Lent & Easter may be over, but some of the controversy stirred up by some prominent CoE leader’s remarks on the Atonement back in April continues:

Jeffrey John’s Lent Talk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/lent_talks/scripts/jeffreyjohn.html

=============

Giles Fraser’s Guardian article Cross Purposes (April 2007)
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/giles_fraser/2007/04/christ_recrucified.html

=============

Related Google Search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=turns+Christianity+into+cosmic+child+abuse&btnG=Google+Search
Turns up responses from

Albert Mohler:
http://www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=915

This Crosswalk article
http://www.crosswalk.com/pastors/11540700/

apparently this debate has spilled over into the Emerging Church movement…

==============

Adrian Warnock’s blog (UK Evangelical)
Atonement category: http://adrianwarnock.com/labels/Atonement.htm

==============

Christianity Today: Cross Purposes

Cross Purposes
Biggest Christian conference splits amid growing atonement debate.

Three of Great Britain’s most prominent Christian groups have ended their 14-year conference partnership, scuttling the annual Word Alive youth event. At issue was disagreement over a speaker, the Rev. Steve Chalke.
Related articles and links

But below the surface simmers a theological controversy that threatens to split the country’s evangelicals.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/july/7.15.html

From Old T19:

Tom Wright: The Cross and the Caricatures (April 2007)
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=19023

Related link: How Jesus bore our sins on the cross (also Tom Wright)
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=37874

Anne Atkins: A God who Takes Evil and Injustice Seriously (April 2007)
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=19049

Coming Liturgical Revision at All Saints Pasadena? (May 2007)
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=19238

A Movement from Above to Below (April 2007)
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=18669

Albert Mohler: Two Strands of Faith? No, Two Different Religions (Feb 2007)
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=17637
http://www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=868

A USA Today Article on the Episcopal Church and the New Presiding Bishop
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=17585

Rob Eaton Recalls a Resolution at the General Convention of 2006
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=17245
http://surrounded.classicalanglican.net/

Leander Harding: Finding the True Church?
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=17023

Row over ”˜wrath’ at Chelmsford Clergy Synod
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=12844

Nothing But the Blood (Mark Dever in CT)
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/may/9.29.html

Bob Libby: Lift High the Cross”¦the movie
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=12267

TESM: The Biblical Doctrine of the Atonement
Rodney Whitacre
http://www.tesm.edu/articles/whitacre-biblical-doctrine-of-the-atonement.html

Ed Bacon Preaches at CDSP’s Graduation
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=7059

Dana Wilson: “What Does It Mean To Be a Christian?”
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=6493

Michael Ingham’s Easter Sermon ???
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=5689

=========

Newest issue of Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
http://www.sbts.edu/Resources/Publications/Journal/Summer_2007.aspx

=========

JI Packer: Penal Substitution revisited
http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=6297
http://www.reformation21.com/Upcoming_Issues/Paker_on_Penal_Substitution/343/

=========

John Piper: Why Christ Died
http://lent.classicalanglican.net/?p=175
http://lent.classicalanglican.net/?p=179
http://lent.classicalanglican.net/?p=188
http://lent.classicalanglican.net/?p=190
http://lent.classicalanglican.net/?p=195

From the Christian Science Monitor:

More than a quarter of Americans spent some of their time lending a helping hand last year.

That good news kept the rate of nationwide volunteering at historically high levels: Some 61.2 million people dedicated 8.1 billion hours of service to schools; hospitals; and religious, political, and youth groups in 2006, according to the Corporation for National & Community Service (CNCS).

The bad news is that the number of volunteers recently dipped significantly ”“ by one third ”“ from 2005.

A key reason: Nonprofits and other groups that rely on volunteers are having trouble retaining them.

“The demographics are such that we are poised to make this 30-year high get even better because the baby-boom generation is passing the traditional age of retirement,” says David Eisner, CEO of CNCS. The group aims to raise the number of adult volunteers to 75 million by 2010.

“At the same time,” he says, “our work is cut out for us because, nationally, the volunteer bucket is a bit leaky. We get a lot each year, but we lose a lot each year. We have to figure out how to plug those holes.” Commuting time, education, and home ownership all play roles in determining how much time people are likely to spend helping organizations that need support, according to the CNCS’s national study of America’s top 50 cities based on census data between 2004 and 2006

Read it all.

