This news appeared on a number of blogs today:
Citing fears of creating a controversy, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury has refused to grant Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the right to preach or preside at the eucharist in England. Robinson received the news in an email yesterday morning.
Sources familiar with the email say Williams cites the Windsor Report and recent statements from the Primates Meeting in refusing to grant Robinson permission to exercise his priestly functions during his current trip to England, or during the trip he plans during the Lambeth Conference in July and August.
The Windsor Report does not discuss the ordination of a candidate in a gay relationship to the priesthood, and it is priestly, rather than episcopal functions that Robinson had sought permission to perform. The primates’ statements, similarly, have objected to Robinson’s episcopacy, not his priesthood…
The email, which came to Robinson through a Lambeth official, says Williams believes that giving Robinson permission to preach and preside at the Eucharist would be construed as an acceptance of the ministry of a controversial figure within the Communion…
Sources who have read the email say Williams expresses sorrow for the way the ban on Robinson must appear to the bishop and his supporters, but says he is acting for the good of the Church and the Communion…
Earlier in the day Bishop Robinson had said on BBC Radio that God was “very disappointed” in Williams for his failure to confront [Archbishop of Nigeria Peter] Akinola over his treatment of gays.
You can read Episcopal Café’s version of it (of which the above is an excerpt) here. If you want a glimpse of the line of thinking of many in the Episcopal Church, take a moment also to go through the comments that follow the story.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Rogation Days
The Rogation Days are the three days preceding Ascension Day. They seem to have fallen off the church’s calendar a generation or so ago. The word “rogation” is from the Latin verb, rogo, “I ask.” They come at this point in the year because they are a time of special prayer that God may bless us in this season of planting. I suspect they were dropped from the calendar because they have an antiquated air to them, hearkening back to the days when society was more agrarian. Yet in these days of mass starvation in many parts of the world I believe they have a peculiarly contemporary ring. Here is an excerpt from the Exhortation following the Homily for the Rogation Days, written more than four hundred years ago. For ease of reading I have taken the liberty of modernizing some spellings and updating a few words.If now therefore you will have your prayers heard before Almighty God, for the increase of your corn and cattle, and for the defense thereof from unseasonable mists and blasts, from hail and other such tempests, [pursue] love, equity, and righteousness, mercy and charity, which God most requires at our hands. Which Almighty God respecting chiefly, in making his civil laws for his people the Israelites, in charging the owners not to gather up their corn too nigh at harvest season, nor the grapes and olives in gathering time, but to leave behind some ears of corn for the poor gleaners (Leviticus 19.9-10, Deuteronomy 24.19-21). By this he meant to induce them to pity the poor, to relieve the needy, to show mercy and kindness. It cannot be lost, which for his sake is distributed to the poor (1 Corinthians 9.9-10). For he who ministers seed to the sower, and bread to the hungry, who sends downs the early and latter rain upon your fields, so to fill up the barns with corn, and the wine presses with wine and oil (Joel 2.23-24), he, I say, who recompenses all kinds of benefits in the resurrection of the just, he will assuredly recompense all merciful deeds shown to the needy, however unable the poor is, upon whom it is bestowed. “O,” says Solomon, “let not mercy and truth forsake you. Bind them about your neck,” says he, “and write them on the tablet of your heart, so shall you find favor at God’s hand” (Proverbs 3.3-4).
Thus honor thou the Lord with your riches, and with the first fruits of your increase: So shall your barns be filled with abundance, and your presses in all burst with new wine. Nay, God has promised to open the windows of heaven, upon the generous righteous man, that he shall want nothing. He will repress the devouring caterpillar, which should devour your fruits. He will give you peace and quiet to gather in your provision, that you may sit every man under his own vine quietly, without fear of foreign enemies to invade you. He will give you not only food to feed on, but stomachs and good appetites to take comfort of your fruits, whereby in all things you may have sufficiency. Finally, he will bless you with all manner [of] abundance in this transitory life,and endue you with all manner of benediction in the next world, in the kingdom of heaven, through the merits of our Lord and Savior, to whom with the Father, and the Holy Spirit, be all honor everlasting. Amen.
The full text of the homily may be found here.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Venables predicts end of Anglican Communion
Here is a report from the Anglican Journal (house organ of the Anglican Church of Canada) on the recent convention in Vancouver of the breakaway group, the Anglican Network in Canada:
The South American primate who has welcomed dissenting Canadian Anglican parishes into his province says he sees the beginning of the end of the world-wide Anglican Communion. “I believe we’re in the early stages of divorce,” Archbishop Gregory Venables, presiding (national) bishop of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, told a news conference during a meeting of the Anglican Network in Canada from April 25 to 26. “I think there comes a point when a marriage is no longer a marriage and you have to recognize it,” he said.
But Archbishop Venables suggested that Anglican churches could still stay together in some form. “Maybe we can have an Anglican federation,” he said. In an interview with the Anglican Journal, Archbishop Venables noted that air travel and the Internet have radically re-structured international networks. “We’re no longer living in a world where everything is done locally,” Archbishop Venables said. “The church is a little late in coming to that.” Instead of insisting on geographical church provinces, “hopefully, this will be resolved so we can realign or restructure so everyone can follow their concerns.” …
The delegates also heard from theologian Rev. James Packer, who focused on the need for deeper Bible understanding; Bishop Albert Vun of Malaysia; youth minister Ken Moser of St. John’s Shaughnessy church in Vancouver and Bishop Bill Atwood of Kenya. Mr. Packer called Archbishop Venables’ presence a “watershed,” telling delegates the “principle of geographical exclusiveness has been breached and I think it has been breached in such a way that it cannot be restored.”
Addressing the question of whether the network should encourage more breakaway parishes, Bishop Harvey said, “that is categorically wrong.” He added that the network “has always gone in response to an invitation.” …
Archbishop Venables told the Journal he felt an April 21 letter from Archbishop Fred Hiltz, the Canadian primate, asking him not to come to Canada was little more than a gesture. “I didn’t get the letter until one of the (Canadian) reporters read it over the phone,” he said. “It came through on my fax the next morning and that shocked me.” Archbishop Hiltz could simply have picked up the telephone, Archbishop Venables said. “I would have talked about it.” However, he added, the matter “has nothing to do with the Anglican Church of Canada. These people (the members of the network) didn’t approach me until after they had left.”
Archbishop Hiltz was out of the country and could not be reached for comment. Archdeacon Paul Feheley, the primate’s principal secretary, said efforts were made by fax and e-mail to deliver the letter to Archbishop Venables first. “As for picking up the telephone, it seems to me that if you are a foreign primate visiting another country, the onus is on you to pick up the phone and call the primate of that country,” said Archdeacon Feheley, adding that no one from the network informed Archbishop Hiltz’ office that the South American primate was coming.
Archbishop Venables said he has talked to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, about his actions. “I’m not seeking endorsement but we have open dialogue.” But he stopped short of divulging details. “It was a private conversation.”
You can find the entire article here.
Haitian Food Riots Unnerving But Not Surprising
What follows are the opening and closing paragraphs of an analysis of the current situation in Haiti, which appeared on Global Politician this morning:
Beginning early April, Haiti was gripped by a nation-wide mobilization to protest high food prices, reaching a crescendo on Thursday the 10th, as thousands of people took to the streets. Some protestors burned tires, blocking national highways and city streets in Port-au-Prince, and a few looted local stores. Clashes with police and UN troops resulted in an official count of five dead.
The media covered these events during the days of the crisis but offered little information to explain the protests. This superficial coverage tells an all-too-familiar story of Haiti. The media swarmed to cover the high drama of UN troops breaking up demonstrations with rubber bullets, and the U.S. State Department warning its citizens not to enter the country. Then, almost as quickly as it appeared on the news, Haiti disappeared, leaving the residual image of being hopeless, violent, and dangerous.
As awful as the loss of life, property damage, and the resulting climate of fear are, the "rioters" in the street are only the most visible manifestation of a crisis with deep roots. Both the Haitian government and the international community played important roles in creating the current crisis.
While some individuals chose to “riot”—and even fewer looted stores—most people in Haiti’s poor majority actively help one another to survive. While the rising sale of “dirt cookies”—biscuits made of clay, salt, and oil—and the food protests and isolated cases of looting illustrate the desperation of the hungry, Haiti also has a still-extant tradition of youn ede lòt—one helping the other. Although foreigners may not see these invisible ties, even in the crowded capital city ordinary Haitians often share what little they have with neighbors and extended kin.
Several times, I have seen a neighbor, fellow church member, co-worker, friend, or cousin drop in on someone with a plate of food in hand to make sure they had something to eat that night. Most people I know in Haiti also, with no outside help or guidance, organize sòl—solidarity lending groups. Each pay period a group pools together funds, with one person receiving the entire amount, usually to pay for their annual or biannual rent or to pay for their children's schooling, a quarter to a half of a minimum-wage earner’s salary. People also organize in neighborhood associations, picking up trash, fixing potholes, and even opening community schools.
Unnoticed by mainstream accounts, this collectivist tradition in Haiti allows people living on the margins of society (the minimum wage for those few who work in the formal sector is 70 goud, or $1.80 per day) to survive. A Haitian proverb explains the dynamic: bourik chaje pa kanpe (the overloaded donkey can’t stand still). People who are forced to deal with many problems at once can't stop, they must keep going…
Most importantly, the events of last week in Haiti need to be viewed in context and not simply as “Haitian exceptionalism” based on the stereotypic narrative of Haitians being violent, unruly, ungodly, and dangerous. Rather, Haiti needs to be seen as an early warning. Haiti’s geopolitical position—especially its close proximity to the United States and level of dependence on foreign aid—highlights the contradictions and flaws in the system of international aid and growing global food crisis. The World Food Program noted that costs for basic foodstuffs have risen 70% over the past year worldwide, 40% since last summer (WFP 2008). Before Haiti there were riots in several countries, including Cameroon, Egypt, Bolivia, and Indonesia. These so-called “food riots” are really the first flares shot up to signal the need for significant changes to the economic model.
What is to be done? First, take heed. Second, take action. Long-term solutions will have to address both our dependence on oil and the inequalities in distribution within the world system. One action we can take is to pass the Jubilee Act—which would be a complete, immediate cancellation of the debts of 67 Southern countries, of which Haiti is one, without conditionalities—that passed the House of Representatives on April 16 by a vote of 285 to 132. There was a Senate hearing on April 24. Debt cancellation would free up resources—$80 million per year in Haiti—as well as relieve the pressure of neoliberalism, empowering Southern civil societies and governments to define their own priorities, like national production.
To unravel the inequalities of this contemporary neoliberal world system, it is best to start with the thread that is already loose.
I recommend that you also read everything in between. You can find it here.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Canterbury letter still not sent
More than two weeks ago, Bishop Tom Wright spoke publicly of a letter that the Archbishop of Canterbury had sent to the bishops of the Anglican Communion:
“When the Archbishop issued his invitations, he made it clear as I said that their basis was Windsor and the Covenant as the tools to shape our future common life. That invitation was issued only three months after the remarkable joint statement from the Primates issued in Tanzania in February 2007. After a summer and autumn of various tangled and unsatisfactory events, the Archbishop then wrote an Advent pastoral letter in which he reiterated the terms of his initial invitation and declared that he would be writing to those bishops who might be thought particularly unsympathetic to Windsor and the Covenant to ask them whether they were really prepared to build on this dual foundation. Those letters, I understand, are in the post as we speak, written with apostolic pain and heart-searching but also with apostolic necessity.”
Since then, rumors and denials have flown back and forth. And of course the Archbishop has recently made a youtube video of a letter to the bishops preparing for the Lambeth Conference. Many had assumed that perhaps that was “the letter”. However, not so, according to this report:
A spokesman for Archbishop Williams told The Living Church the internet video presentation was “not related” to his forthcoming letter to the bishops of the Communion. In that letter, the archbishop is reported to ask that they predicate their attendance at the Lambeth Conference upon their willingness to accept the Windsor Report and Anglican Covenant processes.
The video presentation, titled “Better bishops for the sake of a better church,” was a pastoral didactic tool, the spokesman. The presentation broadcast on the internet video service, outlines the archbishop’s hopes for the conference…
The letters affirming support for Windsor and the covenant processes had not yet been mailed, but would go out presently, the spokesman said.
You can read the whole story here.
“When the Archbishop issued his invitations, he made it clear as I said that their basis was Windsor and the Covenant as the tools to shape our future common life. That invitation was issued only three months after the remarkable joint statement from the Primates issued in Tanzania in February 2007. After a summer and autumn of various tangled and unsatisfactory events, the Archbishop then wrote an Advent pastoral letter in which he reiterated the terms of his initial invitation and declared that he would be writing to those bishops who might be thought particularly unsympathetic to Windsor and the Covenant to ask them whether they were really prepared to build on this dual foundation. Those letters, I understand, are in the post as we speak, written with apostolic pain and heart-searching but also with apostolic necessity.”
Since then, rumors and denials have flown back and forth. And of course the Archbishop has recently made a youtube video of a letter to the bishops preparing for the Lambeth Conference. Many had assumed that perhaps that was “the letter”. However, not so, according to this report:
A spokesman for Archbishop Williams told The Living Church the internet video presentation was “not related” to his forthcoming letter to the bishops of the Communion. In that letter, the archbishop is reported to ask that they predicate their attendance at the Lambeth Conference upon their willingness to accept the Windsor Report and Anglican Covenant processes.
The video presentation, titled “Better bishops for the sake of a better church,” was a pastoral didactic tool, the spokesman. The presentation broadcast on the internet video service, outlines the archbishop’s hopes for the conference…
The letters affirming support for Windsor and the covenant processes had not yet been mailed, but would go out presently, the spokesman said.
You can read the whole story here.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
London Times Cryptic Crossword for April 27
And here is this week’s puzzle. Click on it to get the full-sized version.
