By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 15, 2026 Antisemitism has gone global. In one country after another, Jews are being excoriated over Israel’s conduct of the war in the Middle East. Israel stands accused of genocide, of baby-killing, of deliberately starving the citizens of Gaza. October 7, 2023 — the slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis and the dragging of roughly 250 hostages into the tunnels of Gaza — is now brazenly repositioned as payback for Israel’s

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 14, 2026 In the space of a single week, the man about to become Britain's prime minister and the Church of England's parliament both turned on the Jewish state. Andy Burnham, Labour's unopposed leader-in-waiting following Keir Starmer's resignation, apologized to the world for his party having stood too close to Israel and pledged to squeeze her harder. Days later, the General Synod, meeting in York, voted to "hear" a lib

ACNA's New Title IV Canons Put a Province on Trial By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org July 13, 2026 Are church canons little more than sin management? It is a fair question, and a cynical age has earned the right to ask it. Canon law, in the hands of a church that has forgotten its Lord, degenerates into something worse than bureaucracy. It becomes power management dressed in legal vestments. The Episcopal Church proved the point for two generations, wielding the

Archbishop of York’s Farewell Address to Synod Is a Masterclass in Saying Nothing Beautifully By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org July 11, 2026 The Archbishop of York rose in York on Friday to deliver his final presidential address of the quinquennium, and it must be said at the outset: the man is good at this. Stephen Cottrell has spent five years perfecting a rhetorical form all his own — the address that absorbs every criticism, confesses every failure, and leave

A Satirical Essay By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 10, 2026 The Church of England announced this week that it will not meet its target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, and the faithful across England wept — all eleven of them. This is, of course, deeply unfair to the church. The Church of England is in fact well ahead of schedule on net zero. It is simply measuring the wrong thing. While the bean counters at Church House fret over boiler emissions a

The archbishops threatened to cancel a fringe event on sexual identity transformation — then backed down halfway. What remains is a Church willing to hear the Gospel only in private. COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 9, 2026 The Church of England has found a new use for safeguarding: silencing the testimony of Christians whose lives have been changed by Jesus Christ. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York — Sarah Mullally and Stephen Cott

The Anglican Church of Canada has produced a 66-page liturgy for euthanasia. It is the most theologically damning document the Communion has seen in a generation. By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 7, 2026 Picture the scene the Anglican Church of Canada has now scripted, rubric by rubric. A dying believer receives the Body and Blood of Christ. Prayers are said. A period of quiet reflection follows. And then, on cue — the liturgy itself makes provision for it

Nairobi-Cairo proposals kicked into the long grass as Canterbury establishment clings to control COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 6, 2026 Why are we not surprised? The 19th Anglican Consultative Council, meeting in Belfast, Northern Ireland, voted 72–8 on July 4 to leave the Archbishop of Canterbury's role as the spiritual and ecclesiastical figurehead of the Anglican Communion untouched. Delegates declined to adopt the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals —

At every step of our Christian development and in every sphere of our Christian discipleship, pride is the greatest enemy and humility our greatest friend. — John Stott AI in some ways brings new challenges. For example, it's going to challenge the very notion of human agency. What is it that makes us human? It's the fact that we have agency. If AI takes away all the things that require human agency, then it will dehumanize us in a way we haven't witnessed before. — Carl True

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 2, 2026 There is a movement afoot — earnest, energetic, and ultimately doomed — to reconquer the mainline Protestant denominations for the gospel they long ago abandoned. Its advocates speak of renewal, revival, and reclamation. They invoke the memory of better days. They organize conferences, publish manifestos, and recruit orthodox clergy willing to remain inside dying institutions as a remnant witness. Scripture has a wo

The bishops' bench backs Labour's Conversion Practices Bill. They are wrong to do so. COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | June 30, 2026 Orthodox Christians opposed to the Labour Government's Conversion Practices Bill should expect no support from the 26 Church of England bishops who sit in the House of Lords. The Bishop of Manchester, David Walker, a prominent supporter of the LGBT agenda in Parliament, has fired a warning shot across the bows of any

Lawsuits, small parishes, theological differences, divided leadership, women's ordination rankle the orthodox Anglican denomination. By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I June 24, 2026 Gloating about being orthodox as opposed to revisionist might seem like a winning ticket. After all, the Anglican Church in North America was born from the Episcopal Church's embrace of pansexuality, and it has watched as that revisionist denomination has paid a steep price in lost me

N.T. Wright versus Alice Linsley COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | June 23, 2026 Women’s ordination to the priesthood never quite leaves the table. It simmers beneath nearly every major Christian communion and periodically threatens to split even the sturdiest of orthodox bodies — most recently the Southern Baptist Convention, which voted by roughly 80 percent against allowing women pastors, a clear victory for SBC president Albert Mohler. Rome r

Bishop C. FitzSimons Allison: At 99 A Living Anglican Legend Bishop FitzSimons Allison is now in his 99th year. His mind, though not as quick as when I interviewed him in 2022, - "The Lion in Winter" (Allison was 95) - remains profoundly alert to the times in which we live. He is a living witness to nearly the entire arc of the modern Anglican crisis — from the pre-revisionist Episcopal Church through the Singapore consecrations to the founding of the ACNA. Very few people al

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I June 18, 2026 Contemporary evangelicalism has fixated on church plants, church revivals, church building campaigns. Multiply the campuses, multiply the capital drives, multiply the square footage. But what if that whole enterprise rests on a category error? What if the New Testament's center of gravity was never "the church" at all, but something larger, older, and far less manageable: the Kingdom of God? The Numbers

ADOSC Bishop praises newly adopted canons. Calls for greater transparency By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | June 16, 2026 ACNA Archbishop Steve Wood has been denied his motion to dismiss the canonical case against him. The presentment includes three formal charges: violation of ordination vows, conduct giving just cause for scandal or offense, and sexual immorality. The Diocese of the Carolinas confirms these correspond to specific canons — Violation of Ordina

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I June 15, 2026 Efforts to reframe and restructure the Anglican Communion are little more than rearranging chairs on the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) deck and will not bring about the unity their architects hope to achieve. The Rt. Rev. Glenn Davies, bishop of the GAFCON Diocese of the Southern Cross, has delivered a stinging critique of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals, arguing that the historic understanding o

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I June 15, 2026 Archbishop Sarah Mullally has set herself an impossible task. She wants to reconcile what cannot be reconciled, and short of a miracle — a commodity in increasingly short supply in the Church of England — she will not succeed in shaping the Communion into her own image. In time she will sit down with the provinces sympathetic to her vision: those still tethered to Canterbury, still willing to play

"Schism is not the one who leaves, but the burden of the one who causes the schism." — Chuck Collins "Without the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, even impossible. There can be no life without the life-giver, no understanding without the Spirit of truth, no fellowship without the unity of the Spirit, no Christlikeness of character apart from His fruit, and no effective witness without His power. As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | June 9, 2026 Pope Leo has again declared that the war against Iran does not qualify as a just war under Catholic teaching. "I believe it has been already declared clearly," Leo told Italian journalist Franca Giansoldati of Il Messaggero. "There is no just war there," he said, referencing the conflict. The remark came in response to Vice President JD Vance, who invoked just war theory in April to justify the military