Check it out.

A Baptist leader said Tuesday that the United States’ farm policy is unfair to African-American farmers and disadvantaged farmers in Africa, the Caribbean and the developing world.

Earl Trent, executive director of missions for the Progressive National Baptist Convention, joined other religious leaders on Capitol Hill hours before the House Agriculture Committee was set to begin debating the 2007 Farm Bill to call for reform that reflects American values of fairness and equal opportunity.

In prepared remarks, Trent said the Progressive National Baptist Convention, founded in 1961, the convention of Martin Luther King, has in its “organizational DNA” a central concern for “the least, the lost and the left out of our society.”

Current farm policies, Trent said, are inequitable. Commodity subsidies to black farmers are “abysmally low,” he said. Out of every $100,000 given for subsidies, black farmers receive three dollars.

Read it all.

I would like to clear some factual errors in the article by reporter Sharon Waxman, “Man of the Flesh to Man of the Cloth,” (Sunday July 15, Fashion and Style).

Mr. Ronald Boyer is not in any process for ordination in The Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Los Angeles. He has expressed an interest in ordained ministry, as do dozens of people every year. But the path to ordination is a long, careful, deliberate process, beginning with a discernment committee in the applicant’s own congregation, which over a period of time arrives at a prayerful recommendation as to whether or not to support the person’s application.

Read it all.

As abuse victims sobbed in the courtroom, a judge approved a $660 million settlement yesterday between the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles and 508 people who had filed suit over sexual abuse by clergy members.

“Settling the cases was the right thing to do,” said Judge Haley J. Fromholz of Los Angeles County Superior Court.

The settlement in the nation’s largest Roman Catholic diocese is considered a landmark because the legal battle endured for more than four years, and because the sum is more than six times larger than any previous deal struck by a diocese.

At a news conference outside the courthouse yesterday, sexual abuse victims stepped to the microphone one by one, many carrying photographs of themselves as children, and shared their feelings of betrayal by the church and in particular, the archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, a fixture in Los Angeles since 1985.

“I don’t want Mahony going around saying everything is all right, because it’s not,” said Rita Milla, 45, a medical assistant who lives in Carson. “My church acted like it didn’t know what was happening.”

Read it all.

The strained argument between the United States government and nonprofit groups over how to deal with charities suspected of supporting terrorism is expected to play out in federal court here with the trial of the largest Muslim charity in this country, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

[Jury selection in the trial began on Monday, and was expected to take most of the week.]

The government, in the lengthy indictment and other court documents, accuses the foundation of being an integral part of Hamas, which much of the West condemns as a terrorist organization. The prosecution maintains that the main officers of the Holy Land foundation started the organization to generate charitable donations from the United States that ultimately helped Hamas thrive.

The defense argues that the government, lacking proof, has simply conjured up a vast conspiracy by claiming that the foundation channeled money through public charity committees in the occupied territories that it knew Hamas controlled. The federal government, the defense says, has never designated these committees as terrorist organizations.

Read it all.

British Methodists say the Anglican-Methodist Covenant is facing challenges that some here might call a “bumpy patch.”

Signed in 2003, the covenant agreement sets out plans for greater cooperation between the two traditions. Commenting on a report about its implementation during the 2007 annual conference, British Methodist officials say the process has yielded “some encouragements and some disappointments.”
The role of women in church leadership and the role of bishops themselves are among issues that still have no formal agreement between Anglicans and Methodists. The British Methodist Church has no bishops.

United Methodist Bishop William Oden, ecumenical officer for the denomination’s Council of Bishops and a representative to the British Methodist Conference, expressed concern about the covenant’s progress.

“It seems (the covenant) is stalled at the moment when U.S. United Methodist and Episcopal relations are going forward,” Oden told United Methodist News Service, referring to progress in dialogue between those denominations. “The Church of England is busy with other issues, and British Methodists seem to have backed off.”

Read it all.

