The Archbishop of Canterbury the Most Rev Justin Welby has invited Jean Vanier, the Canadian Catholic theologian, to address the bitterly divided primates of the worldwide Anglican communion who have been meeting this week in Canterbury to discuss the themes of living together and the creation of a community.

After two-and-a-half days the 38 archbishops were still together, defying threats of an early walkout by some African leaders over the vexed issue of the western churches’ tortuous accommodation with homosexuality.

Third world archbishops, backed by some English and American conservative evangelicals, have repeatedly demanded over the last decade that liberal American, Canadian and some British churches should be punished for tolerating gay clergy and the meeting is seen as a last chance of compromise. There have been predictions that between three and a dozen archbishops may walk out if their demands are not met.

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Four Anglican churches in Trinity Bay have been deconsecrated, and parishioners will come together in a new place of worship at a local area school.

The old buildings, all located within a 10-minute drive between Heart’s Delight and Green’s Harbour, can no longer support their own separate congregations.

Attendance at St. Matthew’s, a 135-year-old church in Green’s Harbour, had shrunk to half a dozen regular parishioners.

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Archbishop Justin Welby has invited the founder of the L’Arche movement, Jean Vanier, to visit Canterbury next week during the gathering of Anglican Primates.

Vanier, 86, is a Roman Catholic philosopher and social innovator who founded the L’Arche Communities – where people with and without learning disabilities share life together, living and working in community – in 1964.

The movement began with Vanier’s own commitment to living in community with people who have learning disabilities in Trosly-Breuil, France, where he still lives.

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A recently retired theologian in Van­couver, British Columbia, tells a story about a conversation he once had while getting his hair cut. The stylist asked what he did, and he replied, “I teach theology.”

“Really? You believe in God?”

“I do. And the strangest thing I believe about God is that he became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.”

“Who’s that?”

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Two contract extensions in spite of the fact that the City councillors unanimously said no to the rezoning application. Two extensions in spite of the feelings of the neighbours who want the church to remain a church and in spite of the hopes and prayers of local congregations who are longing for usable worship space. Preserve a church as a church? Why do that when you can reap an extra million dollars by selling to a developer who specializes in high-density construction?

The words of Bill Mous, spokesperson for the Diocese, ring hollow to anyone who has a stake in the neighbourhood surrounding the church property. The Diocese “cares deeply for Guelph”? This community does not feel cared for.

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The Anglican Diocese of Niagara is giving community groups a two-month window to come up with a revised development proposal for the patch of land at 171 Kortright Rd. W.

The Diocese made the announcement in a news release on Wednesday.

Earlier this year, HIP Developments made a conditional offer on the property that was formerly the St. Matthias Anglican Church. When residents and community groups complained about the proposed six-storey, 325-resident condominium geared toward student housing, the developers offered a plan for stacked townhouses instead.

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In their annual joint Christmas greeting posted on YouTube December 4, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, and Bishop Susan Johnson, national bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, urge church members to “give an extra gift” in support of refugees.

The message begins with Hiltz’s reflection on the story of the birth of Jesus, focusing on the rather negative light in which we often see the innkeeper.

“As I read the Christmas story I’m always taken by the way in which we portray the innkeeper as the one who said to Mary and Joseph, ”˜No room here,’ when in fact he did provide them a warm and safe place for the birth of the holy child,” Hiltz says. “Yes, it was a manger, but for them it was a warm place, and a safe place.”

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Did you ever wonder why the world is the way it is? Or what your purpose in life is? Or what good is the church? Or why there are so many religions? Or whether things will be okay?

People have been asking big, existential questions like these for a long time. Members of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue of Canada (ARC Canada) are asking them again””and offering some responses””in a new ecumenical common witness initiative called “Did You Ever Wonder”¦”: Small Answers to Big Questions.

“With this project, our national Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue is attempting something new: how can we witness to our commonly held faith together?” explained Anglican co-chair Bishop Linda Nicholls.

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We have seen a number of silly episodes on college campuses this fall, and I appreciate that people have grown exasperated. But even a broken clock is right twice a day. In this case, it seems to me, the students who object to the University of Ottawa’s yoga class have a point””though perhaps not the one they think.