Cryptic Crossword Solution for April 20
Here is the official solution to last Sunday’s London Times Cryptic crossword puzzle:
Bill Moyers Interview with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright
The media have broadcast sound bites from the sermons of Barack Obama’s pastor, but this Bill Moyers interview allows for a more in-depth perspective, which I found extremely helpful. Here is an excerpt:
BILL MOYERS: Lots of controversy about black liberation theology. As I understand it, black liberation theology reads the bible through the experience of people who have suffered, and who then are able to say to themselves that we read the bible differently, because we have struggled, than those do who have not struggled. Is that a fair bumper sticker of liberation theology?
REVEREND WRIGHT: I think that’s a fair bumper sticker. I think that the terms “liberation theology” or “black liberation theology” cause more problems and red flags for people who don’t understand it.
BILL MOYERS: When I hear the word “black liberation theology” being the interpretation of scripture from the oppressed, I think well, that’s the Jewish story—
REVEREND WRIGHT: Exactly, exactly. From Genesis to Revelation. These are people who wrote the word of God that we honor and love under Egyptian oppression, Syrian oppression, Babylonian oppression, Persian oppression, Greek oppression, Roman oppression. So that their understanding of what God is saying is very different from the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians. And that’s what prophetic theology of the African-American church is.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. But talk a little bit about that. The prophets loved Israel. But they hated the waywardness of Israel. And they were calling Israel out of love back to justice, not damning—
REVEREND WRIGHT: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: Not damning Israel. Right?
REVEREND WRIGHT: Right. They were saying that God was—in fact, if you look at the damning, condemning, if you look at Deuteronomy, it talks about blessings and curses, how God doesn’t bless everything. God does not bless gang-bangers. God does not bless dope dealers. God does not bless young thugs that hit old women upside the head and snatch their purse. God does not bless that. God does not bless the killing of babies. God does not bless the killing of enemies. And when you look at blessings and curses out of that Hebrew tradition from the book of Deuteronomy, that’s what the prophets were saying, that God is not blessing this. God does not bless it—bless us. And when we’re calling them, the prophets call them to repentance and to come back to God. If my people who are called by my name, God says to Solomon, will humble themselves and pray, seek my faith and turn from their wicked ways. God says that wicked ways, not Jeremiah Wright, then will I hear from heaven.
BILL MOYERS: One of the most controversial sermons that you preach is the sermon you preach that ended up being that sound bite about God damn America.
REVEREND WRIGHT [in video of church service]: Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I’m through now. But let me leave you with one more thing. Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate—the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed. And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizen as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!
BILL MOYERS: What did you mean when you said that?
REVEREND WRIGHT: When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government—a particular government and not to God, that you’re in serious trouble because governments fail people. And governments change. And governments lie. And those three points of the sermon. And that is the context in which I was illustrating how the governments biblically and the governments since biblical times, up to our time, changed, how they failed, and how they lie. And when we start talking about my government right or wrong, I don’t think that goes.
You can see, hear, or read the whole interview here.
BILL MOYERS: Lots of controversy about black liberation theology. As I understand it, black liberation theology reads the bible through the experience of people who have suffered, and who then are able to say to themselves that we read the bible differently, because we have struggled, than those do who have not struggled. Is that a fair bumper sticker of liberation theology?
REVEREND WRIGHT: I think that’s a fair bumper sticker. I think that the terms “liberation theology” or “black liberation theology” cause more problems and red flags for people who don’t understand it.
BILL MOYERS: When I hear the word “black liberation theology” being the interpretation of scripture from the oppressed, I think well, that’s the Jewish story—
REVEREND WRIGHT: Exactly, exactly. From Genesis to Revelation. These are people who wrote the word of God that we honor and love under Egyptian oppression, Syrian oppression, Babylonian oppression, Persian oppression, Greek oppression, Roman oppression. So that their understanding of what God is saying is very different from the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians. And that’s what prophetic theology of the African-American church is.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. But talk a little bit about that. The prophets loved Israel. But they hated the waywardness of Israel. And they were calling Israel out of love back to justice, not damning—
REVEREND WRIGHT: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: Not damning Israel. Right?
REVEREND WRIGHT: Right. They were saying that God was—in fact, if you look at the damning, condemning, if you look at Deuteronomy, it talks about blessings and curses, how God doesn’t bless everything. God does not bless gang-bangers. God does not bless dope dealers. God does not bless young thugs that hit old women upside the head and snatch their purse. God does not bless that. God does not bless the killing of babies. God does not bless the killing of enemies. And when you look at blessings and curses out of that Hebrew tradition from the book of Deuteronomy, that’s what the prophets were saying, that God is not blessing this. God does not bless it—bless us. And when we’re calling them, the prophets call them to repentance and to come back to God. If my people who are called by my name, God says to Solomon, will humble themselves and pray, seek my faith and turn from their wicked ways. God says that wicked ways, not Jeremiah Wright, then will I hear from heaven.
BILL MOYERS: One of the most controversial sermons that you preach is the sermon you preach that ended up being that sound bite about God damn America.
REVEREND WRIGHT [in video of church service]: Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I’m through now. But let me leave you with one more thing. Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate—the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed. And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizen as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!
BILL MOYERS: What did you mean when you said that?
REVEREND WRIGHT: When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government—a particular government and not to God, that you’re in serious trouble because governments fail people. And governments change. And governments lie. And those three points of the sermon. And that is the context in which I was illustrating how the governments biblically and the governments since biblical times, up to our time, changed, how they failed, and how they lie. And when we start talking about my government right or wrong, I don’t think that goes.
You can see, hear, or read the whole interview here.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Influential evangelical theologian latest to split with Canadian Church
This article appeared this morning in the Vancouver Sun:
One of the world’s most famous evangelical theologians quit the Anglican Church of Canada this week because he believes many of its bishops are “arguably heretical” for adhering to “poisonous liberalism”. James Packer, whom Time magazine recently named as one of the planet’s 25 most influential evangelicals, said he hesitated before using the harsh terms to describe the Anglican bishops, but believed he must do so in the name of truth.
Vancouver-based Packer, who has sold more than four million copies of his many books, said he and 10 other B.C. Anglican clergy left the national denomination this week to operate under the authority of a South American Anglican archbishop because they felt they were being “starved out and worn down”. Oxford-trained Packer was interviewed at a Friday gathering of about 300 members of the breakaway Anglican Network in Canada, which officially welcomed South American Anglican Primate Gregory Venables to Canada as their spiritual leader—against the express wishes of Canada’s top Anglican, Primate Fred Hiltz.
Packer, 81, said he can no longer serve under Vancouver-area Bishop Michael Ingham, who in 2002 sanctioned a diocesan vote that eventually permitted the blessing of same-sex couples at eight out of 67 parishes. “He is a bishop who appears heretical,” Packer said, comparing Ingham to high-profile progressive U.S. Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong and Church of England Bishop Richard Holloway…
Known for the way he does not sugarcoat his conservative Christian beliefs despite his soft-spoken, gracious demeanour, Packer said the Bible is the “absolute” authority on divine truth, which clearly describes homosexuality as a grave sin. Opening his English Standard Version of the Bible, of which he was chief editor, Packer read out passages from 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, in which the apostle Paul compares “men who lie with men” to drunkards, thieves, slanderers and adulterers, none of whom will enter the kingdom of heaven. “That’s a very solemn apostolic warning,” said Packer, a self-described “Calvinist Anglican” who wrote the book, The Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life.
The priest at St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Kerrisdale, which is seeking permission to bless same-sex relationships in the future, said Packer’s decision to raise the concept of “heresy” to describe his theological opponents stunts dialogue and honest intellectual exploration. “I think it’s very unfair when any new insight that departs from an accepted position is labelled ‘heretical’,” said Rev. Kevin Dixon. The priest called the Vancouver-area diocese’s decision to bless same-sex relationships “a recognition of what’s true in light of contemporary research in genetics and psychology”.
Dixon said Packer is adopting a “literalistic” reading of the Bible when he takes Paul's 2,000-year-old words as proof for all time that the Supreme Being condemns homosexuality. “It’s the same process of logic that leads to supporting slavery,” Dixon said, noting that the apostle of Jesus also did not oppose slavery…
For his part, Packer described the blessings that many of Canada’s Anglican bishops are willing to give to active gays and lesbians, as well as the bishops’ openness to diverse ways of interpreting the Bible, as “persistent unrepentant doctrinal disorder”. The author of the 1973 book, Knowing God, which alone has sold more than three million copies, said it is “utterly tragic” that some conservative Anglicans felt they had no option but to leave the Anglican Church of Canada…
Packer maintained it is top leaders of the Anglican Church of Canada, not he and more than 2,000 fellow conservatives in the Anglican Network in Canada, who have changed their interpretation of Christianity since he moved from Britain to Canada more than 29 years ago to teach at Vancouver’s Regent College. “I’m simply being an old-fashioned mainstream Anglican,” Packer said.
The Bible teaches, he said, that people who feel erotic attractions to people of the same gender “are called by God to remain chaste”, avoiding sexual relationships. Packer urged Anglicans who are adamantly opposed to liberal developments in the Anglican church in Canada and the U.S. to remain “tough” as they re-align themselves under Archbishop Venables into a new non-geographically-based form of Anglicanism.
Dixon accuses Packer of siding with proponents of slavery and then accuses him of impeding dialog? You can read the whole article here.
One of the world’s most famous evangelical theologians quit the Anglican Church of Canada this week because he believes many of its bishops are “arguably heretical” for adhering to “poisonous liberalism”. James Packer, whom Time magazine recently named as one of the planet’s 25 most influential evangelicals, said he hesitated before using the harsh terms to describe the Anglican bishops, but believed he must do so in the name of truth.Vancouver-based Packer, who has sold more than four million copies of his many books, said he and 10 other B.C. Anglican clergy left the national denomination this week to operate under the authority of a South American Anglican archbishop because they felt they were being “starved out and worn down”. Oxford-trained Packer was interviewed at a Friday gathering of about 300 members of the breakaway Anglican Network in Canada, which officially welcomed South American Anglican Primate Gregory Venables to Canada as their spiritual leader—against the express wishes of Canada’s top Anglican, Primate Fred Hiltz.
Packer, 81, said he can no longer serve under Vancouver-area Bishop Michael Ingham, who in 2002 sanctioned a diocesan vote that eventually permitted the blessing of same-sex couples at eight out of 67 parishes. “He is a bishop who appears heretical,” Packer said, comparing Ingham to high-profile progressive U.S. Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong and Church of England Bishop Richard Holloway…
Known for the way he does not sugarcoat his conservative Christian beliefs despite his soft-spoken, gracious demeanour, Packer said the Bible is the “absolute” authority on divine truth, which clearly describes homosexuality as a grave sin. Opening his English Standard Version of the Bible, of which he was chief editor, Packer read out passages from 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, in which the apostle Paul compares “men who lie with men” to drunkards, thieves, slanderers and adulterers, none of whom will enter the kingdom of heaven. “That’s a very solemn apostolic warning,” said Packer, a self-described “Calvinist Anglican” who wrote the book, The Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life.
The priest at St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Kerrisdale, which is seeking permission to bless same-sex relationships in the future, said Packer’s decision to raise the concept of “heresy” to describe his theological opponents stunts dialogue and honest intellectual exploration. “I think it’s very unfair when any new insight that departs from an accepted position is labelled ‘heretical’,” said Rev. Kevin Dixon. The priest called the Vancouver-area diocese’s decision to bless same-sex relationships “a recognition of what’s true in light of contemporary research in genetics and psychology”.
Dixon said Packer is adopting a “literalistic” reading of the Bible when he takes Paul's 2,000-year-old words as proof for all time that the Supreme Being condemns homosexuality. “It’s the same process of logic that leads to supporting slavery,” Dixon said, noting that the apostle of Jesus also did not oppose slavery…
For his part, Packer described the blessings that many of Canada’s Anglican bishops are willing to give to active gays and lesbians, as well as the bishops’ openness to diverse ways of interpreting the Bible, as “persistent unrepentant doctrinal disorder”. The author of the 1973 book, Knowing God, which alone has sold more than three million copies, said it is “utterly tragic” that some conservative Anglicans felt they had no option but to leave the Anglican Church of Canada…
Packer maintained it is top leaders of the Anglican Church of Canada, not he and more than 2,000 fellow conservatives in the Anglican Network in Canada, who have changed their interpretation of Christianity since he moved from Britain to Canada more than 29 years ago to teach at Vancouver’s Regent College. “I’m simply being an old-fashioned mainstream Anglican,” Packer said.
The Bible teaches, he said, that people who feel erotic attractions to people of the same gender “are called by God to remain chaste”, avoiding sexual relationships. Packer urged Anglicans who are adamantly opposed to liberal developments in the Anglican church in Canada and the U.S. to remain “tough” as they re-align themselves under Archbishop Venables into a new non-geographically-based form of Anglicanism.
Dixon accuses Packer of siding with proponents of slavery and then accuses him of impeding dialog? You can read the whole article here.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Burma’s Secret War
Our church has been blessed in recent months by a growing number of Karen refugees from Burma. Gradually we are beginning to learn their story, which is hardly known outside Burma. This 48-minute documentary video, filmed a couple of years ago, relates the vicious persecution that they have suffered in their homeland for two generations.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Why I left the Episcopal Church
This article by Dr Moheb Ghali appeared on the Anglican Mainstream website two days ago. Dr Ghali has brought together a useful collection of denials of basic tenets of Christian faith by bishops of the Episcopal Church. What follows is a digest of his patient research:
Occasionally I am asked why I found it necessary, after four decades of committed service, to leave the Episcopal Church. My answer is: I had to choose whom to believe. On many issues central to my faith what Jesus and the Apostles say and what the leaders of the Episcopal Church say are incompatible. I chose to believe in what Jesus and the Apostles say, and that made it necessary to leave the Episcopal Church.
