept of winning and losing. In many of the great controversies that face the church at the moment, and Lord knows there are enough of those, many of those controversies it seems to me increasingly clear that nobody’s going to win. In other words, there is not going to be a situation of sublime clarity in which one group’s views will prevail because the other group simply says, ‘Oh I see it all now.’ But if we’re not in the business of winning and losing like that, what does the church look like? What if we were sufficiently unafraid, (and there’s a key word) sufficiently unafraid to be able to put winning and losing on the back burner, to move away from the notion that my triumph is another’s loss. What if we were able to think of the health of the Christian community in terms of our ability or otherwise, our freedom or otherwise, to connect one another with the wellsprings of reconciliation. Let me go back to a phrase I used a bit earlier: ‘Sin is healed by solidarity’.

The monks of the desert were looking for solitude, but not isolation. A good deal of research has been done in the last couple of decades on the importance of community to these people. And the way in which time and again in the narratives and the sayings that stem from them, time and again point is reinforced. Only in the relations they have with one another can the love and the mercy of God appear and become effective. And those mutual relations have to do with that identification, that solidarity, that willingness to stand with the accused and the condemned. And somehow it’s in that action that the real healing occurs. Prayers and fasting, sleepless nights and asceticism, well various of the fathers take varying views of it. Most of them are rather sceptical about how significant that is. But if you are able in some sense, to take away what in you stands between God and the neighbour, then your own healing, as well as the other person’s healing, is set forward.

So asceticism is not simply about loading your body with chains, spending 30 years on top of a pillar, sleeping two hours a night, or whatever, or even working for a merchant bank, it’s about learning to contain that aspect of acquisitive human instinct that drives us constantly to compete and to ignore what’s around us.

Asceticism is a purification of seeing. It’s not a self-punishment, but a way of opening the eyes.

Dated, bit still of interest. Read it all.

Cardinal Kasper, who has given generously of his time to the Church of England recently, spoke for many Anglicans when he said, ‘It occurs to me that at critical moments in the history of the Church of England and subsequently of the Anglican Communion, you have been able to retrieve the strength of the Church of the Fathers when that tradition was in jeopardy. The Caroline divines are an instance of that, and above all, I think of the Oxford Movement. Perhaps in our own day it would be possible too, to think of a new Oxford Movement, a retrieval of riches which lay within your own household.

‘This would be a re-reception, a fresh recourse to the Apostolic Tradition in a new situation. It would not mean a renouncing of your deep attentiveness to human challenges and struggles, your desire for human dignity and justice, your concern with the active role of all women and men in the Church. Rather, it would bring these concerns and the questions that arise from them more directly within the framework shaped by the Gospel and ancient common tradition in which our dialogue is grounded.’
Fr Aidan Nichols has expressed the same sentiments about the need for Anglicans to bring classical Anglicanism into a reunited Church. Thirty years ago Michael Ramsey was advocating the need for a new Oxford Movement. It is an attractive proposition and invites a discerning consideration, not in the sense of replicating a piece of past history, which would be impossible, but in a discernment of what the essence of that Movement was and the underlying principles that motivated it.

The Tractarians’ concern was why the Church was so weak in the face of the dangers which threatened it; dangers not simply from the outside but also in the actual life of the Church of their day. William Palmer said, ‘we felt ourselves assailed by enemies from without and foes within…enemies within the Church seeking the subversion of its essential characteristics and what was worst of all, no principle in the public mind to which we could appeal.’

For such people the Church was no more than an association for the promotion of religion and social virtue. Matters of dogmatic belief, ecclesiastical organization and liturgical observance were only of secondary importance. Hence the Church lacked that clear principle by which it could define its true character and defend itself against the world. So national apostasy and ecclesiastical apostasy were two sides of the same coin.

Our questions are the same. Does the Church have a distinctive and independent witness to the society in which it is set? Is it to be ‘conformed to this world’ or is its purpose to be very much more?