The problem is not that a yoga class wrongly appropriates a foreign culture. As critics of the university’s decision rightly point out, there’s nothing necessarily offensive in that. And there’s no indication that the teacher or students in this particular class did anything to mock Indian culture. I imagine most of the students didn’t think about yoga’s cultural roots at all. Probably some of them assumed yoga was a Western invention. American tourists in Italy frequently tell Italians that we invented pizza.

The problem is that yoga, in its essence, is a religious exercise.

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Historic St. George’s Church and Hall, facing likely demolition, will be put up for sale in a last-ditch effort to save it.

But officials at the Anglican Church’s Diocese of Huron ”” which owns the Walkerville property, with an asking price of $250,000 ”” aren’t holding their breath.

“We’re going to proceed with demolition but because the city really would like to see if we can sell it first, we’re going to test it on the market for a couple of months,” Paul Rathbone, secretary-treasurer for the Diocese of Huron, said Wednesday. “But we’re not going to hold it on the market long at all.

“I think the city will see there’s no demand for these buildings. One is condemned by an engineer.”

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Nods and exhalations of “uh-huh” from the crowd give the brief sense of a revival meeting, making it easy to forget that Hayhoe is, first and foremost, a scientist. The 43-year-old Ph.D. made her name building localized statistical models (“downscaling,” in the argot of her field), which governments from California to Massachusetts use to prepare for a future onslaught of drought, or unprecedented rainfall. She currently heads up the Climate Science Center of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and has contributed to reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Later this month, she’ll appear at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a 46-year-old organization devoted to promoting a healthier, safer planet.

But here in the beating heart of Christian America, she’s an apostle of her discipline, faced with a daunting challenge. Of all U.S. religious groups, white evangelical Protestants are least likely to believe in human-caused planetary warming: Only 11 per cent accept the idea, compared to 46 per cent of the broader U.S. population. Yet no movement punches further above its political weight, bringing cash and votes to Republicans who voice their doubts and fears in Washington. If you belong to the 97 per cent of climate scientists who regard global warming as real, man-made and potentially catastrophic, this deep fracture in U.S. politics is an enormous problem.

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It was 100 years ago that John McCrae wrote his famous First World War poem In Flanders Fields. When he wrote the poem, McCrae was a major and a doctor with the Canadian military in Belgium.

Thanks in part to the famous opening lines from his poem”””In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row”””poppies have become a symbol of remembrance for those killed in war.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the poem, the City of Guelph has created an interactive map journal that explores McCrae’s birthplace, his life in the city, his military service and how he came write In Flanders Fields.

Read it all it is well worth the time.

The Bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada say that they recognise the “deep pain” that will be caused by next year’s General Synod vote on allowing same-sex marriage in Church; and question whether the Synod’s parliamentary-style procedures are “the most helpful way to discern the mind of the Church, or of the Spirit, in this matter.”

In 2013, Canada’s triennial General Synod approved a resolution asking its Council to prepare and present a motion that would to change the church’s Canon 21 “to allow the marriage of same-sex couples in the same way as opposite-sex couples” with “a conscience clause so that no member of the clergy, bishop, congregation or diocese should be constrained to participate in or authorize such marriages against the dictates of their conscience.”

That motion is due to be debated when the Synod next meets in Toronto from 7 to 13 July 2016. As a doctrinal matter, if approved, the motion would be sent to the provincial synods for information and would need to approved again by the General Synod in 2019 before it would take effect.

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In the spring, Aeterna Zentaris announced the transfer of its library of 100,000 drug compounds to the Medical University of South Carolina in a collaborative venture it hopes will lead to new treatments.

MUSC can make that available to researchers within the University of South Carolina system. It also will own any therapeutic compounds it discovers outside of the company’s areas of interest.

Under the agreement, MUSC will try to provide Aeterna Zentaris with at least 10 development candidates over 10 years starting in 2018. The company also will get the rights to license any of those ideas.

Read it all from the local paper.

Reconciliation has been on the hearts and in the minds of our church for decades. In 2015, the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report, the #22Days project, and eighth national Anglican Indigenous Sacred Circle among others further highlighted the issue of reconciliation with Indigenous people, putting it front and centre for and within the Anglican Church of Canada.

Reflecting on survivor testimony and an examination of the Indian residential school system in policy and practice, the TRC was able to determine that history to be nothing short of cultural genocide. The TRC brought to light the traumatic effect of the schools on generations of survivors and their families, as well as the negative social repercussions in Indigenous communities.