So far, invitations to the Lambeth Conference of 2008 have been sent out, but withheld from some bishops (Gene Robinson of New Hampshire because of his same-gender relationship on one hand, and on the other, Martyn Minns of CANA and Charles Murphy and his colleagues of the AMiA for the crossing of TEC provincial/diocesan boundaries by their sponsoring archbishops of Nigeria and Rwanda respectively. Also not invited for other unrelated reasons are Robinson Cavalcanti from South America and Nolbert Kunonga from Zimbabwe). That is how central the archbishop of Canterbury, one of our “Instruments of Communion”, has become to Anglican identity in our current crisis. Of particular interest and significance, the bishops of the AMiA and CANA claim they are already in direct communion with the archbishop of Canterbury through their sponsoring provinces of Rwanda and Nigeria respectively, and an invitation to the Lambeth conference would cement their legitimacy as bishops in America, directly in communion with Canterbury, instead of their current “backdoor” link through their sponsors (hence some refer to these bishops as “bishops irregular” as opposed to bishops suffragan or assistant or missionary, on account of their “backdoor” election and consecration). The legitimacy so eagerly sought is deemed to be so crucial to these bishops’ mission goals that if they are not invited to Lambeth 2008, there seems to be a determined willingness from their quarters to compel the bishops of their sponsoring provinces to boycott the Lambeth conference altogether, yet organize another conference of these same boycotting bishops somewhere else around the same time, in hope that next year’s Lambeth conference might become/appear irrelevant to Anglican identity and mission, or might even be postponed altogether, thereby indirectly embarrassing (punishing?) the archbishop of Canterbury for not “officially” recognizing (legitimizing) their mission in Anglican America (a kind of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face). Yes, Lambeth 2008 has become that important a deadline for the Anglican family in America.

The implications for historic Anglican Order resulting from any such legitimation are just too staggering for some of us to sponsor or support at this time, for in their zeal to restore their vision of what Anglican Faith should be, these dear brothers and sisters are ready to break down Anglican Order. Instead, one would rather fully join the other reformed church traditions like the Baptists that hold to Anglican Faith but not to Anglican Order. One cannot have one and not the other and still be legitimately Anglican. It is true that Anglican Faith is broken in TEC (and really only in the North Atlantic Provinces), but that does not justify TEC breaking up Anglican Order and for the rest of the Anglican Communion to pay the price. In my opinion, this vision (saving TEC from herself and for herself) is not worth the price asked for (taking down the entire Anglican family). The juice would not be worth the squeeze.

Unfortunately for the Global South, it is the dioceses and churches in the Global South that critically need to be present at the Lambeth conference, as for some of them, this is the only time and opportunity that their leaders get just that once every ten years to inform the world of what is really happening in their ministries, especially where persecution and oppression exists in their home countries! Many a Global South political dictator is afraid of the bishops from his country attending the Lambeth conference, for they get to tell on an international stage the real stories of their experience of oppression and hardships under the home regime, and possibly gather sufficient international support that usually makes the difference between life and death for their Christians or programs back home (a good example is how Uganda’s Idi Amin directly sponsored some cleric into his secret police so he could attend Lambeth ”˜78, just to spy on Ugandan bishops following the martyrdom of Uganda archbishop Janani Luwum the previous year!). In short, Anglican Faith is comparable to a train, while Anglican Order is comparable to the rail(s) the train runs on. It is not wise to have the best train, even a bullet train (restored Anglican Faith within the American Anglican family) with a disjointed rail system to run it on (broken Anglican Order worldwide).

Read it all.

In a dramatic illustration of the unhappiness among conservative Episcopalians in the United States, an Episcopal priest from the North Shore has decided to become a bishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya.

The Rev. William L. Murdoch, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in West Newbury, will fly to Nairobi next month for his consecration as a Kenyan bishop, then return to Massachusetts to minister to other disaffected conservatives who are leaving the Episcopal Church over its 2003 decision to ordain an openly gay priest as the bishop of New Hampshire.

Murdoch’s congregation, which averages about 300 worshipers each Sunday, will have to turn over its three buildings and a $1 million endowment to the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. The congregation is planning to buy a closed Catholic church in Amesbury and start over as All Saints Anglican, a local parish of the Kenyan church.

The extraordinary act is part of a new national movement, in which a handful of Episcopal parishes and priests are leaving the 2-million-member Episcopal Church USA and affiliating with the more conservative Anglican churches, called provinces, of Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda.