Today’s apostasy is as real as that which Keble preached against. It intrudes itself as a political correctness that is tearing the Anglican Communion apart in the struggle of two incompatible religions. Its aim is to re-interpret biblical and credal orthodoxy and conform it to the secular spirit of the age.

The bishops do not exemplify in their teaching and work their status and function as the apostolic ministry in and to the Church founded by Christ. It is reduced to a functionalism that anyone can do; man or woman. An understanding of the episcopal office is missing in the contemporary Church of England and this is why there is so much confusion over it, not least among bishops themselves; and why it is so difficult to get across its absolute centrality for the Church in reunion discussions.

What stands in the way of this reappraisal of the episcopal order, vital for our Church, is again a want of principle, a principle by which we can assess and reform. For the Tractarians their bishops lacked any understanding of the Episcopal Office and they point us to where we should look for it. They sought to recover it by their emphasis on the Apostolic Succession and the sacramental character of the episcopate. They wanted to revive an awareness of the true character of the bishop, and of the fact that this character was the most important thing about him. It was the symbol of the divine origin of the whole Church.

But the Tractarians were also concerned with the renewal of the priesthood, by their emphasis on sacramental and priestly ideals. This is what changed the whole character of priestly ministry and awakened the parochial clergy with their watch-cry, ‘Stir up the gift that is in you.’

Priests need a true and profound understanding of their calling to receive a ‘divine commission’ that should permeate and inform the whole of their spiritual lives. Only then can genuine and effective priestly action flow and only then will society learn that it needs this distinctive ministry which it can find nowhere else. Renewal in our church must begin, as did the Oxford Movement, though not of course end, with the renewal of the priesthood.

The Tractarians were concerned for a return to the prescriptive sources of Anglicanism. We must make friends with the great Anglican divines of the seventeenth century and the early Christian Fathers that were the bedrock of their theology. This is vital for the renewal of the Church and also for the intellectual and spiritual formation and nourishment of the clergy. For the Tractarians, a priest’s life and work must be grounded in sound doctrine, the traditional and orthodox faith of the Church, which rested for them on the Bible, the early Fathers, the Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican divines of the seventeenth century.

How many priests know the Fathers or anything in their own classical Anglican tradition where there are crucial resources for their intellectual and devotional life? How much is today’s ordinand informed of these resources in theological college? The evidence suggests that emphasis is more heavily weighted on the agenda of politically correct issues than classical Anglican theology.

Our church and its leaders apparently are not presenting a vigorous and reasoned defence of those core doctrines which are the Church’s foundation; doctrines and sacramental life not our own and received from the universal Church. We need to be made aware of the spiritual treasures of the Anglican divines who preserved the Reformed and Catholic heritage of the Church of England; and whose heirs the Tractarians recognized themselves to be.

Once more, Anglican renewal must have its theological side; a re-statement and affirmation of the Church’s historic faith in this twenty-first century. There is little sign of this as yet. These divines have much to say to us of the whole tenor and temper of modern church life. They saw the Christian life in terms of holiness, the sanctity of the individual member and the whole body of the faithful.

Theology is not just a matter of intellectual clarity but the union of human lives with God in the way of holiness. So the Christian life is ‘one of constant discipline where we are immersed in holy things which are to be handled in a spirit of sobriety, austerity and awe.’ This is such a contrast to the loss of dignity in the casualness and laid-back mateyness of much Christian worship today. For these divines the Church is a supernatural body that reflects the divine holiness and this present life is a preparation for the life to come. The ‘life of the world to come’ is not merely in the future but it is a present eternal state that penetrates our earthly life.

After July the outlook looks dark but not hopeless. If it seems that the English Catholic Church is disappearing into sectarianism, remember that it is still present in us. If we are in a New Interregnum then we must realize that we cannot survive by a policy of mere aloofness and obstruction. We must continue to justify our opposition on theological and historical grounds and so inform ourselves to do so.