“For those who have ears to hear, a conscience to stir, and a heart to move, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has humbled this nation to confess its sin, and to pray for guidance in walking in a new and different way with the First Peoples of this land,” Archbishop Fred Hiltz, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said in his opening sermon at this year’s Sacred Circle.

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As we sit down to creation’s bounty in the form of a magnificent harvest dinner this month, let’s be thankful we can plan for this fine-weather feast on the second Monday in October. Historically, the date of Canada’s day of thanks has been anything but fixed.

In fact, it was not until 1957 that Parliament first officially set the permanent date we now observe, with Prime Minister John Diefenbaker declaring it “A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed.”

Before that, the celebration was decidedly, in Hemingway’s words, “a movable feast.” Often wrongly disparaged as lacking the deep historical roots of American Thanksgiving, English Canada’s first celebration occurred 43 years before the Pilgrim Fathers touched American shores. It’s linked to 1578, when British North West Passage explorer Sir Martin Frobisher declared a day of thanksgiving for cross-Atlantic and Arctic tribulations survived. An Anglican service was held near Baffin Island by the Rev. Robert Wolfall, expedition chaplain.

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At the agency, “I was fascinated by the creative guys,” he said, especially the copywriters. While there was a lot of interesting characters to be seen at such a firm, there were less savoury aspects of the job that he, as a Christian, had to learn to contend with.
“I went to the cathedral at the time,” he remembered. “I was the only person in the agency who went to church”¦I was always perplexed by people my age who had no ethical qualms about how we did our business and who we represented.”
Around this time, the United Church of Canada was taking part in a boycott of Nestle, the chocolate maker, for their role in milk formula sales to Third World countries. Nestle was one of his clients and a friend asked a co-worker of his, “ “”˜Doesn’t that bother you?’ She said, ”˜No, this was business.’”
He began to question his direction in life, wondering: “Maybe it’s not possible to live in this world and be a Christian.” (He now believes it is so.)
It was at this time that “God moved me to look somewhere else.”

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Concerned with what she calls the “increasing rhetoric about the wearing of the niqab by Muslim women,” an Anglican priest in Regina decided to take matters into her own hands. She wore a hijab for a day to see what’s like.

In a post on Facebook, Cheryl Toth said she’s “uncomfortable with the way the debate focuses on what women wear (or decide not to wear). I am afraid that [the rhetoric] will increase hostility towards women who choose to wear a hijab, a niqab or a burka.”

She said she sees her trial run with the hijab as a way “to contribute to the conversation.”

She wore it around Regina including on campus at Luther College, walking around her neighbourhood, at a public lecture and while shopping at a mall.

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A former Anglican church in Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s that was the source of deep division in the community is being demolished.

A demolition crew arrived at the property Monday and made short work of the steeple, which had become a symbol of a bitter feud that has raged since 2009 when the diocese approved a plan to remove the 120-year-old former sanctuary.

Someone took a saw to the steeple in March 2010 and used a vehicle to pull it down to the ground. That’s where it rested until it was hauled away and later reduced to splinters by a backhoe.

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A panel of six different faiths found commonality during a religious conference that tasked its speakers to discuss God as myth or reality.

“I don’t think it’s possible to prove or disprove the existence of God in any rational way,” said Anglican priest Peter Zimmer, who presented before an audience of about 80 people Sunday evening at the University of Northern B.C.’s Canfor Theatre for the World Religions Conference.

The question, to him, is the difference faith can make in a person’s life.

Zimmer suggested all major religions attempt to answer three questions: where do we come from, where are we going, and what must we do on our way.

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What spurred him on his journey to the priesthood was a growing realization of how poorly Canadian students are taught about the aboriginal experience. His mother went to a residential school, as did most of his relatives. Talking to elders to learn more about Cree history, he was drawn into “the story of the land.” Meanwhile, his Christian faith was nurtured by his mother and grandfather, both “hard-core Anglican.”

“That’s the work I’ve been doing, trying to reconcile those two things: the work of Jesus Christ, the history of Canada, the impact of both of those questions on Cree people. How can we as Cree people be fully engaged in our identity and be connected to the land, and still be connected to Jesus Christ?”

After graduating from university, he briefly worked for Revenue Canada until, wanting more human contact, he turned to hairdressing, eventually buying his own shop. It proved to be an inspiration for the next step in his life: seminary.