The Bishops of the Church, who are the Ecclesiastical Authorities in their dioceses, the successors to the Apostles and the guardians of faith, speak for the Church on matters of faith and doctrine … Their public statements interpreting the Gospel and doctrine, unless repudiated by Church councils, may be taken as representing the Church’s positions. In what follows I compare examples of the positions expressed by Episcopal Bishops, theologians and other Church leaders on ten issues, positions that have not been repudiated by councils of the Episcopal Church, with the positions found in Scripture. I use statements by Presiding Bishops, both current and former, with greater frequency as I consider the public views of the presiding officer of the House of Bishops to be representatives of views of the majority of its members.
Is Jesus the only way?
“We who practice the Christian tradition understand him as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.” [Presiding Bishop, Time, July 10, 2006]
Is Jesus the Son of God?
“It’s not about having answers as much as it is about engaging a story. It is about your story and how your story connects to an ancient story of desert wanderers that, in time, came to see that humanity and this energy they called God mingled and existed through Christ and thus, exists in all of humanity.” [The Episcopal Church web site, Visitors Center, “Spiritual but not Religious”]
The Resurrection
“The story of Jesus’ bodily resurrection is, at best, conjectural; that the resurrection accounts in the four Gospels are contradictory and confusing… the significance of Easter is not that Jesus returned to actual life but that even death itself could not end the power of his presence in the lives of the faithful.” [Bishop of Diocese of Washington, D.C., Easter sermon in 2002]
The Bible
“And while I think we would all say as our ordination liturgy has us say—those of us who are ordained—that we believe that the Old and New Testament contain all things necessary to salvation, there is a broad interpretation of what precisely that means in actual terms as one looks at various issues and concerns in the life of the church. … So when we think about church, I think many of us think first of all about that sacramental experience rather than the Book.” [Former Presiding Bishop, AAC Equipping the Saints 2007]
Salvation
“The question is always how can we get beyond our own narrow self-interest and see that our salvation lies in attending to the needs of other people.” [Presiding Bishop, Parabola, Spring 2007]
The Eucharist
“Why does the church gather around a table with food and drink in its primary act of worship? Because God calls the church to a ministry of reconciliation. The church is called to restore the dignity of creation. It is all about feeding and being fed. It is all about making certain that all God’s children are safe, whole and nourished. The ritual breaking of bread in the midst of the assembly reminds us of our task while it embodies its reality.” [The Rev. Clayton Morris, Liturgical Officer for the Episcopal Church, Episcopal Life, March 31, 2008]
Marriage
“Resolved, That this 96th Convention of the Diocese of Olympia affirms, and calls upon the Bishops and Standing Committee of the Diocese to affirm the full inclusion in all areas of the life of the Episcopal Church of our otherwise qualified brother and sister Christians who are single or partnered heterosexual gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered persons, and those who are in non-celibate heterosexual relationships and those who are divorced, as well as the full inclusion of the Episcopal Church in the full life of the Anglican Communion.” [Passed with two friendly amendments; 317 in favor, 79 against, 51 abstentions]
The Creeds
“Those creeds are not about checking off a bunch of propositions. They are about giving our heart to a sense that Jesus shows us what it looks like to be a divine human being.” [Presiding Bishop, Parabola, Spring 2007].
Dr Ghali’s quotations underline the fact that the issues that conservative Episcopalians have with many of the leaders of their church are not homosexuality but a proud and outright denial of foundational Christian beliefs. If you have the stomach for it, you can read his whole paper here.
Occasionally I am asked why I found it necessary, after four decades of committed service, to leave the Episcopal Church. My answer is: I had to choose whom to believe. On many issues central to my faith what Jesus and the Apostles say and what the leaders of the Episcopal Church say are incompatible. I chose to believe in what Jesus and the Apostles say, and that made it necessary to leave the Episcopal Church.
The Bishops of the Church, who are the Ecclesiastical Authorities in their dioceses, the successors to the Apostles and the guardians of faith, speak for the Church on matters of faith and doctrine … Their public statements interpreting the Gospel and doctrine, unless repudiated by Church councils, may be taken as representing the Church’s positions. In what follows I compare examples of the positions expressed by Episcopal Bishops, theologians and other Church leaders on ten issues, positions that have not been repudiated by councils of the Episcopal Church, with the positions found in Scripture. I use statements by Presiding Bishops, both current and former, with greater frequency as I consider the public views of the presiding officer of the House of Bishops to be representatives of views of the majority of its members.
Is Jesus the only way?
“We who practice the Christian tradition understand him as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.” [Presiding Bishop, Time, July 10, 2006]
Is Jesus the Son of God?
“It’s not about having answers as much as it is about engaging a story. It is about your story and how your story connects to an ancient story of desert wanderers that, in time, came to see that humanity and this energy they called God mingled and existed through Christ and thus, exists in all of humanity.” [The Episcopal Church web site, Visitors Center, “Spiritual but not Religious”]
The Resurrection
“The story of Jesus’ bodily resurrection is, at best, conjectural; that the resurrection accounts in the four Gospels are contradictory and confusing… the significance of Easter is not that Jesus returned to actual life but that even death itself could not end the power of his presence in the lives of the faithful.” [Bishop of Diocese of Washington, D.C., Easter sermon in 2002]
The Bible
“And while I think we would all say as our ordination liturgy has us say—those of us who are ordained—that we believe that the Old and New Testament contain all things necessary to salvation, there is a broad interpretation of what precisely that means in actual terms as one looks at various issues and concerns in the life of the church. … So when we think about church, I think many of us think first of all about that sacramental experience rather than the Book.” [Former Presiding Bishop, AAC Equipping the Saints 2007]
Salvation
“The question is always how can we get beyond our own narrow self-interest and see that our salvation lies in attending to the needs of other people.” [Presiding Bishop, Parabola, Spring 2007]
The Eucharist
“Why does the church gather around a table with food and drink in its primary act of worship? Because God calls the church to a ministry of reconciliation. The church is called to restore the dignity of creation. It is all about feeding and being fed. It is all about making certain that all God’s children are safe, whole and nourished. The ritual breaking of bread in the midst of the assembly reminds us of our task while it embodies its reality.” [The Rev. Clayton Morris, Liturgical Officer for the Episcopal Church, Episcopal Life, March 31, 2008]
Marriage
“Resolved, That this 96th Convention of the Diocese of Olympia affirms, and calls upon the Bishops and Standing Committee of the Diocese to affirm the full inclusion in all areas of the life of the Episcopal Church of our otherwise qualified brother and sister Christians who are single or partnered heterosexual gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered persons, and those who are in non-celibate heterosexual relationships and those who are divorced, as well as the full inclusion of the Episcopal Church in the full life of the Anglican Communion.” [Passed with two friendly amendments; 317 in favor, 79 against, 51 abstentions]
The Creeds
“Those creeds are not about checking off a bunch of propositions. They are about giving our heart to a sense that Jesus shows us what it looks like to be a divine human being.” [Presiding Bishop, Parabola, Spring 2007].
Dr Ghali’s quotations underline the fact that the issues that conservative Episcopalians have with many of the leaders of their church are not homosexuality but a proud and outright denial of foundational Christian beliefs. If you have the stomach for it, you can read his whole paper here.
Archbishop of Canterbury’s Reflections on Lambeth Conference 2008
Below is an excerpt from that elusive letter that the Archbishop of Canterbury sent to the bishops of the Anglican Communion. And here is the Archbishop himself on youtube:
At the heart of the whole Anglican Communion is relationship. We have never been a body that is bound together by firm and precise rules and that is often, as it is at the moment, a matter of some real concern and some confusion in our life as a communion.
We don’t want at the Lambeth Conference to be creating a lot of new rules but we do obviously need to strengthen our relationships and we need to put those relationships on another footing, slightly firmer footing, where we have promised to one another that this is how we will conduct our life together. And it is in that light that at this year we are discussing together the proposal for what we are calling a covenant between the Anglican Churches of the world. A covenant. A relationship of promise. We undertake that this is how we will relate to one another; that when these problems occur, that this is how we will handle them together, that this is how advice will be given and shared and that this is how decisions and discernment can be taken forward.
That is a very a big part of what we will be looking at this year but it is not everything because no covenant, no arrangement of that sort is worth the paper it is written on if it doesn't grow out of the relationships that are built as people pray together and share their lives together over tow and a half weeks. And to try and underline, we have also decided that this year we are going to begin the Lambeth Conference with a couple of days of retreat, of quiet prayer and reflection. There will be addresses. There will be a lot of open space and open time where people can just be alone with God, to think deeply about what they want from the conference and perhaps have the opportunity to talk quietly with one of two others about their hopes and fears.
What I would really most like to see in this years Lambeth Conference is the sense that this is essentially a spiritual encounter. A time when people are encountering God as they encounter one another, a time when people will feel that their life of prayer and witness is being deepened and their resources are being stretched. Not a time when we are being besieged by problems that need to be solved and statements that need to be finalised, but a time when people feel that they are growing in their ministry.
And for that to happen once again, we are going to need the prayers and the support of so many people around the world… So please pray for the Conference and please share in that process of preparation, that reflection of God's word in the Gospel of John that will open up to us the horizons that we need in order to be better Bishops for the sake of a better Church. Bishops who are more deeply bound together in Christian fellowship so that their Churches may be more deeply bound in Christian fellowship; Churches that are bound deeper in fellowship so that they can witness more effectively, more convincingly, more transformingly in the world around.
The full text of the letter is available from Ruth Gledhill at Timesonline here.
At the heart of the whole Anglican Communion is relationship. We have never been a body that is bound together by firm and precise rules and that is often, as it is at the moment, a matter of some real concern and some confusion in our life as a communion.
We don’t want at the Lambeth Conference to be creating a lot of new rules but we do obviously need to strengthen our relationships and we need to put those relationships on another footing, slightly firmer footing, where we have promised to one another that this is how we will conduct our life together. And it is in that light that at this year we are discussing together the proposal for what we are calling a covenant between the Anglican Churches of the world. A covenant. A relationship of promise. We undertake that this is how we will relate to one another; that when these problems occur, that this is how we will handle them together, that this is how advice will be given and shared and that this is how decisions and discernment can be taken forward.
That is a very a big part of what we will be looking at this year but it is not everything because no covenant, no arrangement of that sort is worth the paper it is written on if it doesn't grow out of the relationships that are built as people pray together and share their lives together over tow and a half weeks. And to try and underline, we have also decided that this year we are going to begin the Lambeth Conference with a couple of days of retreat, of quiet prayer and reflection. There will be addresses. There will be a lot of open space and open time where people can just be alone with God, to think deeply about what they want from the conference and perhaps have the opportunity to talk quietly with one of two others about their hopes and fears.
What I would really most like to see in this years Lambeth Conference is the sense that this is essentially a spiritual encounter. A time when people are encountering God as they encounter one another, a time when people will feel that their life of prayer and witness is being deepened and their resources are being stretched. Not a time when we are being besieged by problems that need to be solved and statements that need to be finalised, but a time when people feel that they are growing in their ministry.
And for that to happen once again, we are going to need the prayers and the support of so many people around the world… So please pray for the Conference and please share in that process of preparation, that reflection of God's word in the Gospel of John that will open up to us the horizons that we need in order to be better Bishops for the sake of a better Church. Bishops who are more deeply bound together in Christian fellowship so that their Churches may be more deeply bound in Christian fellowship; Churches that are bound deeper in fellowship so that they can witness more effectively, more convincingly, more transformingly in the world around.
The full text of the letter is available from Ruth Gledhill at Timesonline here.
America’s Role in Haiti’s Hunger Riots
Here is a shocking article about the current crisis in Haiti and some of the long-term conditions that underlie it, that appeared on truthout earlier this week:
Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?
In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries, to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The US has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.
Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. “Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice’. The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, US subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid’, flooded the market. There was violence ... ‘rice wars’, and lives were lost.”
“American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.
The Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees. “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”
Still, the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for US assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the US, the IMF and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more. But Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere; what reason could the US have for destroying the rice market of this tiny country?
Haiti is definitely poor. The US Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400. The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78. Over 78 percent of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day. Yet, Haiti has become one of the top importers of rice from the United States. The US Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third-largest importer of US rice—at over 240,000 metric tons of rice. (One metric ton is 2,200 pounds).
Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the US. Rice subsidies in the US totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006. One producer alone, Riceland Foods of Stuttgart, Arkansas, received over $500 million in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the US—with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.” In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the US, there are also direct tariff barriers of three to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute—the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the US and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s.
US protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in The Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice. And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt. Paul Farmer saw it happen to the sugar growers as well. “Haiti, once the world’s largest exporter of sugar and other tropical produce to Europe, began importing even sugar—from US-controlled sugar production in the Dominican Republic and Florida. It was terrible to see Haitian farmers put out of work. All this speeded up the downward spiral that led to this month’s food riots.”
After the riots and protests, President Rene Preval of Haiti agreed to reduce the price of rice, which was selling for $51 for a 110-pound bag, to $43 dollars for the next month. No one thinks a one-month fix will do anything but delay the severe hunger pains a few weeks.
Haiti is far from alone in this crisis. The Economist reports a billion people worldwide live on $1 a day. The US-backed Voice of America reports about 850 million people were suffering from hunger worldwide before the latest round of price increases. Thirty-three countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices, World Bank President Robert Zoellick told The Wall Street Journal. When countries have many people who spend half to three-quarters of their daily income on food, “there is no margin of survival”.
In the US, people are feeling the worldwide problems at the gas pump and in the grocery. Middle-class people may cut back on extra trips or on high price cuts of meat. The number of people on food stamps in the US is at an all-time high. But in poor countries, where malnutrition and hunger were widespread before the rise in prices, there is nothing to cut back on except eating. That leads to hunger riots.