Our aim and that of our constituency must be to build an edifice of reasoned theology and devotion in support of orthodox Anglican church principles. Not only will this moderate our opponents. It will make these principles intelligible to them. This need is crucially urgent when so many theological schemes for training priests have retreated from theology. We must encourage our young ordinands and laity to engage with us in this endeavour by organizing groups and conferences and providing the necessary resources. From lectures and retreats I am conscious of laity keen to know more about this.

Let us avoid knee-jerk reactions of rushing into the arms of another Communion, or becoming a defeated and bedraggled remnant begging Rome for ecclesiastical asylum. Let us continue to stand firm in our Anglican orthodoxy against the modernism that is doing its worst to conform our Church to secularism. Let us reach out to our Evangelical brethren whose concern is for a biblical and historical Anglican orthodoxy, and then we will have the riches of our Anglican patrimony to bring into a reunited Church when liberalism has withered away.

In this spirit we can take up the challenge of Cardinal Kasper and retrieve the riches which lie within our own household and retrieve the strength of the Church of the Fathers, a fresh recourse to the Apostolic Tradition in a new situation.

–This article appears in the October 2008 edition of New Directions

Listen to it all-featured is Saint George’s, Belfast.

Let us make no bones about it. This financial crisis is a major spiritual crisis. It is the crisis of a society that worships at the temples of consumption, and that has isolated and often abandoned millions of consumers now trapped on a treadmill of debt. It is the crisis of a society that values the capital gains of the rentier more highly than the rights of people to a home, or an education or health. It is the crisis of a society that idolises money above love, community, wellbeing and the sustainability of our planet. And it is a crisis, in my view, for faith organisations that have effectively colluded in this idolatry, by tolerating the sin of usury.

I define usury as the exalting of money values over human and environmental values; of creating money at no cost and lending at rates of interest intended to accumulate reserves of unearned income. Of reaping that which one did not sow.

Christians began to dilute the sin of usury as far back as the 1500s. John Eck, supported by the Fugger banking family, in his book Tractates contractu quinque de centum (1515), defended 5% as an acceptable rate of interest as long as the borrower and lender mutually agreed to the loan. Martin Luther took exception to this laxity, and raged that “heathen were able, by the light of reason, to conclude that a usurer is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, however, hold them in such honour that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money … Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves … Little thieves are put in the stocks, great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk.”

Read the whole piece.

The Life of Jesus film crew has gained rare access to an archaeological find that cements historical evidence early Christians worshiped Jesus as divine.

Dr John Dickson, the series’ host and co-founder of the Centre for Public Christianity, will guide viewers through the remains of an ancient prayer hall unearthed at Megiddo in central Israel.

“The inscriptions on the mosaic floor are remarkable,” Dr Dickson says.

“One of them names a benefactor called Gaianus who is described as a centurion. Another mentions a woman called Akeptous who ”˜”¦offered this table in memorial of the God Jesus Christ’.”

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His main point is that Vatican II differed in its way of thinking from every other doctrine-setting gathering in the church’s history, from the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. to the First Vatican Council in 1869. His preferred word for this is “style,” though sometimes he says “method,” “approach” or “language.” Vatican II was distinctive, he contends, in its attention to the liberty of the human person and to the connectedness of the human community. The new spirit was to affirm, not condemn; to be open, not closed; to focus on ideals to live by, not things forbidden.

“Vatican II was unprecedented,” he writes, “for the notice it took of changes in society at large and for its refusal to see them in globally negative terms as devolutions from an older and happier era.” He says the council underscored the authority of bishops while, at the same time, trying to make them “less authoritarian.” For bishops, priests and everybody in authority, it recommended the ideal of the servant-leader. It upheld the legitimacy of modern methods in the study of the Bible. It condemned anti-Semitism and discrimination “on the basis of race, color, condition in life, or religion.” It called on Catholics to cooperate with people of all faiths, or no faith, in projects aimed at the common good. And it supplied “the impetus,” O’Malley writes, “for later official dialogues of the Catholic Church with other churches….”

