DOOR: How come so many liberal clergy never talk about Jesus? It’s like they’re afraid to say His name.

MCLAREN: I think a lot of them are reacting to fundamentalism and the Religious Right. Enough angry folks have hurled the word “Jesus” around like an insult that other folks don’t want to say His name at all. It almost feels to them like a racist or a hate crime statement sometimes because “Jesus” is used to legitimize all kinds of fear and intimidation. Another reason goes back farther in history of liberalism where I think people were seeking to speak in more theistic, deistic, universal, non-particular, nonspecific ways. They had reasons for this in the 17th and 18th centuries, with all the religious wars in Europe, but I think that tide is going to change because of the work of people like N. T. Wright and Steve Chalke, who are helping us get a new vision of what the message of Jesus is. I think if we could get that back, people are going to be very excited to talk about Jesus again.

Read it all.

From the Daily Telegraph:

“As long as someone does not deny the very basic doctrines of the Church – the creation, the death, the resurrection of Christ and human beings being made in the image of God – then the rest really helps but they are not the core message.

“And I haven’t found that in Ecusa or in Canada, where I was recently, they have any doubts in their understanding of God which is very different from anybody. What they have quarrelled about is the nature of sexual ethics.”

He nevertheless emphasised that Dr Williams does expect those who attend Lambeth to abide by the decision-making processes of the Anglican Communion.

“The Archbishop of Canterbury is very clear that he still reserves the right to withdraw the invitations and that those who are invited are accepting the Windsor process and accepting the process about the covenant.

“But in another sentence, he said that attending Lambeth is not also a test of orthodoxy.

“Church regulations and Church legislation should not stand in the way of the gospel of love your neighbour.

“You are members of one body and therefore you should listen to one another and find a way out.

Read it all.

Steve Waring’s article in The Living Church has prompted several requests for clarification. Let me begin by saying how deeply tragic it is that trust levels are so badly damaged in this church that whether or not a diocese used this or that “form” becomes such an issue. One of my favorite Chesterton quotes is: (to paraphrase) The pessimist is not to be faulted for criticizing the world. The pessimist is to be faulted for not loving what he criticizes. Amen. I trust that none of us takes any glee or delight in finding ourselves at such a place in the life of the Episcopal Church.

It is also important I believe for me to say that neither I (nor I trust anyone in South Carolina) would have felt the need to say anything about this at all save for the fact that Mr. Beers and others had made the statement in print that South Carolina used the same “short form” as Virginia. That is verifiably not the case. What seems to be a matter of curiosity is how it came not to be the case.

We seemed to have had in our election files, as apparently did many other dioceses, the now infamous “short” form. In receiving information from Bishop Matthew’s office, he simply cautioned us to check the language very carefully, and to make sure that our language complied with the standard. His assistant, Lindy Emory very kindly sent us the correct form, which as I stated before, we simply cut and pasted into our consent request letter (I verified these details with Bishop Salmon’s assistant on Monday to insure that I remembered them correctly. She faxed me the “boiler plate” we had received from Ms. Emory and indeed, we used the correct form).

It is also extremely important for me to add that in offering advice to “keep us out of the ditch” Bishop Matthews and his staff were in every instance respectful, kind and helpful. We were grateful that they kept us from making a mistake. Why the Diocese of Virginia “didn’t get the memo” is unclear.

So on the day that Mark Lawrence was elected, the request letters, in the proper form, sat addressed and ready to go. They sat for 60 days or so while we waited for the “green light” from Canon Gerdau. The delay was in the requirement for the second psychological exam. Fr. Lawrence had to go from Bakersfield to UCLA, and the physician was painfully slow in getting the results to 815. According to Fr. Lawrence, the second exam was most cursory compared to the one done just a few weeks before, and the physician marveled that such a thing was required, given that an objective “third party” examiner in another diocese and previously employed by 815 had just completed the same test. But those were the rules and we followed them. The rest, as they say, is history.

And finally, to answer the question posed on a blog, yes, nearly all this took place during the last days of Presiding Bishop Griswold’s term in office. If my memory serves me correctly, Presiding Bishop Schori took office the same week that our consents went out. I remember this because much of the staff at 815 was absent, having gone to Washington for the ceremony.

Hope this helps clarify.