In the short term, the world community is sending bags of rice to Haiti. Venezuela sent 350 tons of food. The US just pledged $200 million extra for worldwide hunger relief. The UN is committed to distributing more food.
What can be done in the medium term? The US provides much of the world’s food aid, but does it in such a way that only half of the dollars spent actually reach hungry people. US law requires that food aid be purchased from US farmers, processed and bagged in the US and shipped on US vessels—which cost 50 percent of the money allocated. A simple change in US law to allow some local purchase of commodities would feed many more people and support local farm markets.
In the long run, what is to be done? The president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who visited Haiti last week, said, “Rich countries need to reduce farm subsidies and trade barriers to allow poor countries to generate income with food exports. Either the world solves the unfair trade system, or every time there's unrest like in Haiti, we adopt emergency measures and send a little bit of food to temporarily ease hunger.”
Citizens of the US know very little about the role of their government in helping create the hunger problems in Haiti or other countries. But there is much that individuals can do. People can donate to help feed individual hungry people and participate with advocacy organizations such as Bread for the World or Oxfam to help change the US and global rules which favor the rich countries. This advocacy can help countries have a better chance to feed themselves.
Meanwhile, Merisma Jean-Claudel, a young high school graduate in Port-au-Prince, told journalist Wadner Pierre “... people can’t buy food. Gasoline prices are going up. It is very hard for us over here. The cost of living is the biggest worry for us; no peace in stomach means no peace in the mind.... I wonder if others will be able to survive the days ahead, because things are very, very hard.”
You can read it all here.
Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?
In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries, to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The US has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.
Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. “Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice’. The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, US subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid’, flooded the market. There was violence ... ‘rice wars’, and lives were lost.”
“American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.
The Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees. “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”
Still, the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for US assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the US, the IMF and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more. But Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere; what reason could the US have for destroying the rice market of this tiny country?
Haiti is definitely poor. The US Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400. The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78. Over 78 percent of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day. Yet, Haiti has become one of the top importers of rice from the United States. The US Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third-largest importer of US rice—at over 240,000 metric tons of rice. (One metric ton is 2,200 pounds).
Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the US. Rice subsidies in the US totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006. One producer alone, Riceland Foods of Stuttgart, Arkansas, received over $500 million in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the US—with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.” In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the US, there are also direct tariff barriers of three to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute—the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the US and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s.
US protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in The Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice. And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt. Paul Farmer saw it happen to the sugar growers as well. “Haiti, once the world’s largest exporter of sugar and other tropical produce to Europe, began importing even sugar—from US-controlled sugar production in the Dominican Republic and Florida. It was terrible to see Haitian farmers put out of work. All this speeded up the downward spiral that led to this month’s food riots.”
After the riots and protests, President Rene Preval of Haiti agreed to reduce the price of rice, which was selling for $51 for a 110-pound bag, to $43 dollars for the next month. No one thinks a one-month fix will do anything but delay the severe hunger pains a few weeks.
Haiti is far from alone in this crisis. The Economist reports a billion people worldwide live on $1 a day. The US-backed Voice of America reports about 850 million people were suffering from hunger worldwide before the latest round of price increases. Thirty-three countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices, World Bank President Robert Zoellick told The Wall Street Journal. When countries have many people who spend half to three-quarters of their daily income on food, “there is no margin of survival”.
In the US, people are feeling the worldwide problems at the gas pump and in the grocery. Middle-class people may cut back on extra trips or on high price cuts of meat. The number of people on food stamps in the US is at an all-time high. But in poor countries, where malnutrition and hunger were widespread before the rise in prices, there is nothing to cut back on except eating. That leads to hunger riots.
In the short term, the world community is sending bags of rice to Haiti. Venezuela sent 350 tons of food. The US just pledged $200 million extra for worldwide hunger relief. The UN is committed to distributing more food.
What can be done in the medium term? The US provides much of the world’s food aid, but does it in such a way that only half of the dollars spent actually reach hungry people. US law requires that food aid be purchased from US farmers, processed and bagged in the US and shipped on US vessels—which cost 50 percent of the money allocated. A simple change in US law to allow some local purchase of commodities would feed many more people and support local farm markets.
In the long run, what is to be done? The president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who visited Haiti last week, said, “Rich countries need to reduce farm subsidies and trade barriers to allow poor countries to generate income with food exports. Either the world solves the unfair trade system, or every time there's unrest like in Haiti, we adopt emergency measures and send a little bit of food to temporarily ease hunger.”
Citizens of the US know very little about the role of their government in helping create the hunger problems in Haiti or other countries. But there is much that individuals can do. People can donate to help feed individual hungry people and participate with advocacy organizations such as Bread for the World or Oxfam to help change the US and global rules which favor the rich countries. This advocacy can help countries have a better chance to feed themselves.
Meanwhile, Merisma Jean-Claudel, a young high school graduate in Port-au-Prince, told journalist Wadner Pierre “... people can’t buy food. Gasoline prices are going up. It is very hard for us over here. The cost of living is the biggest worry for us; no peace in stomach means no peace in the mind.... I wonder if others will be able to survive the days ahead, because things are very, very hard.”
You can read it all here.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
London Times Cryptic Crossword for April 20
My apologies for my lateness in posting Sunday’s crossword. I was away in Winnipeg for a conference for the last few days. As usual, just click on the image to the right to get the full-sized, printable version.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
From the Pope’s New York address…
From the Catholic News Service, here is an excerpt from the prepared text of Pope Benedict XVI’s address to the ecumenical gathering in New York City on 18 April:
Too often those who are not Christians, as they observe the splintering of Christian communities, are understandably confused about the Gospel message itself. Fundamental Christian beliefs and practices are sometimes changed within communities by so-called “prophetic actions” that are based on a hermeneutic not always consonant with the datum of Scripture and Tradition. Communities consequently give up the attempt to act as a unified body, choosing instead to function according to the idea of “local options”. Somewhere in this process the need for diachronic koinonia—communion with the Church in every age—is lost, just at the time when the world is losing its bearings and needs a persuasive common witness to the saving power of the Gospel (cf. Rom 1:18-23).
Faced with these difficulties, we must first recall that the unity of the Church flows from the perfect oneness of the Trinitarian God. In John’s Gospel, we are told that Jesus prayed to his Father that his disciples might be one, “just as you are in me and I am in you” (Jn 17:21). This passage reflects the unwavering conviction of the early Christian community that its unity was both caused by, and is reflective of, the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This, in turn, suggests that the internal cohesion of believers was based on the sound integrity of their doctrinal confession (cf. 1 Tim 1:3-11). Throughout the New Testament, we find that the Apostles were repeatedly called to give an account for their faith to both Gentiles (cf. Acts 17:16-34) and Jews (cf. Acts 4:5-22; 5:27-42). The core of their argument was always the historical fact of Jesus’s bodily resurrection from the tomb (Acts 2:24, 32; 3:15; 4:10; 5:30; 10:40; 13:30). The ultimate effectiveness of their preaching did not depend on “lofty words” or “human wisdom” (1 Cor 2:13), but rather on the work of the Spirit (Eph 3:5) who confirmed the authoritative witness of the Apostles (cf. 1 Cor 15:1-11). The nucleus of Paul’s preaching and that of the early Church was none other than Jesus Christ, and “him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). But this proclamation had to be guaranteed by the purity of normative doctrine expressed in creedal formulae - symbola - which articulated the essence of the Christian faith and constituted the foundation for the unity of the baptized (cf. 1 Cor 15:3-5; Gal 1:6-9; Unitatis Redintegratio, 2).
My dear friends, the power of the kerygma has lost none of its internal dynamism. Yet we must ask ourselves whether its full force has not been attenuated by a relativistic approach to Christian doctrine similar to that found in secular ideologies, which, in alleging that science alone is “objective”, relegate religion entirely to the subjective sphere of individual feeling. Scientific discoveries, and their application through human ingenuity, undoubtedly offer new possibilities for the betterment of humankind. This does not mean, however, that the “knowable” is limited to the empirically verifiable, nor religion restricted to the shifting realm of “personal experience”.
For Christians to accept this faulty line of reasoning would lead to the notion that there is little need to emphasize objective truth in the presentation of the Christian faith, for one need but follow his or her own conscience and choose a community that best suits his or her individual tastes. The result is seen in the continual proliferation of communities which often eschew institutional structures and minimize the importance of doctrinal content for Christian living.
Even within the ecumenical movement, Christians may be reluctant to assert the role of doctrine for fear that it would only exacerbate rather than heal the wounds of division. Yet a clear, convincing testimony to the salvation wrought for us in Christ Jesus has to be based upon the notion of normative apostolic teaching: a teaching which indeed underlies the inspired word of God and sustains the sacramental life of Christians today.
Only by “holding fast” to sound teaching (2 Thess 2:15; cf. Rev 2:12-29) will we be able to respond to the challenges that confront us in an evolving world. Only in this way will we give unambiguous testimony to the truth of the Gospel and its moral teaching. This is the message which the world is waiting to hear from us. Like the early Christians, we have a responsibility to give transparent witness to the “reasons for our hope”, so that the eyes of all men and women of goodwill may be opened to see that God has shown us his face (cf. 2 Cor 3:12-18) and granted us access to his divine life through Jesus Christ. He alone is our hope! God has revealed his love for all peoples through the mystery of his Son’s passion and death, and has called us to proclaim that he is indeed risen, has taken his place at the right hand of the Father, and “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead” (Nicene Creed).
May the word of God we have heard this evening inflame our hearts with hope on the path to unity (cf. Lk 24:32). May this prayer service exemplify the centrality of prayer in the ecumenical movement (cf. Unitatis Redintegratio, 8); for without it, ecumenical structures, institutions and programs would be deprived of their heart and soul. Let us give thanks to Almighty God for the progress that has been made through the work of his Spirit, as we acknowledge with gratitude the personal sacrifices made by so many present and by those who have gone before us.
By following in their footsteps, and by placing our trust in God alone, I am confident that—to borrow the words of Father Paul Wattson—we will achieve the “oneness of hope, oneness of faith, and oneness of love” that alone will convince the world that Jesus Christ is the one sent by the Father for the salvation of all.
This is sound and solid counsel for the church today. If our life and witness are to have power and cogency, it will only be as we adhere to the core of “the faith once delivered”: salvation through Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary, sacrificed for our sins, and risen victorious over death. The entire text is here.
Too often those who are not Christians, as they observe the splintering of Christian communities, are understandably confused about the Gospel message itself. Fundamental Christian beliefs and practices are sometimes changed within communities by so-called “prophetic actions” that are based on a hermeneutic not always consonant with the datum of Scripture and Tradition. Communities consequently give up the attempt to act as a unified body, choosing instead to function according to the idea of “local options”. Somewhere in this process the need for diachronic koinonia—communion with the Church in every age—is lost, just at the time when the world is losing its bearings and needs a persuasive common witness to the saving power of the Gospel (cf. Rom 1:18-23).
Faced with these difficulties, we must first recall that the unity of the Church flows from the perfect oneness of the Trinitarian God. In John’s Gospel, we are told that Jesus prayed to his Father that his disciples might be one, “just as you are in me and I am in you” (Jn 17:21). This passage reflects the unwavering conviction of the early Christian community that its unity was both caused by, and is reflective of, the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This, in turn, suggests that the internal cohesion of believers was based on the sound integrity of their doctrinal confession (cf. 1 Tim 1:3-11). Throughout the New Testament, we find that the Apostles were repeatedly called to give an account for their faith to both Gentiles (cf. Acts 17:16-34) and Jews (cf. Acts 4:5-22; 5:27-42). The core of their argument was always the historical fact of Jesus’s bodily resurrection from the tomb (Acts 2:24, 32; 3:15; 4:10; 5:30; 10:40; 13:30). The ultimate effectiveness of their preaching did not depend on “lofty words” or “human wisdom” (1 Cor 2:13), but rather on the work of the Spirit (Eph 3:5) who confirmed the authoritative witness of the Apostles (cf. 1 Cor 15:1-11). The nucleus of Paul’s preaching and that of the early Church was none other than Jesus Christ, and “him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). But this proclamation had to be guaranteed by the purity of normative doctrine expressed in creedal formulae - symbola - which articulated the essence of the Christian faith and constituted the foundation for the unity of the baptized (cf. 1 Cor 15:3-5; Gal 1:6-9; Unitatis Redintegratio, 2).
My dear friends, the power of the kerygma has lost none of its internal dynamism. Yet we must ask ourselves whether its full force has not been attenuated by a relativistic approach to Christian doctrine similar to that found in secular ideologies, which, in alleging that science alone is “objective”, relegate religion entirely to the subjective sphere of individual feeling. Scientific discoveries, and their application through human ingenuity, undoubtedly offer new possibilities for the betterment of humankind. This does not mean, however, that the “knowable” is limited to the empirically verifiable, nor religion restricted to the shifting realm of “personal experience”.
For Christians to accept this faulty line of reasoning would lead to the notion that there is little need to emphasize objective truth in the presentation of the Christian faith, for one need but follow his or her own conscience and choose a community that best suits his or her individual tastes. The result is seen in the continual proliferation of communities which often eschew institutional structures and minimize the importance of doctrinal content for Christian living.
Even within the ecumenical movement, Christians may be reluctant to assert the role of doctrine for fear that it would only exacerbate rather than heal the wounds of division. Yet a clear, convincing testimony to the salvation wrought for us in Christ Jesus has to be based upon the notion of normative apostolic teaching: a teaching which indeed underlies the inspired word of God and sustains the sacramental life of Christians today.