To the dismay of the Episcopal Church, the African provinces are now developing church organizations in the United States to reach out to those looking for an alternative.

The Episcopal Church is at odds with much of the rest of the Anglican Communion over its support of gay rights and is facing possible sanctions.

Read it all.

One can see… [Sartre’s] point. At times life does seem uncompromisingly bleak. Terrorism, starvation, war, disease, climate change and the ticking nuclear clock threaten humanity on the global front. Broken relationships, street violence, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual crime and depression lurk demonically on the domestic horizon. Even the religious dimension is bedevilled by fanaticism, intolerance, infighting and bigotry.
So is that it? Is life a nihilistic endurance test, a tortured journey through a cosmic desolation? If so, we might as well jump off the nearest cliff.

There is an exit strategy from the mire. It springs from a realisation that the future is always pregnant with unformulated possibilities and hope, and that an unrelieved pessimism for what lies ahead might prove unfounded.

At its most fundamental level this implies that life forges ahead inexorably with a kind of Hegelian dialectic. The cosmic wheel of fortune throws up a grim actuality such as terminal illness or a bereavement. Our gut response is one of despair or even rage. But as time passes events slowly meld themselves into a synthesis, a compromise with the stark hand of fate, or maybe God.

Read it all.

Marriage and family life continue to suffer the inroads of contemporary society. From England came the recent news that the number of women giving birth outside of marriage rose by 22% in the last 5 years.

According to a June 29 report published by the Daily Mail newspaper, in 2006 a total of 327,000 children were born out of wedlock, 59,000 more than in 2001. In terms of a proportion of overall births, in 2006 no less than 43.7% of babies had unmarried mothers.

The Daily Mail quoted Patricia Morgan, author of a number of studies on the family, who accused the British tax system favoring single parenthood. “Two out of three of the babies outside marriage will have been born to couples with one eye on the benefit authorities,” she told the newspaper.

Her remarks were confirmed by a former Labour Party minister for welfare reform, Frank Field. He argued that the tax and benefits system “brutally discriminate,” against two-parent families, reported the Times newspaper, June 14.

Read it all.

The truth we have is admittedly partial, but it is sufficient to proclaim him as Lord and Savior, the Son of God, the Messiah. That is the Christian witness. We may wrestle with it. We may ponder and wonder at it. But for the Church or its leaders to discard it would make us something other than Christian. We may be nice, helpful, neighborly citizens, but something other than Christian.

I did not bring all this up to point out the speck in Ms. Redding’s eye, although I am distressed and saddened by her actions. The risk in addressing this matter is that it invites you to join (or criticize) my distress and sadness. The log in my own eye is how far I fall short of proclaiming our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and in sharing his healing love. I encourage you and Ms. Redding to join me in not settling for partial truth.

The claim of our Episcopal Church, to which I have dedicated my life as I knelt before her, my bishop, and God, and through which I swore to serve God, is that Jesus is Lord. He is the only Son of God, and it is only through his sacrifice that our sin might be overcome. In him is life, true life. This is what we believe and proclaim together. Yet we do so with all humility, as St. Paul wrote in Philippians 3:12, “Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (NRSV)

Read it all.

Many young people rank listening to a sermon right up there with a trip to the dentist’s office or taking a pop quiz.

But what if that sermon included miming, inspiring music and dramatic dance moves?”Some people go to sleep listening to preachers,” said Mason Porter, a Dallas mime who uses his talent for the dramatic to encourage people to embrace the Christian faith. “We’re outta the box.”

Mason and his twin brother, Jason, are founders of the Wandering Mimes Ministry, a 17-member group of Christian mimes and dancers with the motto, “We are just showing the world what they refuse to hear.”

Read it all.

THE ARCHBISHOP of Nigeria has condemned the kidnapping of a British toddler in the Niger Delta, and has called for an end to the crime spree that threatens to destabilise the country’s oil producing region.

Archbishop Peter Akinola wrote that ”˜the spate of kidnapping’ was a ”˜worrisome trend.’ He expressed relief that three-year-old Margaret Hill had been released unharmed, but asked ”˜How long will this go on?’

Read it all.