But to my thinking, O’Malley’s approach is a little too lacking in irony, a little too blind to the council’s negative effects and much too blind to errors committed by progressives in pursuit of noble goals: Translations of council documents (and important texts of the Scriptures) were so ideologically cast that they distorted the meaning. The abruptness of changes in the sacred liturgy unloosed a sense of instability and make-it-up-yourself theology. In some places, there followed a “me decade” of “cafeteria Catholics” who felt they could pick and choose from church doctrines.

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It would be misleading to claim that all American religion at century’s end could be captured with one metaphor. From the beginning, we have argued that the lines drawn on the religious maps remain and have certain kinds of significance. But the metaphorical mountains and rivers have their own secrets, which are now being laid bare. All too visible are those features of the landscape and climate that do not show up on the maps where political and organizational lines have been drawn.

New line-drawing also goes on, among people like Robert J. Lifton’s “constrictive” types as well as among people of open outlook. These latter seekers pursue integral and organic outlooks and ways of life through what has been called ressourcement, a return to sources. Extreme forms of this retrieval occur in fundamentalist efforts to draw boundaries and hold adherents with them while they promote negative views of the “other.” Moderate forms of this also take the form of patterns of resistance against the erosive and dissolving elements in American life, its spiritual marketplaces and cafeteria lines.

In the new century, one may expect a continued drama among those who, like so many around the world, have at least three choices. Some turn tribal and exclusive within their boundaries. Others seek to choose communal life of a more open character but still respectful of boundaries. Still others heed the call to “pay no attention to boundaries” and then invent new kinds of responses.

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James Duane’s big plans for Duanesburg never quite materialized, but the modest wooden church he built about a mile west of the small hamlet named after him has endured for more than 200 years.

Christ Episcopal Church, built in 1793, stands now much as it did two centuries ago. The only major difference is a tower that was added in 1811, the money for that coming from one of Duane’s daughters. Situated on Route 20 at Duanesburg Churches Road in the town of Duanesburg, the church is a plain but dignified two-story white building that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

“There are four very special historic buildings in Duanesburg, and that church is foremost among them,” said town of Duanesburg historian Arthur D. Willis. The Duane Mansion, the North Mansion and the Quaker Meeting House round out his list. “You can tell a lot of care went into the building of that church, and the congregation and the different ministers over the years have done a great job taking care of the building and preserving it.”

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Good to remember him on his feast day.

In reading through Prof. Davenport’s text, I was struck by how similar are the contours of the economic debates in this period of American history are to our own debates. There are those who are comfortable with the idea of a free economy as a necessary institution for providing material well being for the human family. It simply is not possible to support six billion people on a system of central planning or on agrarian or distributivist principles. At the same time, there are the Sojourners who feel grave discomfort at what they perceive to be the materialism of our age and thereby seek system-wide change. Finally, there are the moralists who minimize debates about politics and rather seek to inspire personal moral piety.

What we need to see is the greater compatibility between the three positions than is usually supposed, provided there is freedom in which the three approaches can work. No society under any economic system will be free of greed, but the free economy produces the wealth that also makes charity and philanthropy possible. In addition, for those who seek simpler lives and private piety, the free economic system provides the room and possibility to make that choice. Davenport does not appear to be what I would call a pro-market thinker, which is what I suppose I might be called. Nonetheless, this book has identified the critical issues of the debate in those times and in our own. Christianity has adapted itself to many cultures and settings, but the advent of capitalism did provide its own special challenges.

How can a religion born in a world of poverty, and centered on the eventual glory associated with death on a cross, thrive in a world of fantastic levels of material prosperity? The experience of Americans shows how, and the views of the thinkers highlighted in this volume explain how a reconciliation can occur. It comes down to the critical fact that the most productive economic system ever known also happens to be the one that is most respectful of human rights and dignity, and provides the freedom to worship.