Only by “holding fast” to sound teaching (2 Thess 2:15; cf. Rev 2:12-29) will we be able to respond to the challenges that confront us in an evolving world. Only in this way will we give unambiguous testimony to the truth of the Gospel and its moral teaching. This is the message which the world is waiting to hear from us. Like the early Christians, we have a responsibility to give transparent witness to the “reasons for our hope”, so that the eyes of all men and women of goodwill may be opened to see that God has shown us his face (cf. 2 Cor 3:12-18) and granted us access to his divine life through Jesus Christ. He alone is our hope! God has revealed his love for all peoples through the mystery of his Son’s passion and death, and has called us to proclaim that he is indeed risen, has taken his place at the right hand of the Father, and “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead” (Nicene Creed).
May the word of God we have heard this evening inflame our hearts with hope on the path to unity (cf. Lk 24:32). May this prayer service exemplify the centrality of prayer in the ecumenical movement (cf. Unitatis Redintegratio, 8); for without it, ecumenical structures, institutions and programs would be deprived of their heart and soul. Let us give thanks to Almighty God for the progress that has been made through the work of his Spirit, as we acknowledge with gratitude the personal sacrifices made by so many present and by those who have gone before us.
By following in their footsteps, and by placing our trust in God alone, I am confident that—to borrow the words of Father Paul Wattson—we will achieve the “oneness of hope, oneness of faith, and oneness of love” that alone will convince the world that Jesus Christ is the one sent by the Father for the salvation of all.
This is sound and solid counsel for the church today. If our life and witness are to have power and cogency, it will only be as we adhere to the core of “the faith once delivered”: salvation through Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary, sacrificed for our sins, and risen victorious over death. The entire text is here.
Friday, April 18, 2008
New ultimatum to Lambeth bishops
There has been much talk since Bishop Tom Wright referred last week to the contents of a letter that the Archbishop of Canterbury was sending to the bishops of the Anglican Communion in preparation for the Lambeth Conference. Since then rumors, speculation and denials have been flying back and forth. But here is the latest, from George Conger, and published in the Church of England Newspaper.
Bishops attending the Lambeth Conference will be asked to affirm their willingness to abide by the recommendations of the Windsor Report and work towards the creation of an Anglican Communion Covenant.
A spokesman for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams told The Church of England Newspaper that letters affirming support for Windsor and the Covenant process had not yet been mailed, but would go out presently.
Bishops attending Lambeth must have a “willingness to work with those aspects of the [Lambeth] Conference’s agenda that relate to implementing the recommendations of [the Windsor Report], including the development of a Covenant,” Dr. Williams wrote in his Dec. 14 Advent pastoral letter.
The Windsor Report calls for a ban on gay bishops and blessings and discouraged violating the diocesan boundaries of bishops in opposing theological camps. Affirming the recommendations of the Windsor Report may cause difficulty for US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and other progressive American, Canadian, Brazilian and British bishops who have given either their formal or informal support to moves to normalize homosexuality within the life of the church. It also closes the door on full participation in the conference of the Bishop of New Hampshire, the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson.
Overseas primates who have backed the violation of diocesan boundaries by African-consecrated American missionary bishops, could also fall afoul of Dr. Williams’ dictate. However, as the principal provinces backing overseas missionary bishops—Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda—will not be at Lambeth, the warning is a “moot point”, one overseas primate told The Church of England Newspaper.
Approximately 600 of the Communion’s 716 diocesan and 171 suffragan and assistant bishops have stated they would attend Lambeth, and more responses are expected to arrive in the coming weeks, a member of the conference team said.
You can find the whole article here. I expect it will not be too long before the actual text of the letter is made public.
Bishops attending the Lambeth Conference will be asked to affirm their willingness to abide by the recommendations of the Windsor Report and work towards the creation of an Anglican Communion Covenant.
A spokesman for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams told The Church of England Newspaper that letters affirming support for Windsor and the Covenant process had not yet been mailed, but would go out presently.
Bishops attending Lambeth must have a “willingness to work with those aspects of the [Lambeth] Conference’s agenda that relate to implementing the recommendations of [the Windsor Report], including the development of a Covenant,” Dr. Williams wrote in his Dec. 14 Advent pastoral letter.
The Windsor Report calls for a ban on gay bishops and blessings and discouraged violating the diocesan boundaries of bishops in opposing theological camps. Affirming the recommendations of the Windsor Report may cause difficulty for US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and other progressive American, Canadian, Brazilian and British bishops who have given either their formal or informal support to moves to normalize homosexuality within the life of the church. It also closes the door on full participation in the conference of the Bishop of New Hampshire, the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson.
Overseas primates who have backed the violation of diocesan boundaries by African-consecrated American missionary bishops, could also fall afoul of Dr. Williams’ dictate. However, as the principal provinces backing overseas missionary bishops—Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda—will not be at Lambeth, the warning is a “moot point”, one overseas primate told The Church of England Newspaper.
Approximately 600 of the Communion’s 716 diocesan and 171 suffragan and assistant bishops have stated they would attend Lambeth, and more responses are expected to arrive in the coming weeks, a member of the conference team said.
You can find the whole article here. I expect it will not be too long before the actual text of the letter is made public.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Conflict and Covenant in the Communion
Here are the concluding remarks in a paper which Andrew Goddard presented at last week’s Fulcrum conference in London.
There are, of course, all sorts of questions about the value and likely effectiveness of this current and very recent proposal. But what it is seeking is I think, unquestionably, what we need. Conflict is a reality at every level of the church. As we have seen it is not always wrong—it can be justified when matters of truth and integrity are at stake. If our conflicts are set in the context of an explicit covenant then we may be able to avoid at least some of the horrors we now know can arise. If we can agree the boundaries of faithful Anglicanism. If we can establish procedures by which we will address future conflicts about actions that transgress them and threaten our unity and mission. Then we will have gained a pearl of great price as a result of the conflicts of recent years. That indeed is a goal worth making great sacrifices for.
If, however, we let the conflict continue to escalate and serious and long-term fractures result we face a scandalous nightmare scenario of serious division probably at every level of Communion life. I began with a quote from Butterfield about conflict in church choirs. Another famous quote from him described the post-World War Two, Cold War situation. It is a scenario we perhaps need to beware of finding ourselves in as Anglicans just as divided Christians have found themselves in it in the past:
The greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness—each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked—each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.
I don’t believe we are there yet, thankfully. However, you don’t have to read many blogs to realise some people are pretty close and it may be where we are headed. The only antidote to that threat and to our current conflict is ultimately of course the gospel. The gospel of reconciliation. The gospel which leads to a pattern of life that does not deny or avoid conflict but sets it in the context of covenantal commitment to Christ whose conflict with sin led him to the cross and the new covenant in his blood. The gospel which is lived out in obedience to Paul’s exhortation to the Ephesians:
As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
You can read the whole of this excellent paper here.
There are, of course, all sorts of questions about the value and likely effectiveness of this current and very recent proposal. But what it is seeking is I think, unquestionably, what we need. Conflict is a reality at every level of the church. As we have seen it is not always wrong—it can be justified when matters of truth and integrity are at stake. If our conflicts are set in the context of an explicit covenant then we may be able to avoid at least some of the horrors we now know can arise. If we can agree the boundaries of faithful Anglicanism. If we can establish procedures by which we will address future conflicts about actions that transgress them and threaten our unity and mission. Then we will have gained a pearl of great price as a result of the conflicts of recent years. That indeed is a goal worth making great sacrifices for.
If, however, we let the conflict continue to escalate and serious and long-term fractures result we face a scandalous nightmare scenario of serious division probably at every level of Communion life. I began with a quote from Butterfield about conflict in church choirs. Another famous quote from him described the post-World War Two, Cold War situation. It is a scenario we perhaps need to beware of finding ourselves in as Anglicans just as divided Christians have found themselves in it in the past:
The greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness—each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked—each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.
I don’t believe we are there yet, thankfully. However, you don’t have to read many blogs to realise some people are pretty close and it may be where we are headed. The only antidote to that threat and to our current conflict is ultimately of course the gospel. The gospel of reconciliation. The gospel which leads to a pattern of life that does not deny or avoid conflict but sets it in the context of covenantal commitment to Christ whose conflict with sin led him to the cross and the new covenant in his blood. The gospel which is lived out in obedience to Paul’s exhortation to the Ephesians:
As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
You can read the whole of this excellent paper here.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Anglican covenant conference draws international group, elicits varied viewpoints
From the Episcopal News Service:
Participants at the recent “An Anglican Covenant: Divisive or Reconciling?” conference, held at the Desmond Tutu Center in New York City, gathered to discuss whether or not the Anglican Communion should adopt an official covenant.
The conference opened with the Most Rev. Drexel W. Gomez, Archbishop of the West Indies and Bishop of the Diocese of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. In delivering the first of three keynote addresses Gomez, chairman of the Covenant Design Group, presented a decidedly, pro-Anglican covenant message, saying that this is a “time of great tension” within the Anglican Communion and that “the ‘bonds of affection’ which once held our fellowship together are strained; indeed some would say broken.” …
Referencing Anglican polity and the Windsor Report, Gomez said that in the three years since the release of the Windsor Report, positions across the Communion have “polarized” and there is “less trust” between parties and provinces than there has been for a long time. “Everyone claims to be the defender of the true spirit of Anglicanism, and to describe that spirit as orthodox, mainstream, comprehensive or inclusive,” he said. “The language has become more strident, and, quite frankly, scaremongering is commonplace.” He said in a situation which is becoming “increasingly overheated” we need to hear “a voice of calm”.
We need to identify the fundamentals that we share in common, and to “state the common basis on which our mutual trust can be rebuilt”. Stating that as “essentially all that the covenant proposal is—no more and no less,” Gomez clarified that it is not intended to define some sort of “new Anglicanism”, or invent a new model of authority, or “peddle a narrow or exclusive view of what Anglicanism is”. “It is intended to state concisely and clearly the faith that we have all inherited together, so that there can be a new confidence that we are about the same mission,” he said…
The draft covenant produced by the Covenant Design Group, Gomez said, does not seek to address the particular circumstances of any one conflict, neither of the current presenting issue of human sexuality; it does not revisit controversies of the past, nor is it trying to anticipate which problems may arise in the future. “Rather, it seeks to set out the basis on which fellowship can be maintained, and to give some substance in hard concrete terms of the sort of processes which can be expected in a family of autonomous churches to enable the churches to offer mutual admonition to one another as they hold each other mutually accountable,” he explained.
The covenant proposal, Gomez said, challenges every member church of the Anglican Communion to answer the following question: “Are you willing to engage with a process which seeks to find a common basis for the Provinces of the Anglican Communion to move forward together as a Communion? A positive answer would declare that we have a future together as we explore what holds us together; as we covenant to walk in a shared faith and a shared hope—in communion as surely God intends us to be. I assure you that we in the Province of the West Indies firmly support the covenant proposal.”
You can find the whole article here. The Living Church offers further coverage of the conference here and here.
Participants at the recent “An Anglican Covenant: Divisive or Reconciling?” conference, held at the Desmond Tutu Center in New York City, gathered to discuss whether or not the Anglican Communion should adopt an official covenant.
The conference opened with the Most Rev. Drexel W. Gomez, Archbishop of the West Indies and Bishop of the Diocese of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. In delivering the first of three keynote addresses Gomez, chairman of the Covenant Design Group, presented a decidedly, pro-Anglican covenant message, saying that this is a “time of great tension” within the Anglican Communion and that “the ‘bonds of affection’ which once held our fellowship together are strained; indeed some would say broken.” …
Referencing Anglican polity and the Windsor Report, Gomez said that in the three years since the release of the Windsor Report, positions across the Communion have “polarized” and there is “less trust” between parties and provinces than there has been for a long time. “Everyone claims to be the defender of the true spirit of Anglicanism, and to describe that spirit as orthodox, mainstream, comprehensive or inclusive,” he said. “The language has become more strident, and, quite frankly, scaremongering is commonplace.” He said in a situation which is becoming “increasingly overheated” we need to hear “a voice of calm”.
We need to identify the fundamentals that we share in common, and to “state the common basis on which our mutual trust can be rebuilt”. Stating that as “essentially all that the covenant proposal is—no more and no less,” Gomez clarified that it is not intended to define some sort of “new Anglicanism”, or invent a new model of authority, or “peddle a narrow or exclusive view of what Anglicanism is”. “It is intended to state concisely and clearly the faith that we have all inherited together, so that there can be a new confidence that we are about the same mission,” he said…
The draft covenant produced by the Covenant Design Group, Gomez said, does not seek to address the particular circumstances of any one conflict, neither of the current presenting issue of human sexuality; it does not revisit controversies of the past, nor is it trying to anticipate which problems may arise in the future. “Rather, it seeks to set out the basis on which fellowship can be maintained, and to give some substance in hard concrete terms of the sort of processes which can be expected in a family of autonomous churches to enable the churches to offer mutual admonition to one another as they hold each other mutually accountable,” he explained.
The covenant proposal, Gomez said, challenges every member church of the Anglican Communion to answer the following question: “Are you willing to engage with a process which seeks to find a common basis for the Provinces of the Anglican Communion to move forward together as a Communion? A positive answer would declare that we have a future together as we explore what holds us together; as we covenant to walk in a shared faith and a shared hope—in communion as surely God intends us to be. I assure you that we in the Province of the West Indies firmly support the covenant proposal.”
You can find the whole article here. The Living Church offers further coverage of the conference here and here.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Bringing food to Haiti and wisdom home
From South Coast Today (Massachusetts):
The missionary group from Nazarene Christian Academy was lucky to get home alive. Temporarily isolated by the violent protests in Port-au-Prince over high food prices, the group eventually made its way safely to the airport and returned to Dartmouth. But yesterday, two days after their return, the fatal shooting of a United Nations peacekeeper from Nigeria proved the danger wasn’t over.
