Eastertide, 2009

Dear Friends in Christ:

I am writing to you with news that may not be surprising to some, but may require some explanation for others. After over 13 years of discernment, I will be chrismated and received into the Eastern Orthodox Church on Orthodox Pentecost, June 7th. I will be making my church home at St. George Antiochian Cathedral in Oakland (Pittsburgh) along with my husband Chris, who was received in November 2007, my oldest daughter Meredith, my son-in-law Josh, my grand-daughter Katherine, and the child soon to be born into their family. Though my husband and my daughter became Orthodox before me, our attraction together to the Orthodox Church began several years before our move to Pittsburgh.

I understand that some will not understand why I am doing this, since we have worked together for the health of the Anglican communion, and since many Anglicans are now realigned and looking towards the recognition of a newly formed North American province. Please be assured that my efforts for our communion have always been wholehearted, and hopeful. Once the leaders of TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada made it clear that they were not prepared to walk with the historic Church and the rest of the Anglican communion in areas of ethics and doctrine, the Realignment seemed to me the most authentic response for faithful Anglicans: unrepentant heterodoxy must be given a clear answer. While in Jerusalem and Jordan I was very encouraged by the ability of leaders with different expressions of Anglicanism to listen and to learn from each other, and was optimistic that the interplay between evangelicals, charismatics and anglo-catholics would bring about something very good. I pray that God will continue to guide Anglicans who care about orthodoxy and right practice in the Anglican communion.

At the same time, I have wondered for several years about the possibility of our continuing together, given the foundational differences that we have in our understanding of the Church, of the sacraments, and of the place of tradition. Recent developments, including the continuing autonomy of AMIA within the proposed new Province, suggestions that we can continue in parallel with TEC, Primatial statements that expressed satisfaction with the last Primates’ meeting when it seems to contradict GAFCON, and continued attention to pragmatics rather than to the nature of the Church have been very problematic, in my view. All the while, I have been drawn for some time in a compelling manner towards the Eastern Christian tradition, and have gained deep appreciation for its apostolic claims, its ancient theologians, its healing disciplines, its sacramental spirituality and its rich liturgical tradition. Despite my temptation to stay and fight for the Anglican way, it seems clear to me now that I must go where the Lord is directing me.

I have been an Anglican for a quarter of a century, and am grateful for all that this communion has given to me””a sense of the mystery of God’s love, awe and joy in the liturgy, a grasp of the breadth of God’s Church, its purpose in mission, and its faithfulness in witness, even in very difficult times. I owe so much to many brothers and sisters, and to special fathers (and mothers) in Christ! You are in good hands with leaders in the realignment, Bishop Duncan and others. I hope that you will not be disappointed in me, but will bless me as I do what I believe God has been drawing me to do for over a decade. God willing, we will in time find ourselves in a single faithful and united body, fulfilling the Lord’s “high priestly” prayer for us! Be assured that I will continue to pray for you in your courageous stand for the gospel and the truth. I love you all, and will miss worshiping with you and working with you on a regular basis.

The Peace of Christ be with you all,

Your sister,

Edith Humphrey

The nine-digit Social Security Number is holding strong after 73 years. The 10-digit phone number is six decades old and counting. But the Internet will soon outlive its equivalent numbering system for identifying Web surfers and the sites they visit, which could have disruptive and costly consequences for life online.

As originally designed, Internet Protocol addresses contained 32 bits, represented in four sets of numbers from 0 to 255. There are 4.3 billion different possible combinations, which seemed like plenty to Vint Cerf, who helped develop the IP standards in the late 1970s.

“It was an experiment with an uncertain outcome,” Mr. Cerf, now chief Internet evangelist for Google, says of the Internet. Some other online pioneers argued for 128 bits, but they lost out. “I couldn’t imagine arguing that we needed 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses to carry out an experiment,” Mr. Cerf says.

Read it all from this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

Finally, for those who are alienated within the Episcopal Church, the aim of the “professionally mediated discussion” has already been determined: “WCG believes that the advent of schemes such as the Communion Partners Fellowship and the Episcopal Visitors scheme instituted by the Presiding Bishop in the United States should be sufficient to provide for the care of those alienated within the Episcopal Church from recent developments.”[4] (emphasis added)

According to this recommendation of the WCG, those within TEC will have two alternatives to choose from: a Communion Partners Fellowship scheme that has no details as yet beyond DEPO and mere fellowship, or an Episcopal Visitors scheme imposed by the Presiding Bishop. What is the point of gathering those alienated by TEC for a “professionally mediated conversation” when the results have already been pre-determined? Is it an opportunity for further indoctrination in the false gospel of TEC? Or institutional loyalty? Or simply an exercise designed to wear down their resistance to false teaching?