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I would like to thank Dr. Gundersen, a church historian, for reviewing my recent paper, “Is The Episcopal Church Hierarchical?”. Reading her response, one could perhaps be forgiven when informed that my paper contains a “fatal flaw” for thinking that she had discovered that TEC’s constitution did in fact contain explicit technical legal language identifying General Convention as the supreme or highest authority. But she makes no such claim. Nor did she discover that the Church of England, contrary to the claims in my original paper, lacked a “Supremacy Act” and an “Oath of Supremacy” at the time TEC was being formed. Or that the governing legal instruments of other churches widely-regarded as hierarchical are actually devoid of the legally-precise hierarchical language identified in the original paper. Because those points are at the heart of the argument developed in that paper, one senses right away that the “fatal flaw” is unrelated to the main lines of the paper. What is not so quickly apparent, however, is that Dr. Gundersen’s critique itself contains a “fatal flaw”: she overlooks my discussion of the very topic she says is not there. It is Dr. Gundersen who engages in an anachronistic and legally uninformed reading of the text, and it is she who clearly misunderstands legal terminology, preferring to use colloquial definitions and references to an ordinary dictionary for the legal terminology analyzed in the original paper.

What follows is necessarily technical, but to avoid the anachronistic reading Dr. Gundersen gives the language in question some technical understanding is required….

Read it all and note that a fuller version with footnotes is available.

David Say, former Anglican Bishop of Rochester for 27 years from 1961, and who died in 2006, is to have a stone monument in his honour.

The memorial stone is to be dedicated at Rochester Cathedral, England’s second oldest, having been founded in 604AD by Bishop Justus, in memory of the town’s long-serving former bishop, David Say.

The member of the House of Lords until his retirement in 1988 will have a dedication of his memorial stone in a service at the cathedral, at 3.15pm on Saturday.

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On a hot June evening in 1854, a group of liberal Christians met in the Odd Fellows Hall in downtown Exeter to vote the Universalist Society out of existence. Out of the meeting, the First Unitarian Society of Exeter was born.

There had been a small Universalist presence in the town for decades. Rejecting the notion of predestination, universalist teachings granted salvation to everyone and not just a chosen few. Followers had formed into a congregation in 1831 and by 1841 had built themselves a fine church on the corner of Front and Center streets. But the mortgage on the building was high and they didn’t have enough members to support themselves.

Meanwhile, the Second Parish Congregational Church was leaking members to the growing Unitarian movement. Unitarians rejected the idea of the holy trinity and had elements of universalism tempering those beliefs. Like margarine and butter, the Universalists and Unitarians were similar, but not quite the same. Still, they had enough in common to bring them all together for the meeting at the Odd Fellows Hall. They banded together and quickly paid off the mortgage.

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Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered 45 years ago today, established the Baptist preacher as a modern-day prophet, according to scholars contacted by EthicsDaily.com.

Delivered Aug. 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the speech is widely regarded as one of the most important addresses in American history. Scholars in 1999 voted it the best political speech of the 20th century.

“Dr. King’s 1963 words yet ring powerful and prophetic 40 years after his voice was tragically silenced in 1968,” said Wendell Griffen, a Baptist minister and former judge on the Arkansas Court of Appeals. “The power of the words lies in their hopeful urgency.”

Bill Tillman, T.B. Maston Professor of Christian Ethics at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon School of Theology, said King met at least a couple of criteria for recognition as a prophet.

“One of the criteria, not being accepted in his own land, marks the response of many Christians, and sad to say many Baptist Christians, to King,” Tillman said.

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We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

—The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., forty five years ago today, in a speech that should be read and reread, listened to and relistened to–KSH

Rev Prof Kenneth Newport, pro vice-chancellor of Liverpool Hope University, has deciphered more than 1,000 pages written 250 years ago between 1736 and 1756.