After an 18 month saga of temporary inhibitions and presentment by the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York and Bishop Gladstone “Skip” Adams, III of Syracuse charging a parish priest with financial misconduct at his former parish, the priest was exonerated today when the Episcopal Church ecclesiastical court dismissed all of the charges. That priest now has restored to him by canon law the right to celebrate the Eucharist and perform the other functions of a clergyman which were taken away from him by the bishop a year and a half ago.

Fr. David Bollinger defended the proceeding which resulted in the church court refusing to allow any evidence to be introduced against the priest or any witnesses to testify against him. The judge cited numerous procedural problems with the case brought by the bishop and the diocese against Fr. Bollinger. Carter Strickland, the judge in the ecclesiastical court, had previously directed the prosecutor, church attorney James Sparks, to give Fr. Bollinger copies of the evidence against him, but the diocese refused to release it to the priest. One of the pieces of evidence was the so-called Schafer Report. That was a report commissioned by the diocese and prepared by a previous judge of the ecclesiastical court. That report was believed to have contained evidence to the effect that Fr.Bollinger was not guilty of misconduct.

“One of the basic rules of due process of law is that someone accused of an offense should be able to see the evidence against him,” said Raymond Dague, the attorney for Fr. Bollinger. “The failure of the diocese and the bishop to disclose this evidence to Fr. Bollinger was the straw that broke the camel’s back in their case against this priest. We applaud the faithful judge who was able to stand up against a bishop and tell him that he was not above the law and rules of fair play.”

Read it all.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco has signed into law two bills banning a controversial form of late-term abortions, making Louisiana the first state outlaw the procedure after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal ban in April.

Under two bills, which went into effect Friday, anyone convicted of performing “a partial birth abortion … thereby kills a human fetus” and can be imprisoned for one to 10 years, fined from $10,000 to $100,000, or both. Women who have the procedure will not be subjected to fines or jail time under the new laws.

A doctor charged with the crime can seek a hearing before the State Board of Medical Examiners to determine whether the procedure was necessary to save the mother’s life, an exemption under the new laws.

Read it all.

From the National Catholic Register:

Pope Benedict XVI has relaxed the rules on the use of the Mass celebrated before the Second Vatican Council.

In a document titled Summorum Pontificum, issued July 7, the Pope has instructed bishops to make the Tridentine Mass freely available in any parish that desires to have it.

The Holy Father called the instruction the “fruit of much reflection, numerous consultations and prayer.” It comes into effect Sept. 14, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

At present, any priest or group of faithful wishing to celebrate the old Latin rite requires the permission of their bishop who can arbitrarily refuse the request.

But from September, all the faithful will now have the right to use without further permission what Pope Benedict describes as this “extraordinary form” ”” the Mass celebrated according to the 1962 Missal of Blessed Pope John XXIII.

The “ordinary form” of the Mass will continue to be the 1970 Novus Ordo Mass of Pope Paul VI.

Read it all.

At 1 p.m. on a weekday, the emergency department at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Upper Manhattan is in full cry, with bays crowded, patients on stretchers lining the hallways, and paramedics bringing in more sick people. Time for the Rev. Margaret A. Muncie to work the floor.

Not shy, this pastor with the clerical collar, the Ann Taylor blazer and the cheerful insistence of one whose own mother called her a steamroller. Among the first women ordained an Episcopal priest and a self-described “Caucasian minority,” she’s an odd bird among the ethnically diverse staff and especially the patients, most of them black or Latino. But she keeps pecking her head behind curtains, parting gatherings of worried family members, impervious to startled looks of suspicion.

“Hi, I’m Peggy Muncie, a hospital chaplain,” she says. “Would you like a visit?”

She’s not there to thump. Deftly, she asks people how they’re feeling, then lets them vent their pain and fear, their anxiety and frustration. She nods, a little pushy with her probing. She flags a nurse. “Can you direct a doctor toward that patient?” she whispers.

And always, at the end of a visit: “Would it be all right if I prayed with you?” The health care chaplain will touch a forehead, hold a hand and quietly pray worries to the Divine, speaking with inflections that, as needed, may be Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim. For the Baptist woman in Bed 7 whose anxieties are making her chest pain worse, the chaplain prays for calm to allow the medicine to work. Gradually, the patient’s breathing slows.