This report from the WCG is the culmination of five years of conversation, dialogue, schemes, reports, and committees that have all failed to adequately address the crisis before us. These efforts have failed in part because they have not adequately talked with or heard from those most hurt by this crisis, those persecuted orthodox Anglicans in North America. Skeptics will be forgiven for recognizing in these WCG recommendations the same processes that have failed to hold the Communion together, and the same processes of delay that TEC will take advantage of while imposing a false gospel at home and throughout the rest of the Communion.

Read it all.

Reacting to Bishop Cameron’s statement, the lay delegate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Suzanne Lawson said, “Interesting.” She added, “I think that would be difficult for the Canadian church. I actually spend a good deal of time thinking about how change comes about and time is an important element in that. If we are to be looking in Canada at something that will take seriously the Covenant and reframe our thinking, we need some time to talk about it at General Synod in Nova Scotia and we may need more time three years from then.” General Synod, the Canadian Anglican church’s governing body, which gathers every triennium, is scheduled to meet in Halifax in 2010.

Ms. Lawson said, “We need to respect the provinces where that is a required amount of time.”

Read it all.

A nice piece about a local school doing a world of good–watch it all.

After nine grinding years of war, the once-mighty soldier abruptly comes unglued. Denied an honor he thinks he’s due, he goes to kill the officers he holds responsible, but after his night of rage finds he has slaughtered barnyard animals, not generals.

Shamed beyond endurance, he plans suicide. “A great man must live in honor or die an honorable death,” he tells his wife. “That is all I have to say.”

The soldier is Ajax, fighter of the Trojan War, his downfall portrayed in a Greek tragedy written more than two millennia ago.

Read it all.

An independent federal panel on religious freedom has added two countries to its list of “countries of particular concern” ”” Iraq and Nigeria ”” and six others to its watch list.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom released its 2009 report on Friday (May 1). It sends an annual set of recommendations to the president, secretary of state and Congress.

Read it all.

The Anglican Communion is a family of autonomous Churches. It finds its identity in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Churches of the Communion, which are self-governing, share something of a common history, and have traditionally set their faces against centralised government in favour of regional autonomy1. The Anglican tradition was fashioned in the turmoil of reformation in Western Europe in the sixteenth century. Its historic formularies acknowledge the circumstances in which its emerged as a distinctive church polity. The non-negotiable elements in any understanding of Anglicanism – the scriptures, the creeds, the gospel sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, and the historic episcopate – are to be found in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral2; and the Instruments of Communion – the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates Meeting – provide an evolving framework within which discussion and discernment might take place. It remains to be seen if the circumstances in which the Communion finds itself today – externally and internally – might require over the years a shift of emphasis from “autonomy with communion” to “communion with autonomy and accountability”.

The principle of autonomy-in-communion described in the Windsor Report makes clear that the principle of subsidiarity has always to be borne in mind. If the concern is with communion in a diocese, only diocesan authority is involved; if communion at a provincial level then only provincial decision. But if the matter concerns recognising one another as sharing one communion of faith and life, then some joint organs of discernment and decision, which are recognised by all, are required. It is this necessity which led the WCG to articulate the move to “communion with autonomy and accountability” as being a better articulation of the ecclesiology which is necessary to sustain Communion.
So the task for the CDG was to write something which preserved the autonomy of the Churches, but which provided for a strong glue that held us together. It had to reflect the fact that as Anglicans we do not believe in one authority structure, but in dispersed authority – the whole people of God bearing witness to the Truth found in Jesus Christ, and each church rooting its witness in its own mission context.

Please take the time to read through it all (7 page pdf).

Take the time to watch it all (almost 30 minutes).

The authority of the Episcopal Church resides at the diocesan level. This is witnessed to by the structure of the church as “that of a voluntary association of equal dioceses.” Also, the Constitution and Canons of the Church make no provision for either a central hierarchy or a Presiding Bishop with metropolitan authority. Furthermore, our General Convention representation is as dioceses and not as communicants, with only an administrative role for the convention leadership, the voting members of the leadership themselves drawn from the diocesan deputations. In addition, the ordinal does not contain any language acknowledging or committing to submit to any metropolitan or central hierarchal authority.

Read it all.

After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.

Tired of hearing the grim truth about their economic future, Americans demanded that the bald-faced lies resume immediately, particularly whenever politicians feel the need to divulge another terrifying problem with Wall Street, the housing market, or any one of a hundred other ticking time bombs everyone was better off not knowing about.