He has uncovered details of Wesley’s anxieties over the possibilities of a split from the Church of England, his younger brother’s plans to marry and even over the growing influence of Islam.

He used a handwritten transcription of the four gospels made by Wesley as a guide to deciphering the journals themselves.

Wesley’s concerns over the prospect of the newly founded Methodist Societies splitting from the Church of England echo the Anglican Church’s current debate over the consecration of gay clergy and the threat of schism.

Read it all.

Working with his Rugby contemporary R. H. Tawney, the seminal Labour thinker, and William Beveridge, the architect of the welfare reforms which sought to banish the five giants of want, idleness, squalor, ignorance and disease, Temple’s book Christianity and Social Order, published in 1942, provided a challenging theological gloss to this vision: “. . . there is no hope of establishing a more Christian social order except through the labour and sacrifice of those in whom the Spirit of Christ is active, and that the first necessity for progress is more and better Christians taking full responsibility as citizens for the political, social and economic system under which they and their fellows live.”

After Temple’s death at the age of 63 after being Archbishop of Canterbury for only 30 months, Bishop Barry of Southwell asked angrily in The Spectator: “Is the Church so rich in prophets that it can afford to squander the gifts of God?” A contrasting view, expressed by Hensley Henson, was that he died just in time “for he had passed away while the streams of opinion in Church and State, of which he became the outstanding symbol and exponent, were at flood, and escaped the experience of their inevitable ebb”.

Although a much different world than that of 60 years ago, the weight of Temple’s greatness is still felt. Once described as “a man so broad, to some he seem’d to be Not one, but all Mankind in Effigy”, his wide informed vision checks our growing narrowness and self-obsession, his realism our Utopian perfectionism, his generosity of heart a worthy riposte to the mood of cynicism and anger epitomising the age and his statesmanship a powerful reminder of what it is to serve as the national church.

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Unlike its sister churches in the Anglican Communion, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the U. S. has never had an archbishop. But last week it took a step to get itself within three years the next thing to an archbishop. Hitherto U. S. Episcopalians have merely chosen a Presiding Bishop, expected him simultaneously to run his own diocese and head the church at large. The present Presiding Bishop, the Right Rev. Henry St. George Tucker of Virginia, has a nationwide job but ecclesiastical authority only in Virginia. Most often he is in Manhattan, where he must get leave from Bishop William Thomas Manning to officiate in the chapel of the Church Missions House.

Last week the Episcopalians’ 53rd triennial General Convention, at Kansas City, did not quite get around to creating an archbishopric but it voted to make the National Cathedral at Washington the official seat of the Presiding Bishop, thus giving him a national pulpit for his pronouncements. Eventually the change may mean that the diocese of Washington will become a primatial see for the U. S. such as Canterbury is for England.

Not likely to be the first U. S. Episcopal archbishop is lean, spiritual Bishop Tucker, who as a good Virginia Low Churchman would dislike the trappings of the office. He will reach the retirement age for Presiding Bishops (68) at the next General Convention in 1943, when by a pleasant coincidence Bishop James Edward Freeman of Washington will reach the newly set retirement age for other bishops (72). With the two offices falling vacant at once, Episcopalians will then have a good excuse for merging them.

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We read in the gospel that when the Lord was teaching his disciples and urged them to share in his passion by the mystery of eating his body, some said: This is a hard saying, and from that time they no longer followed him. When he asked the disciples whether they also wished to go away, they replied: Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.

I assure you, my brothers, that even to this day it is clear to some that the words which Jesus speaks are spirit and life, and for this reason they follow him. To others these words seem hard, and so they look elsewhere for some pathetic consolation. Yet wisdom cries out in the streets, in the broad and spacious way that leads to death, to call back those who take this path.

–Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)

O God, by whose grace thy servant Bernard of Clairvaux, enkindled with the fire of thy love, became a burning and a shining light in thy Church: Grant that we also may be aflame with the spirit of love and discipline, and may ever walk before thee as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, liveth and reigneth, one God, now and for ever.