Read it all.

An ecclesiastical court ruled July 16 in Syracuse, N.Y., that the Rt. Rev. Gladstone “Skip” Adams, Bishop of Central New York, would not be permitted to testify in the trial of the Rev. David Bollinger, former rector of St. Paul’s, Owego, who stands accused of financial misconduct and disobedience.

Before the trial began, Carter Strickland, the presiding judge, excluded most of the evidence and all of the witnesses for the prosecution because it missed the discovery phase filing deadline by more than two weeks. Bishop Adams was not on a witness list submitted to the court at least 60 days before the start of the trial.

Read it all.

From a letter in the Parksville Qualicum News:

For a few years the marriage of same sex partners to live together as a unit is allowed in our country by the law.

There are people in our country who adhere to different faiths, who pay homage to their gods and they too are expected, and required to subordinate their religious practices to Canadian law.

Therefore, who and what are these 21 bishops who, as their Catholic partners in this same faith did for 2,000 years, terrorize and tyrannize the faithful by preaching that their God loves them all. Then by human judgement they reject great numbers, condemn them despite their innocence, ostracize them as being unworthy to socialize with ”” but still taking their tithes to make a living off ”” and beyond all this are unaware, or in demonstrated disregard, that they thereby remove themselves out of the bounds of the protective, but into the sphere of punitive criminal law.

Read it all.

From USA Today:

Two days after he wrote the famous words “separation between church and state” in an 1802 letter to Baptists in Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson began attending church ”” on the floor of the House of Representatives. He would attend the makeshift church in the national Capitol nearly every Sunday morning for the rest of his presidency. Clearly, his understanding of the connection between religion and government is not the one we endure today.

We should not be surprised. It was Jefferson, after all, who insisted upon the Bible as part of the curriculum at the University of Virginia, Jefferson who approved federal funding for a Catholic priest to serve the Kaskaski Indians, and Jefferson who once said, “I am a Christian in the only sense in which he (Jesus) wished anyone to be.” True, he was far from theologically orthodox, he expected most of the young men in his day to end their lives as Unitarians and he angrily despised the clergy of his day. Yet, contrary to the secular dreams of an influential few today, Jefferson envisioned a government that would encourage religion while neither submitting to nor erecting a religious tyranny.

Even if Jefferson had envisioned a secular state, it would have made little difference in the early history of our nation. It was not his words that carried the force of law ”” written as they were 14 years after the Constitution was ratified ”” but rather the 10 words that are undoubtedly the most tortured in our history: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” These words, the first 10 of our Bill of Rights, make the intentions of the Founding Fathers clear. Having just fought a war of independence against England and her state church, they had no intention of allowing the U.S. Congress the authority to erect a new religious tyranny to dominate their young nation. Instead, they denied Congress the power to create a national church. The states and the individual citizens, of course, were free to be as religious as they wanted to be.

Read it all.

On Pentecost Sunday, May 27, some members of Trinity Episcopal Church, Bristol, including its rector the Rev. Donald Helmandollar, voted to align themselves with the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA). CANA is an initiative of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, a foreign province acting outside the bonds, customs and traditions of the Anglican Communion.

Bishop Andrew Smith first learned of the vote through an Internet posting. He phoned Helmandollar and later received a letter dated May 27 stating that “he and the parish” had formally aligned with CANA.

Bishop Smith brought the matter to the clergy members of the Standing Committee and, with their advice and consent, released Helmandollar from the responsibilities and privileges of a priest in The Episcopal Church under Title III, Canon 9.8. Formal notice of the action was sent out on June 20.

After confirming that the wardens and vestry of Trinity had all also voted to align with CANA, Bishop Smith removed them from their positions under Title I, Canon 17.8 of the Canons and Constitution of The Episcopal Church.

The Bishop asked the CANA group at Trinity to vacate the buildings and surrender control of the assets by July 8. Through an attorney, the CANA group has stated that there will be no compliance and has further announced an intention to bring trespass charges against any Diocesan personnel who help recover possession of Parish property for the use of loyal Episcopalians. The Diocese has now turned the task of recovering the Parish property over to its attorneys.