In addition, citizens are requesting that the phrase, “It will only get worse before it gets better,” be permanently replaced with, “Things are going great. Enjoy yourselves.”

“I thought I wanted a new era of transparency and accountability, but honestly, I just can’t handle it,” Ohio resident Nathan Pletcher said. “All I ever hear about now is how my retirement has been pushed back 15 years and how I won’t be able to afford my daughter’s tuition when she grows up.”

ROFL. Read it all.

Two leaders in the development of the proposed Anglican covenant said here May 5 that the process which might be used for Anglican entities to adopt the document is “evolving,” even as that evolution has made for some seemingly contradictory statements in the past days.

Anglican Communion Deputy Secretary General Gregory Cameron told reporters “we’re feeling our way” in terms of the implications for those provinces that decide not to sign onto the covenant, whether entities other than the provinces which are now members of the Anglican Consultative Council (as listed in the council’s constitution) would be allowed to adopt the covenant and whether there would be a time limit for provinces to decide.

On May 4, Cameron had told reporters that “at the moment there is no linkage to signing the covenant” and participation in the life of the communion. But, he added, “if a number of provinces were to adopt the covenant, then I think naturally the question would be asked whether some sort of assessment or change would have to take place.”

Read it all.

Here is one:

In his analysis of the origins of genius, David Brooks doesn’t mention one essential element: love.

Without it, all those hours of strenuous practice will fall short ”” probably far short ”” of the spark that creates genius.

For just one example among many, Leonardo da Vinci’s tiny, meticulously detailed sketchbook drawings of battle scenes convey (somewhat ironically) an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the subject. He’s enjoying himself ”” immensely ”” and the viewer can sense it in every line.

That intense pleasure, not the self-discipline or self-denial, is the real impetus that pushes some humans to work those very long hours and produce something astonishing.

Cynthia Eardley
New York, May 2, 2009

Read them all.

Its first two recommendations are about the listening process and the moratoria. The first recommendation invites the instruments of communion to commit themselves to a further stage of the listening process.

In this process we are at the stage to allow honest discussion and gain a picture of where the communion as a whole is in its response to Lambeth 1.10 which strongly discouraged ordination of persons in same-sex relations and blessing of same-sex unions but also encouraged listening to the experience of homosexual people. This process should continue, be reinforced and deepened.

I want to make it clear that without that kind of attention to the underlying issue, the appeal for restraint and moratoria is likely to sound rather hollow. You cannot say to large tracts of the communion you cannot pretend that this issue is not there or real. We need to exchange our convictions and thoughts hopes and fears more fully.

In that light, the second recommendation needs to be read about the moratoria. Windsor and Dromantine were consistent in urging that provinces hold back from deeper divisions that make common conversations harder. The moratoria called for restraint from electing a person in a same-sex union to the episcopate, from approving rites for blessing of same sex unions, and from intervention in other provinces to offer pastoral care. The Dar es Salaam communiqué made a heart felt plea about litigation.

Read it all.

Read it all.

In the rush of opinion polls released last week (the one showing that support for torture seems to correlate with the intensity of one’s Christian faith certainly is a jaw-dropper) one intriguing survey on abortion was largely overlooked. The survey, from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, found that support for legal abortion has slipped significantly — mostly among men.

Among all respondents, the percentage of those who say abortion should be legal in all or most cases has declined from 54 to 46 since August, according to the poll. Support for abortion has declined even among white mainline Protestants, who are generally considered liberal on abortion rights issues. Just 23 percent of white evangelical Protestants now favor legal abortion, down from 33 percent in August. But the more surprising numbers are among guys.

Indeed, the change in abortion opinions is being largely driven by large shifts among men. Last August, 53 percent of men said that abortion should be legal in most or all cases. But last month, only 43 percent did.

Read it all.

Emboldened by a few glasses of wine one Saturday night, Tara Hunt ranted on Twitter about her frustrations with San Francisco’s dating scene. She soon regretted it.

At work a couple of days later, her venting was topic No. 1 in the boardroom at Intuit, where Hunt works in marketing. Her colleagues had read the message and, to her embarrassment, chimed in about her love life.

“For those who don’t know me well, it might leave the wrong impression of who I am,” said Hunt, who is a fixture on the Silicon Valley startup scene.

Twitter, Facebook and other similar online services are making it easier than ever for people to share their thoughts with others. But the obsession many people have for posting updates also raises the question: When does sharing about one’s personal life cross the line and become too much information?

Read it all.