Amy Laura Hall’s Conceiving Parenthood (4 stars) might well be seen as science fiction in reverse.

Her journey into the cultural history of reproductive biotechnology reads like an eerie voyage into the future. Yet rather than pushing readers to the outer limits of human progress, Hall urges us to find joy in the inner limits of creatureliness.

Hall’s wide-ranging work looks at Protestant families and the germ-free home; childhood progress and the production of infant food; the eugenics movement and associating heritage with salvation; and finally, the relationship between the orderly domestic family and atomic progress. She examines these themes as they appear in such popular magazines as Parents, Ladies’ Home Journal, National Geographic, and the Methodist journal Together, and thus reminds readers that today’s biotechnological developments grow out of distorted ideals of childhood, family, gender, race, and normalcy.

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I have a number of qualms about the validity of Ould’s reading of the Councils’ “principle of diocesan integrity.” First of all, his reading would have required Christians under the authority of Arian or Donatist leaders to remain under that authority ”” that is, under the authority of the very people whose vies the Councils were summoned in order to denounce. It is not likely that Augustine or Jerome would have endorsed the principle that Ould articulates here.

But let me address this issue more directly. I left the Episcopal Church and joined a new Anglican church largely because I did not want to have my son instructed in beliefs I do not share. Consider this: the man who is now the rector at the parish I left ”” a wonderfully kind and generous man, by the way ”” preached, on Easter Sunday no less, that it does not matter whether Jesus was or was not raised physically from the dead. Now, I happen to think that it matters very much whether Jesus was or was not raised from the dead, and unless I am tragically mistaken, St. Paul did too (see 1 Corinthians 15). I am glad that my son, instead of hearing this sermon, heard a sermon from Father Martin Johnson that joyfully and boldly proclaimed the fact of the Resurrection.

What does Peter Ould have to say to me? He does not believe that All Souls’ Church should exist, at least in its current form, so what options does he think were legitimate and appropriate ones for us? Is it his view that we we obliged to remain at our former church and allow our son to receive false teaching ”” and not just from the pulpit ”” which we could then, presumably, correct once we got home? Or would we be allowed to form a new church as long as it had no bishop other than TEC’s ”” an independent church, say? How about becoming Baptists or Presbyterians or Methodists? If Ould’s concern is the maintaining of catholicity, and catholicity requires bishops whose territories are geographically distinct, then attending any of those non-Anglican churches would violate catholicity just as much as attending a church affiliated with the Southern Cone would.

As far as I can tell, then, Ould is saying that the only way for my wife and me to avoid sin in this matter is to allow ourselves and our son to be instructed in heresy.

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That it is advisable that a consultative body should be formed to which resort may be had, if desired, by the national Churches, provinces, and extra-provincial dioceses of the Anglican Communion either for information or for advice, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury be requested to take such steps as he may think most desirable for the creation of this consultative body.

–Resolution 5 of the Lambeth Conference of 1897

The Conference approves the following statement of nature and status of the Anglican Communion, as that term is used in its Resolutions:

The Anglican Communion is a fellowship, within the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted dioceses, provinces or regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, which have the following characteristics in common:

1. they uphold and propagate the Catholic and Apostolic faith and order as they are generally set forth in the Book of Common Prayer as authorised in their several Churches;

2. they are particular or national Churches, and, as such, promote within each of their territories a national expression of Christian faith, life and worship; and

3. they are bound together not by a central legislative and executive authority, but by mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the bishops in conference.

The Conference makes this statement praying for and eagerly awaiting the time when the Churches of the present Anglican Communion will enter into communion with other parts of the Catholic Church not definable as Anglican in the above sense, as a step towards the ultimate reunion of all Christendom in one visibly united fellowship.

–Resolution 49 of the Lambeth Conference of 1930

Check it out (hat tip: JS)