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The effort to demolish the church has been a source of controversy in the community for the past five years.

Townspeople and historians fought to save and restore the structure, even while the head of the Anglican church for eastern Newfoundland endorsed tearing it down.

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Mary Irwin-Gibson, the bishop-elect, was born in Sarnia, Ont., but grew up around Montreal. Before her election, the 59-year-old served as the dean and rector of St. George’s Catherdral in Kingston since 2009. She was ordained a priest in 1982, just six years after Canada’s Anglican church allowed women to serve in the role.

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(Archbishop Fred Hiltz writes) Dear Friends in Christ,

Today the Council of General Synod received The Report of The Commission on The Marriage Canon. The report is very comprehensive and reflects the commitment of the members to address General Synod 2013’s Resolution C003 in its fullness.

You will recall that the resolution requested consideration as to whether the proposal for amending The Marriage Canon would contravene The Solemn Declaration of 1893; and called for a theological and biblical rationale for the blessing of same sex marriages. The Commissioners take us into a deep exploration of the theology of marriage and present several models for understanding same sex marriage. In accord with the request in Resolution C003 for broad consultation throughout the Church the report includes a succinct summary of feedback received from Anglican Communion and ecumenical partners.

Read it all and yes you need to look at the whole report (64 page download).

A London, Ont. church is raising money for Syrian refugees at lightning speed””thanks, at least partly, to a very Canadian household material.

As of Monday morning, St. Aidan’s Anglican Church had raised roughly $35,000 for refugee sponsorship after 15 days of its “Red Tape Challenge.” The appeal asks participants, after making their donations, to tear a piece of red duct tape and attach it to their vehicles, rural mailbox or other prominent place.

The point of the tape, says John Davidson, the St. Aidan’s parishioner who came up with the idea, is to pressure the federal government to reduce barriers to refugees in Canada ”“ “to show Ottawa that yes, you can cut through red tape if you have the desire and the wherewithal, and you want to get the job done.”

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If there were any doubts that this has become a tight, hard-fought Canadian general election campaign, that went out the window very early during Thursday night’s leaders’ debate in Calgary.

It was a spirited, sometimes snippy affair that often seemed to spin out of control, as the back-and-forth between the three candidates – Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and left-of-centre challengers Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party and Thomas Mulcair of the New Democratic Party – descended into cacophony.

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Anglophone migration out of Francophone Canada has decimated the Anglican Church with the number of members of the Diocese of Quebec falling almost in half over the past two years, a document released on the diocesan website reports.

“A Thumbnail Sketch of the Diocese” published on 14 Sept 2015 in preparation for the election of the 13th Bishop of Quebec reported: “There are 69 congregations, serving an overall Anglican population of approximately 1800 souls.” Statistics published in a report released in early 2014 by the Task Force on Mission Ministry and Management reported the diocese had 3000 members in 52 parishes with 87 congregations.

On 5 Aug 2015 the Bishop of Quebec, the Rt Rev. Dennis Drainville (61) announced that he would step down in 2017 and called for the election of a coadjutor at a special meeting of synod on 26-29 Nov 2015, with his successor consecrated in March 2016. Earlier this year, Bishop Drainville stood for election in Montreal and called for the merger of the two dioceses. He lost to Bishop-elect Mary Irwin-Gibson. He told the Anglican Journal his decision to retire was not related to the result of that election.

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On Feb. 6, 2016 ”“ one year after the historic Supreme Court ruling in the case of Kathleen Carter and Gloria Taylor ”“ physician-assisted death will be legal in Canada. The Canadian Medical Association last week debated what life would be like for physicians and patients in this brave new world. One thing was clear: We are woefully unprepared for Feb. 7.

The Court said the Criminal Code’s prohibitions on assisted suicide will no longer apply “to the extent that they prohibit physician-assisted death for a competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition.” It also stated that physicians cannot be compelled to hasten a person’s death.

In the yawning gap between this straightforward theory and the complexities of everyday practice lie many questions:

Ӣ When a patient asks for a hastened death, who will they ask?

”¢ What do the terms “grievous and irremediable” and “enduring suffering that is intolerable” mean?

”¢ Who will determine a patient’s capacity to consent?

”¢ If a physician can’t be compelled to perform the act, does he or she have an obligation to refer to a doctor who will?

”¢ How long will the “cooling off” period be between a request and administration of a lethal drug?

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