On July 12, Bishop Smith wrote and sent a letter to members of Trinity Episcopal Church, inviting all who wish to continue as Episcopalians to meet with him to discuss the situation, meet a priest-in-charge for Trinity, and begin to identify new leadership.

“Trinity Episcopal Church has a long and solid history as a parish of this Diocese,” he wrote. “Its founders and members over the generations have built the parish within the family and tradition of The Episcopal Church. I truly regret that some members have seen fit to try to tear the congregation from the fabric of the Church and now lay claim to its property and assets.

“Please know that regardless of what may have been said by others, a parish in The Episcopal Church is a constituent member of the Diocese of which it is part. That is a matter of Canon law, and in Connecticut it also is a matter that has been determined by the civil courts. Trinity Episcopal Church, Bristol, is and remains a parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut.

“… Please do pray for the whole Church of God in these times. I am praying for all the members of Trinity Episcopal Church. My hope is that we may pray, reason and work together to serve Christ in our day, as a blessing to God and a clear witness to Christ’s redeeming love in this world.”

In sum, covenants are deeply personal, relational, missional, reconciliatory expressions of the will of the One God to save, to bring into fellowship, and to oblige. This ”˜obliging’ is crucial, not because God delights in commands, but because commands are given in order for grateful response to be possible. But at the very same time, commands never replace the Holy and Living God, who in his character is the desisting and forbearing Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If the gracious ”˜obliging’ is cast aside, God has made provision for renewal and reconciliation, as part of the very act of covenanting in the first place.

It is not the task of those who undertake to compose a covenant, and those who obligate themselves, in Christ, to do what it asks, to imitate some precise form or event from within scripture’s panoramic account. This would be an odd kind of Biblicism, and may explain in part why the New Testament can refer reflexively to a new covenant with all high seriousness, without getting caught up in the provision of inventive new forms. The same holds true for the Anglican Communion in our day. To do this would be to undercut the dynamic and personal character of covenanting.

In the case of Anglicanism, it is the divine initiative in spreading the Gospel through the world to which we make response. We have never truly faced this moment with the kind of seriousness now required””due precisely to the success of missional expansion and the rapid character of communication and personal communion””and so it is not surprising that our time calls for a recognition, solemn and joyful, of God’s work, and of our concern to acknowledge and live within its gracious provision. That is why an Anglican Covenant is proposed by the Windsor Report and why we should undertake its relational, missional and reconciliatory calling in this present season.

Read it all.

From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Hitchens anticipates that critics will point to those crimes against humanity, dwarfing religion’s sins, committed in the name of secular ideas in the 20th century. He attempts to deflect the challenge with sophistry: “It is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists.” But who is behaving defensively here? Mr. Hitchens is the one who unequivocally insists that religion poisons everything, and it is Mr. Hitchens who holds out the utopian hope that eradicating it will subdue humanity’s evil propensities and resolve its enduring questions.

Nor is his case bolstered by his observation that 20th-century totalitarianism took on many features of religion. That only brings home the need to distinguish, as Mr. Hitchens resolutely refuses to do, between authentic and corrupt, and just and unjust, religious teachings. And it begs the question of why the 20th-century embrace of secularism unleashed human depravity of unprecedented proportions.

Even were he to concede that religion doesn’t poison everything, Mr. Hitchens presumably still would cling to his claim that the findings of modern science prove that God does not exist. Thanks to the knowledge we have attained of how the natural order actually operates — in particular the discoveries of Charles Darwin and modern physics — he concludes that “all attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule.”

This conclusion, however, contradicts that of the late Stephen Jay Gould, to whom Mr. Hitchens himself refers as a “great paleontologist” and whose authority he invokes in support of the proposition that randomness is an essential feature of evolution. Noting surveys that showed that half of all scientists are religious, Gould commented amusingly that “Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs — and equally compatible with atheism.”

Read it all.

When senators from opposing parties call each other “friend” and pat each other as they talk, there’s a fighting chance they’re angling to wring each other’s neck.

So it appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday when Democrat Jim Webb of Virginia and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina testily exchanged views on President Bush’s Iraq policy and troop welfare. An impromptu troop surge debate turned into a temper surge.

“Just wash your hands of Iraq,” an animated Graham said to the war critics, including the Democrat seated to his immediate right. “History will judge us, my friend.”