Dow Sanderson,
Past-president,
Standing Committee, South Carolina

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Congo, it’s that most aspects of human nature are universal. Sometimes this place seems like another world altogether, but again and again I’m reminded that we’re really not all that different when it comes down to the essentials.

Politicians are greedy, corrupt and will almost always say what they think you want to hear. Mothers will do anything to save their children’s lives. Unsupervised teenage boys with weapons will make stupid decisions and someone will be killed. People will often do the selfish thing, but sometimes choose to sacrifice their own well-being to serve another. At some basic level, we’re all the same.

So it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that the Baptists here don’t get along with one another either.

I’m not sure I completely understand what their split was about; it has something to do with ethnicity and long-ago grudges. So instead of there being one, unified Baptist group here in the eastern Congo, there are two separate associations, with separate bureaucracies, separate hospitals and separate schools.

Sound familiar?

Read it all.

The Lutheran pastor soon to be bishop of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod wants his denomination to lift a celibacy requirement for gay and lesbian clergy.

“That’s where I think the church is going,” Bishop-elect Wayne Miller of Aurora said. “That’s where I think it needs to go.”

He’s hoping the change will come next month in Chicago, where the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is conducting its churchwide assembly. Nearly a third of the denomination’s 65 synods are asking for a policy shift in clergy standards.

Eventually, gay and lesbian clergy in monogamous, same-sex relationships could be allowed to serve.

Read the whole article.

A 63-year-old Episcopal priest is being temporarily barred from his official duties while he faces charges including public indecency and drunken driving.

The suspension of Robert A. Hufford, chaplain to the Convent of the Transfiguration, takes effect as soon as he receives it, said Richelle Thompson, spokeswoman for the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio in Cincinnati.

Hufford’s lawyer, Brad Kraemer, declined to comment Tuesday except to say his client has pleaded not guilty to the four charges against him: failure to drive within marked lanes, operating a vehicle while impaired, public indecency and abusing harmful intoxicants. Hufford is set to appear in Butler County Area II Court in Hamilton on Sept. 5.

Read it all.

In an interview with The Living Church, Canon Lewis described the case as complex with numerous rulings and motions prior to the start. She said it was regrettable that during the trial the court refused to consider any of the more than 1,000 pages of documentary evidence against Fr. Bollinger that the church attorney had prepared. She defended the diocese’s decision to withhold what became known as the Shafer Report from the court, describing it as a “privileged piece of attorney-client work product.”

The Shafer Report is identified with the last name of a previous church attorney retained by the diocese after Fr. Bollinger accused the former financial controller for the diocese of improperly gaining access to his personal financial records. In a letter to clergy after completion of the investigation, the diocese quoted a paragraph from the report, but the report itself has not been made public and there are no plans to do so, Canon Lewis said.

Read it all.

But recent cost-cutting steps are meant to ensure better financial management of the spiritual seat for some 9,500 Episcopalians in 35 parishes spread out over 21 counties.
“There’s a myth that the cathedral is crashing and burning, but it’s not going under, it’s not closing, and it’s not for sale,” Bishop Don Johnson said recently in an exclusive interview.

“We’re in a very methodical process of assessing the strengths of the cathedral to determine areas where we need to improve. It’s in solid financial shape, but we have to tighten up and live within our budget.”

The situation is not because of any fiscal malfeasance, Johnson said. Instead, the problem arose as yearly budgets remained stable or increased while funding decreased.

At issue is an aging and shrinking congregation, resulting in diminished annual giving.

Read it all.

In the film Bruce Almighty Jim Carrey is allowed by God to run the world for a day. He’s a nice guy and says yes to all prayers. Both he and the world quickly spiral into chaos. While the film reminds us that this is God’s world and not some human invention, trying to see how we are in fact better off with God can be bewildering in the face of unforeseen death.

Now and the hour of our death; these two moments in life are inevitably drawing closer together. For the 26 Polish pilgrims killed so tragically in a coach crash in France on their way home, the two moments unexpectedly became the same moment. The knowledge that they had been visiting the shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary at La Salette only underlined the poignancy of this sudden, unmerited death.

