We need to address our understanding of ourselves and of all of our relationships - starting with our relationship with God and continuing - flowing - inevitably into our relationships with each other. For this reason, I strongly support the conclusion of the St. Michael Report that the issue is in fact a matter of doctrine not just of pastoral care.
Read moreIt is true that we find that it is hard and perhaps impossible any longer to "recognize" our church within the liberal hegemony dominating TEC. And it is natural that we would feel, as a result, a certain anger driven by sadness, disappointment, and alarm.
Read moreThe Archbishop was acting in good faith and desirous to extend the hand of friendship to all factions, since he did not have to please anybody, much less those who had nothing to do with his appointment.
Read moreAnd the two contestants and preachers were the Anglican, Richard Hooker, and the Puritan, Walter Travers. Hooker was a learned young man, wholly dedicated to the preservation of the Anglicanism of the Elizabeth Settlement, and Travers, just a little older, believed that the Church of England was not truly reformed and needed to institute more changes, including the abolition of the Order of Bishops and the required use of The Book of Common Prayer.
Read moreSince the latter was the title that its advocates preferred in the 1920s, I'll call it "Modernism." Modernism appealed to an increasing number of Episcopal clergymen who viewed classical Christianity as outmoded. The infiltration of Modernist theology came to a head in the 1920s.
Read moreEvangelicals today are castigated, not as those who hold to pompous tradition in terms of clothing, liturgy or ceremony, but rather as those who hold to apparently outdated views on the role of women and practising homosexuals in the life of the church community. In other words, the charge is not against their religious ceremony but rather over their adherence to traditional views of Church order and sexual ethics.
Read moreSo it is all the more worrying that much of this seems to have been unravelling in the last few weeks. President Musharraf's sacking of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has caused renewed conflict between secular political parties and the religious opposition.
Read moreA corollary to this observation is that the children of the super-rich of previous generations are either no longer on Forbes's list, or they are much further down the list. Inherited wealth tends to dissipate rather than grow. The Rockefellers and Carnegies and Morgans are no longer on the list, which is now dominated by names unknown just 30 years ago.
Read moreSecondly, 'the likelihood is that Paul is thinking about pederasty' (sex with a boy) since 'there was no other form of male homosexuality in the Greco-Roman world', and that he is opposing it because of the humiliation and exploitation experienced by the youths involved.2 All one can say is the text itself contains no hint of it.
Read moreSo if the second most senior figure in the Church of England is prepared to affirm a form of Anglican identity at such a sensitive moment with a bishop who has consented to an action which has given the clearest possible signal of her church's intention to depart from the historic faith of the Scriptures, what should we conclude?
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