Even before the outbreak of unrest earlier this month, traveling in Haiti was risky. Since the beginning of the year, 13 Americans have been kidnapped in the impoverished nation that shares an island with the Dominican Republic. And the risk isn’t new; last year, the number of Americans reported kidnapped reached 29. The U.S. State Department’s travel warning says the kidnappings are marked by shootings, deaths and “brutal” physical and sexual assault.
Under those conditions, what parent would allow a son or daughter to travel there? Some will find the idea unimaginable, and with good reason. But the parents of the Nazarene students — including the Rev. Jon Helm, who brought his own teenage daughter — felt differently. At least before the rioting, the risk seemed manageable if the students would be chaperoned by the Rev. Helm, who had experience in the country from previous trips.
The group of 16, which included not only high-school seniors but college students and teachers, put their fears aside to work, in an expression of their faith, with destitute human beings in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation. Eighty percent of Haitians live below the poverty line, 54 percent of them suffering in “abject poverty”, according to a CIA profile.
And abject poverty is precisely what the Nazarene group witnessed. They saw unsanitary living conditions and children running barefoot with open sores. But the missionaries didn’t stop at bringing clothes, food and toys. They sat down with the people. They cleaned and bandaged wounds — something most Americans would recoil from doing for a homeless person in their own city.
Their charitable work sets an example of compassion and service that more Americans should follow, either at home or abroad. Ministering to the people of a troubled nation takes courage. In this case, the presence of local missionaries in Haiti during the food-price protests added another dimension to their service, because it raised awareness of the upward turn in urban hunger in poor nations worldwide.
I have included this article because for some months a group of Messiah parishioners have been planning a week-long trip to visit our longstanding Mission Partners in Léogane, Haiti. With the recent upsurge in violence and warnings from the State Department, it looks as though the trip will have to be postponed. You can see and hear a photo documentary from the Miami Herald here.
The missionary group from Nazarene Christian Academy was lucky to get home alive. Temporarily isolated by the violent protests in Port-au-Prince over high food prices, the group eventually made its way safely to the airport and returned to Dartmouth. But yesterday, two days after their return, the fatal shooting of a United Nations peacekeeper from Nigeria proved the danger wasn’t over.
Even before the outbreak of unrest earlier this month, traveling in Haiti was risky. Since the beginning of the year, 13 Americans have been kidnapped in the impoverished nation that shares an island with the Dominican Republic. And the risk isn’t new; last year, the number of Americans reported kidnapped reached 29. The U.S. State Department’s travel warning says the kidnappings are marked by shootings, deaths and “brutal” physical and sexual assault.
Under those conditions, what parent would allow a son or daughter to travel there? Some will find the idea unimaginable, and with good reason. But the parents of the Nazarene students — including the Rev. Jon Helm, who brought his own teenage daughter — felt differently. At least before the rioting, the risk seemed manageable if the students would be chaperoned by the Rev. Helm, who had experience in the country from previous trips.
The group of 16, which included not only high-school seniors but college students and teachers, put their fears aside to work, in an expression of their faith, with destitute human beings in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation. Eighty percent of Haitians live below the poverty line, 54 percent of them suffering in “abject poverty”, according to a CIA profile.
And abject poverty is precisely what the Nazarene group witnessed. They saw unsanitary living conditions and children running barefoot with open sores. But the missionaries didn’t stop at bringing clothes, food and toys. They sat down with the people. They cleaned and bandaged wounds — something most Americans would recoil from doing for a homeless person in their own city.
Their charitable work sets an example of compassion and service that more Americans should follow, either at home or abroad. Ministering to the people of a troubled nation takes courage. In this case, the presence of local missionaries in Haiti during the food-price protests added another dimension to their service, because it raised awareness of the upward turn in urban hunger in poor nations worldwide.
I have included this article because for some months a group of Messiah parishioners have been planning a week-long trip to visit our longstanding Mission Partners in Léogane, Haiti. With the recent upsurge in violence and warnings from the State Department, it looks as though the trip will have to be postponed. You can see and hear a photo documentary from the Miami Herald here.
Growing and coping in Sudan
This article from the Anglican Journal (Canada) gives a picture of how difficult life still is for Christians in Sudan. And yet the church grows…
It is mid-morning on a Sunday in late March. The hot, equatorial sun is already warming up the day and still, an hour before the church service begins, the songs of praise are already rising above the enormous tree that provides shade to the hundreds of worshippers gathered below…
Despite the challenges of everyday life in Sudan, the church – as it is in many parts of Africa – is growing. But churches in Sudan say they must contend not only with a nation that is rebuilding after two decades of civil war, but also with the presence (and growth) of Islam. Churches also complain of rumoured conversions to Islam based on inducements of scholarships, money and material goods.
In south Sudan, in the Episcopal (Anglican) Church of Sudan (ECS), the diocese of Rumbek (with the help of the American evangelical organization Samaritan’s Purse) recently opened 10 churches in one month.
Where buildings do not exist, the church meets under trees. Simple head counts are done each Sunday and gatherings of 1,500 people or more are common at the Dinka-language service in the city of Rumbek, the capital of Lakes State, said Rev. Elijah Magel, a priest in the diocese. A remarkable 5,400 faithful attended the outdoor Easter Sunday service…
Christians face ever-present restrictions in practising their faith in the predominantly Muslim/Arab area of northern Sudan, said Ezekiel Kondo, bishop of Khartoum, one of the biggest ECS dioceses . While the nation’s comprehensive peace agreement, signed in 2005, provides for freedom of religion for all Sudanese, in reality there are still obstacles.
“We have little freedom,” said Bishop Kondo, whose diocese is home to many southern Sudanese who fled to Khartoum during the civil war. The Mothers’ Union is active in his diocese and he has 150 clergy and assorted evangelists to minister to the worshippers in about 50 churches; the Episcopal Church claims about 1.5 million members throughout Sudan…
Under these conditions, evangelism is not just difficult; it can be dangerous. One Muslim man lost his marriage and his job when he converted to Christianity, said the bishop; the Episcopal church gave him a home and eventually helped him relocate to the Netherlands.
“It is hard for Arabs to become Christians,” said Bishop Kondo. “We can be suspicious and think that the ‘converts’ might be spies for the government. We never know if they are genuine.”
The bishop was speaking in Juba at a conference that gathered four international, ecumenical delegations from the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC); the four groups had earlier fanned out across Sudan, Africa’s largest country, as part of a solidarity visit to churches and ecumenical organizations. Bishop Kondo warned the gathering that if the semi-autonomous south Sudan votes in a 2011 referendum for independence from the north, the Christian churches in the north will be even further marginalized. They could even disappear.
“How do we safeguard the church in northern Sudan if the country splits in three years?” Bishop Kondo asked.
Christians in the north experience additional hardships. Bishop Kondo noted that the Arab government is known to expropriate church land and buildings when it deems necessary. The Episcopal Church lost its headquarters (later returned) and a hospital when the government claimed that the leases had expired. The diocese also lost its original cathedral building in 1971; the structure is now a museum. While the diocese was partially compensated, the amount was not enough to replace what it had lost.
And, more recently, last November, on the land that belongs to Khartoum’s only Christian cemetery, the churches discovered that merchants had set up shop – first selling livestock, then second-hand cars. Despite church protests, the government has so far failed to act in the matter.
You can read it all here. Please pray for Messiah’s parishioners in Khartoum, Andy & Kimber Iverson and their children Amana & Caleb.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Conflict and Covenant in the Bible
These are the concluding paragraphs of a paper Bishop Tom Wright presented at the recent Fulcrum Conference in Islington, London:
Covenant and Corinth: Phase One
Ever since it became clear in summer 2003 that the Episcopal Church in the United States was likely both to make Gene Robinson a bishop and to authorize public rites of same-sex blessings, there have naturally been groups who wanted someone, probably the Archbishop of Canterbury or, failing that, the Primates as a whole, to write the equivalent of 1 Corinthians, putting the Americans and others straight with some clear teaching on what is acceptable and what is not. Many, indeed, hoped that the Windsor Report would contain that sort of teaching, and were disappointed when it didn’t. But this was always a misunderstanding. The whole point of having the Lambeth Commission in the first place—forgive me reminding you of this but I find people keep on forgetting—was that Lambeth, the ACC, the Primates and Canterbury had already made the position abundantly clear, and the Americans had chosen to go their own way. If they did not hear Lambeth and the Primates, neither would they have been convinced even if Robin Eames should write another report.
But what Windsor did, of course, was another part of the classic 1 Corinthians material: not giving ethical instruction, but articulating the principle of adiaphora. The question is, which differences make a difference and which don't, how d’you tell, and who says? 1 Corinthians gives, of course, some pretty sharp examples of differences which do make a difference (incest, greed in business, etc.) and of differences which don't (especially dietary laws and customs), and of what to do with the latter (don’t force them on people, and don’t offend someone by presuming on your liberty when their conscience is at risk). What's more, as I argued some years ago, the so-called ‘New Perspective on Paul’ has enabled us to see more clearly why some things are adiaphora and others are not: the things which are adiaphora are those things which would otherwise have come between Jews and Gentiles. It isn't the case, as some low-grade would-be exegesis has sometimes suggested, that Paul simply chopped and changed biblical standards (e.g. circumcision) when he felt like it or for merely pragmatic reasons. This needs to be explored further, but not here. The point is that 1 Corinthians gives a wonderful, classic exposition of Christian love (chapter 13) at the heart of a whole section about the nature of the church in which it is abundantly clear that the multiplicity of gifts, and for that matter cultures, in the church are to be held together in a larger order corresponding to the God-given order of the human body. Clearly, this offers a model for unity and holiness with plenty of room for local variation and no room at all for unholiness—begging the question, of course, as what constitutes holiness and how you might tell.
But to live with 1 Corinthians invites the progression to 2 Corinthians, and that is of course exactly what has happened, and is happening as we speak. This brings me to the last main section of this lecture.
Covenant and Corinth: Phase Two
Many things about 2 Corinthians are exegetically controversial, but nobody would deny that it is the most heart-wrenchingly human letter of Paul that we possess. Not only does he wear his heart on his sleeve, wounds and all, but he actually says he's doing so (6.11). And the reason for this is not far to seek: the Corinthian church, or most of them anyway, have rejected him, choosing to go with others whom he darkly terms ‘super-apostles’ or other less complimentary terms (I am parking one of the many controversies here). The church has made it clear to Paul that if he wants to come back to Corinth he’ll have to prove himself, have to present his credentials, have to obtain ‘letters of recommendation’! In other words, the main theological question of the letter highlights a deep personal problem: the very apostolic authority which enabled Paul to do what he did was being called into question, and he had to find a way of reasserting it, and that at a time when for other reasons he had been at the lowest ebb of his life. Having suffered in Ephesus something like a nervous breakdown (see 1.8f.), quite probably as part of the strong local opposition to his message, he now finds that having faced the pagan hordes he has to face the shiny, successful Christian hordes, and he may well wonder which is worse. At least the pagans aren't supposed to be your friends!
Time forbids full treatment, but let me sketch some features of this ‘2 Corinthians moment’, which is I believe where we are right now in the Anglican Communion. We haven't had much of a formal ‘authority structure’, just as Paul didn’t. Things were assumed as the mission grew; it was clear who the leader was and things could go forward from there. When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians he was in the position that the Anglican Communion thought it was in until 2003: though we didn't have a formal legal or constitutional position, we all more or less knew how things stood, and an appeal to the Apostle in the first century, or to Lambeth in the twentieth, more or less clinched things. But now it had all gone pear-shaped. Pagan behaviour to the left, and ultra-Christian heroism to the right, had left Paul having fought the battles on the one hand only to appear outflanked on the other. What was his answer? Four things, briefly, all within the context of some brilliant as well as deeply personal writing, including some of the cleverest and actually funniest irony anywhere in scripture.
First and foremost, Paul argues for the nature of apostolic authority, rooted and grounded in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The 'super-apostles' appear to want Christian leadership to be a matter of heroism, of people who are above suffering, whose testimony to the power of God is clear and bright, unsullied with moments of pain or despair. That actually conforms only too well to a different aspect of pagan culture, the culture of success, of an essentially imperial model of human flourishing (Corinth prided itself on being 'more Roman than Rome'), of a way of being Christian which had left the cross behind. And Paul will have none of it. For him, the cross is not simply the salvific event, a moment in the past which, its work done, can then be put behind the apostle as he goes forward from glory to glory. That latter phrase, at the end of 2 Corinthians 3, is deeply ironic, because the glory is seen precisely in the suffering, as chapters 4 and 6 make clear. The point is this: apostolic authority is rooted not only in the proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but also in the living out of that death and resurrection - which Paul, clearly, had done, and which, we are left to infer, the super-apostles had not. And, at the heart of it all, Paul embraced and celebrated the shame of the cross, so offensive to those who wanted their Christian faith to be cut and dried and clean and shiny (and conforming to the culture of imperial success), and so essential to genuine apostleship. This is the point of Paul's spectacular piece of inverted boasting in chapters 11 and 12, where he boasts of all the wrong things, like someone today producing a curriculum vitae of the jobs they didn't get and the books they didn't write, or perhaps someone writing a family Christmas letter about failed exams, getting sacked from work, and so on, all in the tone of voice of 'what a wonderful year we've had'. Applied to our current situation, I believe we need to ponder very seriously the notions of human and Christian flourishing that we sometimes take for granted, and which condition many of our ecclesial debates, and reassess them in the light of the foundation gospel events.