They will have recited the Hail Mary many times on their pilgrimage and maybe they were reciting it at the moment their coach crashed through the safety barriers; perhaps its concluding phrase was on their lips in their final agony: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” The image of good and devout people saying that prayer just before they died will be a comfort to their relatives. But in the many stages of grief their families may also experience anger with the God who allowed this to happen.

Read it all.

American women are the fastest-growing part of the motorcycle business, buying more than 100,000 of them a year. Even though aging baby-boomer men, with money to spend and time on their hands, have played a big role in expanding the market in recent years, motorcycle companies are trying hard to woo women buyers.

“Fifty percent of the population is female there is pent-up demand,” said Jim Ziemer, the chief executive of Harley-Davidson. “We need to remove barriers.”

So they are producing more motorcycles that are lower to the ground – so women can plant their feet firmly on the ground – with narrower seats and softer clutches, and adjusting handlebars and windshields to make bikes more comfortable for smaller riders.

They are selling more clothes, too, in bright colors and with rhinestones, rather than the standard-issue black and orange leather jackets. Even the Harley-Davidson skull emblem has undergone a friendly makeover on some clothes to include wings and flowers. Suzuki last year rolled out a new line of clothes called Suzuki Girl with tight-fitting riding jackets in pink and baby blue.

Read it all.

The 2005 English Church Census showed that evangelicals as a group declined in church attendance between 1998 and 2005, along with all other churchmanships. No group saw growth. However, the evangelicals had not declined as much pro rata as other churchmanships, and, like every other group, had some special strengths as well as weaknesses. This article looks at some of the variations to the general picture as exhibited by evangelicals.

Part of the strength of English Christianity during these first years of the 21st century is the burgeoning attendance seen by the black churches especially but also by many of those in other ethnic communities. While some of this is drawn by immigration much is due to overt evangelism. The large majority of these ethnic churches are firmly evangelical, with most of the black churches (but few of other ethnic backgrounds) charismatic evangelical.

The term ”˜evangelical’ is broken down in the Census analyses into three groups: Broad Evangelical, Mainstream Evangelical and Charismatic Evangelical according to how the minister for individual congregations deemed it best to describe his or her church. The ethnic evangelical churches and the black charismatic evangelicals are therefore included within the broad “evangelical” classification.

Read it all.

It’s easy to mock the spiritual language that saturates today’s domestic discourses, but in fact, as Margaret Kim Peterson argues in Keeping House, there is something deeply theological at stake in housework. Peterson’s creative and compelling exploration of keeping house as a basic practice of the Christian life ranges from the practical (good knives should never be put in the dishwasher) to the spiritually incisive (if you think your house is too small, consider the ways in which, through practices ranging from fasting to marriage, “Christian tradition. . . has been inclined to see limits as a necessary component to human flourishing”; thus the cramped house may in fact be a place in which “to live out our dependence on God and our interdependence on one another”).

Contemporary Americans, argues Peterson, a professor at Eastern University, have been shaped by two different cultural conversations about housekeeping. The first tells us that housekeeping is sheer drudgery, that it is mindless, meaningless, and menial, and that if you possibly can avoid it, you should. At the same time, housekeeping has become fodder for fantasy””fantasy that sustains and is sustained by magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and Real Simple. Such glossies tell us that housekeeping is not about “doing a good job at something that needs to be done.” Rather, housekeeping is an effortless exercise in fulfilling consumerism: buy this magazine/storage unit/boutique, organic cleaning product, and your house and life will be perfect. The truth is that housework is hardly effortless, and it involves, to be sure, some drudgery. But when viewed through the lens of the Gospel, rather than the lens of Better Homes and Gardens, housekeeping presents itself as a theologically meaningful site of Christian formation.

Peterson’s interpretation of housework is deeply scriptural. Keeping House is organized around what Peterson identifies as three crucial imperatives in the Bible””the injunctions to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless….

Read it all.

Nearly 5,000 people are on the network’s email list; “people who want to create art but keep an ethical and moral code to our lives,” Covell says.

And the ministry has put together nearly 650 prayer partnerships, in which a Christian outside the industry is teamed up with someone on the inside.

Payne was going about his business in Illinois a year ago when he saw a blurb in some random church publication about HPN seeking prayer partners.

“And I thought, ‘Now there’s something I’d be interested in,” he says. “I’m an Anglican Priest. But I’m also an old thespian.”