“It’s been a hard month, Lindsey,” Webb commiserated, wearing a tight smile. “You need to calm down, my friend.”

Read it all and the transcript is here.

The U.S. military is weighing new directions in Iraq, including an even bigger troop buildup if President Bush thinks his “surge” strategy needs a further boost, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday.
Marine Gen. Peter Pace revealed that he and the chiefs of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force are developing their own assessment of the situation in Iraq, to be presented to Bush in September. That will be separate from the highly anticipated report to Congress that month by Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander for Iraq.

The Joint Chiefs are considering a range of actions, including another troop buildup, Pace said without making any predictions. He called it prudent planning to enable the services to be ready for Bush’s decision.

The military must “be prepared for whatever it’s going to look like two months from now,” Pace said in an interview with two reporters traveling with him to Iraq from Washington.

“That way, if we need to plus up or come down” in numbers of troops in Iraq, the details will have been studied, he said.

Read it all.

From the Washington Post:

Attending what Muslim American activists say is the highest-level meeting ever between Muslim American youths and U.S. officials, Mohamed Sabur couldn’t help but notice a frustrating paradox.

Part of what motivated the 23-year-old to leave computer science for politics was anger at seeing his community constantly defined by extreme topics such as religious violence. And yet Sabur sat last week through unprecedented meetings with officials from the departments of Homeland Security, State and Justice, and one subject kept coming up: Muslim American youth radicalization.

“I’m trying constantly to figure out: How can I be a civically involved Muslim, interact with other Muslims as well as the government while not seeming like a sellout, like my allegiance is in one camp or another?” the native Minnesotan said Friday, just before dinner on Capitol Hill with the two dozen other participants of the first National Muslim American Youth Summit, which ended yesterday. The summit was organized by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, one of the largest U.S. Muslim advocacy groups, to expose future leaders to the workings of a government many Muslims feel speaks about them but not to them.

Six years into a serious political and religious awakening prompted by the Sept. 11 attacks, American Muslims know why such meetings haven’t happened before. The community, 65 percent foreign-born, is just starting to build the type of institutions that can produce young Muslim civic leaders (some call this period “embryonic”). On the government side, things were just too brittle for a lot of invitations to be extended, officials say.

But what young Muslim Americans don’t know, summit participants said, is precisely what to do with their newfound drive.

Read it all.

The Rt Rev Maurice Wood, who has died aged 90, was the flamboyant yet hugely popular bishop of Norwich from 1971 to 1985. He was very good with ordinary people and brought in young clergy to parishes around the city, giving it a great sense of energy. A friend and admirer of Billy Graham, he sponsored the American evangelist’s visits to Cambridge and Norwich in 1955 and spoke on his platforms in Japan and the US.

Born into an evangelical and teetotal family, Wood was a classic evangelical of the 1930s mould, nurtured by his time at Monkton Combe school, near Bath, Queens’ College and Ridley Hall, Cambridge, evangelical camps, bible classes, the Crusaders – and the suffering he witnessed as a chaplain with the commandos during the D-day landings, for which he was awarded the DSC.

A man of simple faith and great zeal, he was successively incumbent of two evangelical flagship parishes, St Ebbe’s, Oxford (1947-52), and St Mary’s, Islington (1952-61). He then became principal of Oak Hill Theological College, Southgate, his warm-hearted pastoral care attracting a good number of students, including many graduates. While never claiming to be an academic himself, and content with an uncritical reading of the scriptures, he added to the fortunes of the college by inviting such evangelical rising stars as John Simpson, later dean of Canterbury, John B Taylor, later bishop of St Albans, and George Carey, later archbishop of Canterbury, to join the staff. The Opportunity Knocks weekends run by the college played no small part in attracting men to the ministry.

Read it all.

THE PRIMATE of Kenya, Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi, has urged the government to suppress the brutal criminal gangs that have seized de facto control of the shanty towns surrounding Nairobi, but cautioned that a violent government response could exacerbate the “Mungiki” menace.

“As a nation, we reaffirm the dignity and sanctity of life of even law breakers and grieve at any violent loss of life,” Archbishop Nzimbi said in an address to the Kenyan House of Bishops on June 29 at All Saints Cathedral, Nairobi.

Read it all.