Second, Paul argues precisely for the establishment, under his cross-and-resurrection-shaped apostolic authority, of the new covenant. As I said earlier, this can’t of course be equated directly with any covenants we may make amongst ourselves today, but it speaks volumes that it is at this point, when he is struggling to re-establish his apostolic authority on gospel lines, that he reaches for ‘covenant’ as his key category. And, within that, membership in the covenant involves the remarkable face-to-face recognition, as in the end of chapter 3, of the glory of Jesus Christ. It is in the actual face-to-face meeting of those who recognise Jesus in one another that covenant membership is enacted, is known for what it is. This chapter should lie near the heart of all discussion of koinonia, of the nature of Christian fellowship.
Third, however, all this has come about not least because Paul has written a painful letter (2.3f.). This too is of course historically controversial: is the ‘painful letter’ 1 Corinthians itself, or is it one of the somewhat disjointed sections of 2 Corinthians itself, perhaps chapters 10-13? I am cautiously with those who think that it is a letter written between the two epistles, and now lost, but that doesn’t take away from the remarkable relevance of 2 Corinthians for our present moment. When the Archbishop issued his invitations, he made it clear as I said that their basis was Windsor and the Covenant as the tools to shape our future common life. That invitation was issued only three months after the remarkable joint statement from the Primates issued in Tanzania in February 2007. After a summer and autumn of various tangled and unsatisfactory events, the Archbishop then wrote an Advent pastoral letter in which he reiterated the terms of his initial invitation and declared that he would be writing to those bishops who might be thought particularly unsympathetic to Windsor and the Covenant to ask them whether they were really prepared to build on this dual foundation. Those letters, I understand, are in the post as we speak, written with apostolic pain and heart-searching but also with apostolic necessity. I am well aware that many will say this is far too little, far too late—just as many others will be livid to think that the Archbishop, having already not invited Gene Robinson to Lambeth, should be suggesting that some others might absent themselves as well. But this is what he promised he would do, and he is doing it. If I know anything about anything, I know that he deserves our prayers at this most difficult and fraught moment in the run-up to Lambeth itself.
Fourth, we have seen, predictably but sadly, the rise of the super-apostles, who have wanted everything to be cut and dried in ways for which our existing polity simply did not, and does not, allow. Please note, I do not for one moment underestimate the awful situation that many of our American and Canadian friends have found themselves in, vilified, attacked and undermined by ecclesiastical authority figures who seem to have lost all grip on the gospel of Jesus Christ and to be eager only for lawsuits and property squabbles. I pray daily for many friends over there who are in intolerable situations and I don’t underestimate the pressures and strains. But I do have to say, as well, that these situations have been exploited by those who have long wanted to shift the balance of power in the Anglican Communion and who have used this awful situation as an opportunity to do so. And now, just as the super-apostles were conveying the message to Paul that if he wanted to return to Corinth he'd need letters of recommendation, we are told that, if we want to go on being thought of as evangelicals, we should withdraw from Lambeth and join the super-gathering which, though not officially, is clearly designed as an alternative, and which of course hands an apparent moral victory to those who can cheerfully wave goodbye to the ‘secessionists’. I have written about this elsewhere, and it is of course a very sad situation which none of us (I trust) would wish but which seems to be worsening by the day.
Apostolic authority, covenant, painful letters and super-apostles: the parallels are not of course exact, but they are striking none the less. And my counsel to those who want to be 'biblical' in their approach to Lambeth is to live within 2 Corinthians, to pray it in, to struggle with its meaning then and now, and in the power of the Holy Spirit to pray to the Father that the pattern of the crucified and risen Son may be made known in our Communion, particularly in Lambeth itself this summer and in all that will follow from it. There is much more that could be said, but my task was to provide a biblical foundation for our thought, and I trust I have gone some way towards that.
Conclusion
But let me conclude with one more word. This is the Easter season, and Easter is about the surprising springtime, the moment when hope rose again after hope had been cruelly killed. Like (I guess) most if not all of you, I have had many hopes and fears these last five years. There are many things I hoped for that have not happened, and some things I feared might happen which have happened. After all, it wasn't just Paul who people thought had let them down by his suffering and his imminent death in Ephesus; it was Jesus himself. ‘We had hoped,’ say the two on the road to Emmaus, ‘that he would be the one to redeem Israel.’ And that hope had been horribly snuffed out. Perhaps the way we Evangelicals—yes, please, let's still use the word, it’s far too good a word to be taken from us by any small group—perhaps the way we Evangelicals have hoped things would turn out has itself been less than the best, has pointed into a somewhat narrow cultural or theological cul-de-sac when the glorious gospel itself would lead us into the larger world that the Bible itself opens up even if our tradition has chosen not to notice it. And perhaps, as we walk on the road, not now to Emmaus but to Lambeth, we need to be alert for the stranger who comes alongside, who gives us a fresh perspective on the scriptures themselves, and then leaves with a broken loaf to remind them of who he was and is, and of what koinonia with him and with one another would mean. My prayer is that as we approach Lambeth, which the Archbishop himself will open by leading a retreat so that all that we then do is framed in prayer and waiting on God in humility and hope, our hearts will again burn within us at fresh wisdom from the scriptures, so that we are ready to recognise Jesus in one another and commit ourselves again to holiness and unity.
The late, great Lesslie Newbigin was once asked whether, when he looked at the church, he was an optimist or a pessimist. I make his reply my own. I am neither an optimist, nor a pessimist: Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
You may read the entire paper here. And follow the link connected with the reference to the letter that the Archbishop may or may not have sent.
Covenant and Corinth: Phase One
Ever since it became clear in summer 2003 that the Episcopal Church in the United States was likely both to make Gene Robinson a bishop and to authorize public rites of same-sex blessings, there have naturally been groups who wanted someone, probably the Archbishop of Canterbury or, failing that, the Primates as a whole, to write the equivalent of 1 Corinthians, putting the Americans and others straight with some clear teaching on what is acceptable and what is not. Many, indeed, hoped that the Windsor Report would contain that sort of teaching, and were disappointed when it didn’t. But this was always a misunderstanding. The whole point of having the Lambeth Commission in the first place—forgive me reminding you of this but I find people keep on forgetting—was that Lambeth, the ACC, the Primates and Canterbury had already made the position abundantly clear, and the Americans had chosen to go their own way. If they did not hear Lambeth and the Primates, neither would they have been convinced even if Robin Eames should write another report.
But what Windsor did, of course, was another part of the classic 1 Corinthians material: not giving ethical instruction, but articulating the principle of adiaphora. The question is, which differences make a difference and which don't, how d’you tell, and who says? 1 Corinthians gives, of course, some pretty sharp examples of differences which do make a difference (incest, greed in business, etc.) and of differences which don't (especially dietary laws and customs), and of what to do with the latter (don’t force them on people, and don’t offend someone by presuming on your liberty when their conscience is at risk). What's more, as I argued some years ago, the so-called ‘New Perspective on Paul’ has enabled us to see more clearly why some things are adiaphora and others are not: the things which are adiaphora are those things which would otherwise have come between Jews and Gentiles. It isn't the case, as some low-grade would-be exegesis has sometimes suggested, that Paul simply chopped and changed biblical standards (e.g. circumcision) when he felt like it or for merely pragmatic reasons. This needs to be explored further, but not here. The point is that 1 Corinthians gives a wonderful, classic exposition of Christian love (chapter 13) at the heart of a whole section about the nature of the church in which it is abundantly clear that the multiplicity of gifts, and for that matter cultures, in the church are to be held together in a larger order corresponding to the God-given order of the human body. Clearly, this offers a model for unity and holiness with plenty of room for local variation and no room at all for unholiness—begging the question, of course, as what constitutes holiness and how you might tell.
But to live with 1 Corinthians invites the progression to 2 Corinthians, and that is of course exactly what has happened, and is happening as we speak. This brings me to the last main section of this lecture.
Covenant and Corinth: Phase Two
Many things about 2 Corinthians are exegetically controversial, but nobody would deny that it is the most heart-wrenchingly human letter of Paul that we possess. Not only does he wear his heart on his sleeve, wounds and all, but he actually says he's doing so (6.11). And the reason for this is not far to seek: the Corinthian church, or most of them anyway, have rejected him, choosing to go with others whom he darkly terms ‘super-apostles’ or other less complimentary terms (I am parking one of the many controversies here). The church has made it clear to Paul that if he wants to come back to Corinth he’ll have to prove himself, have to present his credentials, have to obtain ‘letters of recommendation’! In other words, the main theological question of the letter highlights a deep personal problem: the very apostolic authority which enabled Paul to do what he did was being called into question, and he had to find a way of reasserting it, and that at a time when for other reasons he had been at the lowest ebb of his life. Having suffered in Ephesus something like a nervous breakdown (see 1.8f.), quite probably as part of the strong local opposition to his message, he now finds that having faced the pagan hordes he has to face the shiny, successful Christian hordes, and he may well wonder which is worse. At least the pagans aren't supposed to be your friends!
Time forbids full treatment, but let me sketch some features of this ‘2 Corinthians moment’, which is I believe where we are right now in the Anglican Communion. We haven't had much of a formal ‘authority structure’, just as Paul didn’t. Things were assumed as the mission grew; it was clear who the leader was and things could go forward from there. When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians he was in the position that the Anglican Communion thought it was in until 2003: though we didn't have a formal legal or constitutional position, we all more or less knew how things stood, and an appeal to the Apostle in the first century, or to Lambeth in the twentieth, more or less clinched things. But now it had all gone pear-shaped. Pagan behaviour to the left, and ultra-Christian heroism to the right, had left Paul having fought the battles on the one hand only to appear outflanked on the other. What was his answer? Four things, briefly, all within the context of some brilliant as well as deeply personal writing, including some of the cleverest and actually funniest irony anywhere in scripture.
First and foremost, Paul argues for the nature of apostolic authority, rooted and grounded in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The 'super-apostles' appear to want Christian leadership to be a matter of heroism, of people who are above suffering, whose testimony to the power of God is clear and bright, unsullied with moments of pain or despair. That actually conforms only too well to a different aspect of pagan culture, the culture of success, of an essentially imperial model of human flourishing (Corinth prided itself on being 'more Roman than Rome'), of a way of being Christian which had left the cross behind. And Paul will have none of it. For him, the cross is not simply the salvific event, a moment in the past which, its work done, can then be put behind the apostle as he goes forward from glory to glory. That latter phrase, at the end of 2 Corinthians 3, is deeply ironic, because the glory is seen precisely in the suffering, as chapters 4 and 6 make clear. The point is this: apostolic authority is rooted not only in the proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but also in the living out of that death and resurrection - which Paul, clearly, had done, and which, we are left to infer, the super-apostles had not. And, at the heart of it all, Paul embraced and celebrated the shame of the cross, so offensive to those who wanted their Christian faith to be cut and dried and clean and shiny (and conforming to the culture of imperial success), and so essential to genuine apostleship. This is the point of Paul's spectacular piece of inverted boasting in chapters 11 and 12, where he boasts of all the wrong things, like someone today producing a curriculum vitae of the jobs they didn't get and the books they didn't write, or perhaps someone writing a family Christmas letter about failed exams, getting sacked from work, and so on, all in the tone of voice of 'what a wonderful year we've had'. Applied to our current situation, I believe we need to ponder very seriously the notions of human and Christian flourishing that we sometimes take for granted, and which condition many of our ecclesial debates, and reassess them in the light of the foundation gospel events.
Second, Paul argues precisely for the establishment, under his cross-and-resurrection-shaped apostolic authority, of the new covenant. As I said earlier, this can’t of course be equated directly with any covenants we may make amongst ourselves today, but it speaks volumes that it is at this point, when he is struggling to re-establish his apostolic authority on gospel lines, that he reaches for ‘covenant’ as his key category. And, within that, membership in the covenant involves the remarkable face-to-face recognition, as in the end of chapter 3, of the glory of Jesus Christ. It is in the actual face-to-face meeting of those who recognise Jesus in one another that covenant membership is enacted, is known for what it is. This chapter should lie near the heart of all discussion of koinonia, of the nature of Christian fellowship.
Third, however, all this has come about not least because Paul has written a painful letter (2.3f.). This too is of course historically controversial: is the ‘painful letter’ 1 Corinthians itself, or is it one of the somewhat disjointed sections of 2 Corinthians itself, perhaps chapters 10-13? I am cautiously with those who think that it is a letter written between the two epistles, and now lost, but that doesn’t take away from the remarkable relevance of 2 Corinthians for our present moment. When the Archbishop issued his invitations, he made it clear as I said that their basis was Windsor and the Covenant as the tools to shape our future common life. That invitation was issued only three months after the remarkable joint statement from the Primates issued in Tanzania in February 2007. After a summer and autumn of various tangled and unsatisfactory events, the Archbishop then wrote an Advent pastoral letter in which he reiterated the terms of his initial invitation and declared that he would be writing to those bishops who might be thought particularly unsympathetic to Windsor and the Covenant to ask them whether they were really prepared to build on this dual foundation. Those letters, I understand, are in the post as we speak, written with apostolic pain and heart-searching but also with apostolic necessity. I am well aware that many will say this is far too little, far too late—just as many others will be livid to think that the Archbishop, having already not invited Gene Robinson to Lambeth, should be suggesting that some others might absent themselves as well. But this is what he promised he would do, and he is doing it. If I know anything about anything, I know that he deserves our prayers at this most difficult and fraught moment in the run-up to Lambeth itself.
Fourth, we have seen, predictably but sadly, the rise of the super-apostles, who have wanted everything to be cut and dried in ways for which our existing polity simply did not, and does not, allow. Please note, I do not for one moment underestimate the awful situation that many of our American and Canadian friends have found themselves in, vilified, attacked and undermined by ecclesiastical authority figures who seem to have lost all grip on the gospel of Jesus Christ and to be eager only for lawsuits and property squabbles. I pray daily for many friends over there who are in intolerable situations and I don’t underestimate the pressures and strains. But I do have to say, as well, that these situations have been exploited by those who have long wanted to shift the balance of power in the Anglican Communion and who have used this awful situation as an opportunity to do so. And now, just as the super-apostles were conveying the message to Paul that if he wanted to return to Corinth he'd need letters of recommendation, we are told that, if we want to go on being thought of as evangelicals, we should withdraw from Lambeth and join the super-gathering which, though not officially, is clearly designed as an alternative, and which of course hands an apparent moral victory to those who can cheerfully wave goodbye to the ‘secessionists’. I have written about this elsewhere, and it is of course a very sad situation which none of us (I trust) would wish but which seems to be worsening by the day.