Payne has stood on many a community theater stage, once playing the lead cowboy, Curly, in the musical Oklahoma. Yet he is “disgusted” by many of the movies they make these days.

“They exploit women, that’s what they do,” he says. “And they portray religious people as, you know, strange.”

Yet now he prays up to an hour most every night for the makers of those movies, and specifically for his prayer partners, two Hollywood writers whose names he doesn’t feel comfortable divulging. The writers email Payne when they need divine intervention. One of them recently asked Payne to pray that his writers block lifts and his manuscript sells. There’s been no word on whether Payne’s prayers have been answered, he says, chuckling. “But nevertheless, to me, it’s a form of ministry.”

Read it all.

For the second time in 18 months an attempt has been made on the life of Bishop Benjamin Kwashi, the Bishop of Jos.

Early on the morning of Tuesday July 24 at 2.15 a.m. a gang of men, more than five in number bound the two security guards at the gates of his compound and locked up the four domestic staff,

Armed with guns and knives, they then battered through the doors of the house, went upstairs and marched Bishop Ben Kwashi downstairs and outside.

They told Bishop Ben, they were going to kill him. Then, inexplicably the men changed their minds, gave up that plan, took him back inside and ransacked the house for valuables. They beat up his teenage son Rinji. Help came after about half an hour.

Read it all.

Despite a thicket of troubles, from deadly illnesses like AIDS and malaria to corrupt politicians and deep-seated poverty, a plurality of Africans say they are better off today than they were five years ago and are optimistic about their future and that of the next generation, according to a poll conducted in 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa by The New York Times and the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

The poll results offer an unusual and complex portrait of a continent in flux, a snapshot of 10 key modern African states as they struggle to build accountable governments, manage violent conflict and turn their natural resources into wealth for the population.

It found that in the main, Africans are satisfied with their national governments and a majority of respondents in seven of the 10 countries said their economic situation was at least somewhat good. But many said that they face a wide array of difficult and sometimes life-threatening problems, from illegal drug trafficking to political corruption, from the lack of clean water to inadequate schools for their children, from ethnic and political violence to deadly disease.

Read it all and Check out the fuller documentation is you are so inclined.

An update has been posted on the original thread below giving further details as to who was not in attendance, and how the Steering Committee normally operates in terms of getting approval for its statements.

Recent articles have reported that young adults are turning to religion to the surprise ”” and sometimes chagrin ”” of their less observant parents. Guests discuss God and the generation gap, and why parents aren’t always thrilled when their children become more observant.

Listen it all from NPR.

From Sporting News:

I came away from today’s press conference with Falcons officials convinced the team and NFL were blindsided by Michael Vick’s indictment. They didn’t know it was coming, and they didn’t know how bad it would be. What baffles me is why.

“We had no reason to believe what came out in the indictment would be in the indictment,” team owner Arthur Blank told reporters in Atlanta. “As soon as we saw the indictment, we began to deal with it.”

Team G.M. Rich McKay said the team had no idea the indictment would come down when it did.

Read it all.

From Anglican Mainstream:

The Church of England yearbook for 2006 records the following figures for 2003

Church Electoral Rolls ( effectivelty membership rolls) 1,235,000

Average weekly attendance 1,187,000
Average Sunday attendance 1,017,000

Usual Sunday attendance 901,000

A local [New Jersey] church along with the help of Verizon Wireless may take cell phone tower development to a new and technologically divine level.

You’ve likely seen them erected somewhere along the side of the road or hidden with a grouping of trees, but it’s hard to miss those tall cell phone towers, usually identifiable by their triangle-shaped platforms, planted among our communities. And it’s definitely not often that a town is forced to balance its respect for a religious symbol against a cell phone company’s reliability, but that’s exactly what’s happening in Pequannock Township.

Read it all.

Eight months ago, Missouri seemed well on its way to becoming a national leader in stem cell research.

Voters amended the state’s constitution to protect stem cell research ”” even the controversial form using cells from human embryos. Actor Michael J. Fox appeared in TV ads, visibly shaking from Parkinson’s disease as he sought votes for stem cell supporter Claire McCaskill in her bid for the U.S. Senate.

Now the spotlight is all but gone after a research institute and lawmakers withdrew financial support.

“Things are obviously not moving forward,” said state Sen. Chuck Graham, a Democrat who backed the amendment in November. “Right now, you can’t tell the amendment passed. People are running in the opposite direction. It’s incredibly frustrating.”

Read it all.

During the two-hour service, which was primarily conducted in Spanish with English translations, the Rt. Rev. Carlos Lozan Lopez, Bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church of Spain, welcomed three new honorary canons: Eliseo Villa and the Rev. Anthony Ball from the international office at Lambeth Palace in London, and the Rev. James H. Cooper, rector of Trinity Wall Street.

“Trinity Church is an active partner in the global south, especially strengthening the Church in Africa by facilitating the ability of its leaders to take control of factors that influence their lives,” stated Fr. Cooper in a Trinity press release. “Diocesan partnerships are a vital route to achieving important goals both locally and globally. We look forward this week to challenging conversations, inspired thinking, and renewed commitments to partnership and mission.”

Read it all.

An Indiana judge upheld the decision of a church congregation to leave the United Church of Christ (UCC) because of the denomination’s official recognition of gay “marriage.”

St. Peter’s First United Church of Christ has been part of the UCC for 50 years, the Indianapolis Star reports. The congregation was concerned, however, when the UCC voiced its official support for homosexual “marriage” in 2005.

At its 25th General Synod the UCC declared that the 1.3-million organization officially supported same-sex “marriage”. According to the declaration the UCC, “affirms equal marriage rights for couples regardless of gender and declares that the State should not interfere with couples regardless of gender who choose to marry and share fully and equally in the rights, responsibilities and commitment of legally recognized marriage.”

The concerned congregation of St. Peter’s held some open forum discussion and then decided to hold a vote in September of 2005. The results were 115 to 92 in favor of leaving the UCC. Joanna Kline, Administrative Secretary of St. Peter’s First Church, told LifeSiteNews.com that a couple of church members who wanted to remain UCC then sued the local church council president, Brian Royer, and all his designees, but they did not sue the church itself.

The UCC refused to recognize St. Peter’s decision to leave and joined in the suit. “They had not released St. Peter’s from being one of their congregations,” said Kline. This Friday, however, Special Judge David L. Hanselman Sr. removed the two-year restraining order, allowing St. Peter’s to become independent. Kline added that because the decision is so recent, they haven’t heard back yet from the UCC. She is confident, however, that the organization will respect the court decision.

Read it all.

Over at Stand Firm, Greg Griffith has posted a brief update about a denial of service attack that affected the shared TitusOneNine / Stand Firm server early this morning. You can read the details, and should you be able and eager to do so, find information about how to contribute towards the combined server hosting costs here.

Note, that comment thread also contains info re: a backup site for Christopher Johnson’s Midwest Conservative journal whose site also went down at a similar time, but appears to have been more severely affected. Hmmmm…..

This elf is very thankful for Greg’s excellent blog admin support and especially for all his work in setting up a server with load balancing capacity that has been able to handle even the most outrageously busy news days in the Anglican blog world. Thanks Greg!

Now this elf will be “bossy” again! Go let Greg know how much you appreciate his hard work…! And please give if you can.

–elfgirl

In her posting, Jan [Nunley] says that there are “90 possible” elections affected by defective consents. Let’s suppose in the past it didn’t matter so much, because our church was in a difference place. But in the Lawrence debacle, we were all quoted chapter and verse on why the canons matter. Frankly, I agree with this rigid canonical adherence, but it has to be the same, in all cases, no matter what. It’s only fair. It’s only just

Now we’re told it was about signatures. Of course, it’s hard to see why we insist on the signature portion of the canons, but we look past the textual requirements. I’m also not sure the claim on the importance of signatures is valid. These days, electronic “signatures” in lots of forms are considered equivalent with ink signatures, in lots of situations. The Living Church is reporting that South Carolina was told not to use the “short form” in its consents. Fine. But why wasn’t Virginia told the same thing?

In all elections since the South Carolina election, it seems to me that it is important to ensure that there is adherence to the canons. If we’re tossing out one election because of defects, I think we need to toss out others as well. I am not saying that Virginia’s election should be tossed out, or that the ordination was irregular. I am saying that an “oops” should emanate from 815, and in the future we should follow the canons precisely. If the canons are no longer deemed adequate, there’s a little project to work on before GC 2009.

It seems to me what we heard “law, law” in the case of South Carolina. And we’ve heard “Gospel, Gospel” in other cases. Let’s have law and Gospel in all cases, balanced appropriately. Why am I writing about this budding controversy? Well, I think how we handle these conversations has to do with how we’ll handle other, more difficult issues. When the response from church leadership to all this is, “Let’s don’t and say we did, shall we?” it hardly seems to respect the dignity of those who find this situation challenging. Much better would be a straightforward, official explanation of why canons are applied particular ways at particular times. I’d like this problem to go away. And I’d like to avoid this particular conversation in the future.

Read it all.

Among false slogans, none can beat the one wrought in ornamental iron over the gates of Auschwitz: “Work Makes You Free.” It was the first thing that slave laborers saw as they entered the death camp. Once inside, a million of them died from starvation, exhaustion, and in the furnaces.

Despite that dramatic lesson, workaholism reigns as our nation’s worst addiction. The Center for Work-Life Policy reports that 45 percent of U.S. executives not only work more than 60 hours a week but meet at least five other criteria, such as being on-call 24 hours a day, meeting changing deadlines, and responding to demands across several time zones.

In the past, such workers were known as “wage slaves.” Today, they employ euphemisms to justify their addiction to work, explaining themselves as “ambitious,” “driven,” and “energetic.”

Ironically, as addictions go, workaholism is still considered by many to be virtuous. Two-thirds of Americans claim they love their jobs. Job satisfaction rises to 76 percent world-wide.

But the costs are severe and unsustainable. Two-thirds of executives complain that they get too little sleep. They admit to overeating and drinking, and neglecting exercise.

Read the whole article.

Benedict XVI’s message for World Youth Day 2008 presents the Holy Spirit to young people and the world as the “great unknown.”

The Pope’s message is a reflection on the theme he chose for the event to be held in Sydney, Australia, next July: “You Will Receive Power When the Holy Spirit Has Come Upon You; and You Will Be My Witnesses.”

“The common thread of the spiritual preparation for the appointment in Sydney is the Holy Spirit and mission,” explains the papal message, published in Italian and French by the Vatican press office. Translations into other languages are forthcoming.

The message continues: “Therefore it is important that each one of you young people, in your communities and with your educators, reflect on this protagonist in the history of salvation which is the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of Jesus.

“There are many Christians for whom he remains the ‘great unknown.'”

Read it all.

The $100-a-barrel oil that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said would prevail by 2009 may be only a few months away.

Jeffrey Currie, a London-based commodity analyst at the world’s biggest securities firm, says $95 crude is likely this year unless OPEC unexpectedly increases production, and declining inventories are raising the chances for $100 oil. Jeff Rubin at CIBC World Markets predicts $100 a barrel as soon as next year.

“We’re only a headline of significance away from $100 oil,” said John Kilduff, an analyst in the New York office of futures broker Man Financial Inc. “The unrelenting pressure of increased demand has left the market a coiled spring.” New disruptions of Nigerian or Iraqi supplies, or any military strike against Iran, might trigger the rise, Kilduff said in a July 20 interview.

Higher prices will increase revenue for energy producers from Exxon Mobil Corp. to PetroChina Co., while eroding profit at airlines including EasyJet Plc and railroads such as Union Pacific Corp. The U.S. and other oil-importing nations risk accelerating inflation, while higher energy costs threaten to restrain growth.

Read it all.

Daniel Beaty is the star and author of a one-man play called Emergence-See! In it, a sunken slave ship from the past ”” with its cargo of bones and chains ”” magically surfaces alongside the Statue of Liberty in present-day New York Harbor.

The play portrays the response of 43 different characters ”” old, young, male, female, straight and gay, all of them black ”” to this puzzling event. Their reactions to the suddenly inescapable memory of slavery vary dramatically.

Beaty stands 5 feet 11 inches tall. But as he changes characters, he swells into a bigger man, slumps into the size of someone smaller, and shrinks into a child. He recites poems that he has written, and he sings like a trained opera singer ”” which he is.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Read it all.

Update: July 25
The Global South Anglican website has been updated to provide the details of those not in attendance at the recent London meeting.
Please see also GS Secretariat member Terry Wong’s comment below for further clarification.
Thank you Terry!