Apostolic authority, covenant, painful letters and super-apostles: the parallels are not of course exact, but they are striking none the less. And my counsel to those who want to be 'biblical' in their approach to Lambeth is to live within 2 Corinthians, to pray it in, to struggle with its meaning then and now, and in the power of the Holy Spirit to pray to the Father that the pattern of the crucified and risen Son may be made known in our Communion, particularly in Lambeth itself this summer and in all that will follow from it. There is much more that could be said, but my task was to provide a biblical foundation for our thought, and I trust I have gone some way towards that.
Conclusion
But let me conclude with one more word. This is the Easter season, and Easter is about the surprising springtime, the moment when hope rose again after hope had been cruelly killed. Like (I guess) most if not all of you, I have had many hopes and fears these last five years. There are many things I hoped for that have not happened, and some things I feared might happen which have happened. After all, it wasn't just Paul who people thought had let them down by his suffering and his imminent death in Ephesus; it was Jesus himself. ‘We had hoped,’ say the two on the road to Emmaus, ‘that he would be the one to redeem Israel.’ And that hope had been horribly snuffed out. Perhaps the way we Evangelicals—yes, please, let's still use the word, it’s far too good a word to be taken from us by any small group—perhaps the way we Evangelicals have hoped things would turn out has itself been less than the best, has pointed into a somewhat narrow cultural or theological cul-de-sac when the glorious gospel itself would lead us into the larger world that the Bible itself opens up even if our tradition has chosen not to notice it. And perhaps, as we walk on the road, not now to Emmaus but to Lambeth, we need to be alert for the stranger who comes alongside, who gives us a fresh perspective on the scriptures themselves, and then leaves with a broken loaf to remind them of who he was and is, and of what koinonia with him and with one another would mean. My prayer is that as we approach Lambeth, which the Archbishop himself will open by leading a retreat so that all that we then do is framed in prayer and waiting on God in humility and hope, our hearts will again burn within us at fresh wisdom from the scriptures, so that we are ready to recognise Jesus in one another and commit ourselves again to holiness and unity.
The late, great Lesslie Newbigin was once asked whether, when he looked at the church, he was an optimist or a pessimist. I make his reply my own. I am neither an optimist, nor a pessimist: Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
You may read the entire paper here. And follow the link connected with the reference to the letter that the Archbishop may or may not have sent.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
London Times Cryptic Crossword for April 13
Here is this week’s brain teaser from the London Times. Click on it to bring up the full-sized version.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Why food costs are surging
A sobering study from the Toronto Globe & Mail…
Fatal food riots in Haiti. Violent food-price protests in Egypt and Ivory Coast. Rice so valuable it is transported in armoured convoys. Soldiers guarding fields and warehouses. Export bans to keep local populations from starving.
For the first time in decades, the spectre of widespread hunger for millions looms as food prices explode. Two words not in common currency in recent years — famine and starvation — are now being raised as distinct possibilities in the poorest, food-importing countries.
Unlike past food crises, solved largely by throwing aid at hungry stomachs and boosting agricultural productivity, this one won’t go away quickly, experts say. Prices are soaring and stand every chance of staying high because this crisis is different.
A swelling global population, soaring energy prices, the clamouring for meat from the rising Asian middle class, competition from biofuels and hot money pouring into the commodity markets are all factors that make this crisis unique and potentially calamitous. Even with concerted global action, such as rushing more land into cultivation, it will take years to fix the problem…
How did it come to this? Surging food prices, now at 30-year highs, are actually a relatively new phenomenon. In the mid-1970s, prices began to fall as the green revolution around the world made farms dramatically more productive, thanks to improvements in irrigation and the widespread use of fertilizers, mechanized farm equipment and genetically engineered crops. If there was a crisis, it was food surpluses — too much food chasing too few stomachs — and dropping produce prices had often disastrous effects on farm incomes.
By 2001, the surpluses began to shrink and prices reversed. In the past year or so, the price curve has gone nearly vertical. The UN’s food index rose 45 per cent in the past nine months alone, but some prices have climbed even faster. Wheat went up 108 per cent in the past 12 months; corn rose 66 per cent. Rice, the food that feeds half the world, went “from a staple to a delicacy”, says Standard Chartered Bank food commodities analyst Abah Ofon.
The price of Thai medium-quality rice, a global benchmark, has more than doubled since the end of 2007. This week it reached a record $854 a tonne, which helps explain why World Food Programme trucks carrying rice in certain parts of Africa have come under attack.
Food prices in the first three months of 2008 reached their highest level in both nominal and real (inflation adjusted) terms in almost 30 years, the UN says. That’s stoking double-digit inflation and prompting countries such as Egypt, Vietnam and India to eliminate or substantially reduce rice exports to keep a lid on prices and prevent rioting. But, by reducing global supply, this only increases prices for food-importing countries, many of them in West Africa…
The dramatic price rises have been driven by factors absent in previous food shortages. They include turning food into fuel, climate change, high oil and natural gas prices (which boost trucking and fertilizer costs), greater consumption of meat and dairy products as incomes rise (which raises the demand for animal feedstuffs), and investment funds, whose billions of dollars of firepower can magnify price increases.
Driven by fears of global warming, biofuel has become big business in the U.S., Canada and the European Union. The incentive to produce the fuels is overwhelming because they are subsidized by taxpayers and, depending on the country or the region, come with content mandates.
Starting next week, Britain will require gasoline and diesel sold at the pumps be mixed with 2.5-per-cent biofuel, rising to 5.75 per cent by 2010 and 10 per cent by 2020, in line with European Union directives. Ontario’s ethanol-content mandate is 5 per cent. As the content requirements rise, more and more land is devoted to growing crops for fuel, such as corn-based ethanol. In the EU alone, 15 per cent of the arable land is expected to be devoured by biofuel production by 2020.
That’s raising alarm bells, especially given lingering doubts about the effectiveness of ethanol in combatting climate change. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said this week he’s worried that ethanol production is pushing up food prices everywhere, and he called for an urgent review of the issue. Economist Dr. Hazell has said that filling an SUV tank once with ethanol consumes more maize than the typical African eats in a year.
Rising ethanol demand is one of the main reasons why Wall Street securities firm Goldman Sachs predicts high food prices for a long time. “We believe the recent rise in agriculture prices is not a transient spike, but rather represents the beginning of a structural increase in prices, much as has occurred in the energy and metals markets,” Jeffrey Currie, Goldman’s chief commodities analyst, said in a research note last month…
The UN has predicted that climate change could reduce production in developing countries by 9 to 21 per cent by 2080 and that sub-Saharan Africa could lose more than 30 per cent of its main crop, maize. Southern Asia, it said, could see millet, maize and rice production fall by 10 per cent. The challenge is to offset the losses with higher crop yields on arable land less affected by climate change…
Agriculture economists and the UN have not lost all hope. New irrigation systems are inevitable in Africa and have the potential to boost crop production dramatically. Ditto for the use of fertilizers. Only three to five kilos of fertilizer per hectare is used in Africa, compared with about 250 kilos in the U.S. The problem with using more fertilizer is cost. Fertilizers such as urea are derived from natural gas, and gas prices have climbed, too. The price of urea has almost tripled since 2003, to $400 a tonne.
Dr. Hazell said some big countries, notably the U.S., Canada and Ukraine, have the capacity to increase crop production substantially. Already world cereal production is on the rise, although not nearly fast enough to end the crisis. The Food and Agriculture Organization yesterday forecast a 2.6-per-cent rise in cereal production in 2008.
Cutting back on ethanol production alone would go some way to restoring supply-demand balance in the food markets. “If we decide to do something about it, we can just use less food for fuel,” he said.
But everyone — analysts, economists, agriculture experts, the UN — thinks all bets are off in the next two or three years. It’s almost impossible to boost production quickly, because of land and water shortages and competition from biofuels. “I can say with some degree of confidence that if governments and international development agencies do not put in place a concerted effort quickly, then we are looking at a very serious problem,” Mr. Nwanze said.
You can read the whole article here.
Fatal food riots in Haiti. Violent food-price protests in Egypt and Ivory Coast. Rice so valuable it is transported in armoured convoys. Soldiers guarding fields and warehouses. Export bans to keep local populations from starving.
For the first time in decades, the spectre of widespread hunger for millions looms as food prices explode. Two words not in common currency in recent years — famine and starvation — are now being raised as distinct possibilities in the poorest, food-importing countries.
Unlike past food crises, solved largely by throwing aid at hungry stomachs and boosting agricultural productivity, this one won’t go away quickly, experts say. Prices are soaring and stand every chance of staying high because this crisis is different.
A swelling global population, soaring energy prices, the clamouring for meat from the rising Asian middle class, competition from biofuels and hot money pouring into the commodity markets are all factors that make this crisis unique and potentially calamitous. Even with concerted global action, such as rushing more land into cultivation, it will take years to fix the problem…
How did it come to this? Surging food prices, now at 30-year highs, are actually a relatively new phenomenon. In the mid-1970s, prices began to fall as the green revolution around the world made farms dramatically more productive, thanks to improvements in irrigation and the widespread use of fertilizers, mechanized farm equipment and genetically engineered crops. If there was a crisis, it was food surpluses — too much food chasing too few stomachs — and dropping produce prices had often disastrous effects on farm incomes.
By 2001, the surpluses began to shrink and prices reversed. In the past year or so, the price curve has gone nearly vertical. The UN’s food index rose 45 per cent in the past nine months alone, but some prices have climbed even faster. Wheat went up 108 per cent in the past 12 months; corn rose 66 per cent. Rice, the food that feeds half the world, went “from a staple to a delicacy”, says Standard Chartered Bank food commodities analyst Abah Ofon.
The price of Thai medium-quality rice, a global benchmark, has more than doubled since the end of 2007. This week it reached a record $854 a tonne, which helps explain why World Food Programme trucks carrying rice in certain parts of Africa have come under attack.
Food prices in the first three months of 2008 reached their highest level in both nominal and real (inflation adjusted) terms in almost 30 years, the UN says. That’s stoking double-digit inflation and prompting countries such as Egypt, Vietnam and India to eliminate or substantially reduce rice exports to keep a lid on prices and prevent rioting. But, by reducing global supply, this only increases prices for food-importing countries, many of them in West Africa…
The dramatic price rises have been driven by factors absent in previous food shortages. They include turning food into fuel, climate change, high oil and natural gas prices (which boost trucking and fertilizer costs), greater consumption of meat and dairy products as incomes rise (which raises the demand for animal feedstuffs), and investment funds, whose billions of dollars of firepower can magnify price increases.
Driven by fears of global warming, biofuel has become big business in the U.S., Canada and the European Union. The incentive to produce the fuels is overwhelming because they are subsidized by taxpayers and, depending on the country or the region, come with content mandates.
Starting next week, Britain will require gasoline and diesel sold at the pumps be mixed with 2.5-per-cent biofuel, rising to 5.75 per cent by 2010 and 10 per cent by 2020, in line with European Union directives. Ontario’s ethanol-content mandate is 5 per cent. As the content requirements rise, more and more land is devoted to growing crops for fuel, such as corn-based ethanol. In the EU alone, 15 per cent of the arable land is expected to be devoured by biofuel production by 2020.
That’s raising alarm bells, especially given lingering doubts about the effectiveness of ethanol in combatting climate change. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said this week he’s worried that ethanol production is pushing up food prices everywhere, and he called for an urgent review of the issue. Economist Dr. Hazell has said that filling an SUV tank once with ethanol consumes more maize than the typical African eats in a year.
Rising ethanol demand is one of the main reasons why Wall Street securities firm Goldman Sachs predicts high food prices for a long time. “We believe the recent rise in agriculture prices is not a transient spike, but rather represents the beginning of a structural increase in prices, much as has occurred in the energy and metals markets,” Jeffrey Currie, Goldman’s chief commodities analyst, said in a research note last month…
The UN has predicted that climate change could reduce production in developing countries by 9 to 21 per cent by 2080 and that sub-Saharan Africa could lose more than 30 per cent of its main crop, maize. Southern Asia, it said, could see millet, maize and rice production fall by 10 per cent. The challenge is to offset the losses with higher crop yields on arable land less affected by climate change…
Agriculture economists and the UN have not lost all hope. New irrigation systems are inevitable in Africa and have the potential to boost crop production dramatically. Ditto for the use of fertilizers. Only three to five kilos of fertilizer per hectare is used in Africa, compared with about 250 kilos in the U.S. The problem with using more fertilizer is cost. Fertilizers such as urea are derived from natural gas, and gas prices have climbed, too. The price of urea has almost tripled since 2003, to $400 a tonne.
Dr. Hazell said some big countries, notably the U.S., Canada and Ukraine, have the capacity to increase crop production substantially. Already world cereal production is on the rise, although not nearly fast enough to end the crisis. The Food and Agriculture Organization yesterday forecast a 2.6-per-cent rise in cereal production in 2008.
Cutting back on ethanol production alone would go some way to restoring supply-demand balance in the food markets. “If we decide to do something about it, we can just use less food for fuel,” he said.
But everyone — analysts, economists, agriculture experts, the UN — thinks all bets are off in the next two or three years. It’s almost impossible to boost production quickly, because of land and water shortages and competition from biofuels. “I can say with some degree of confidence that if governments and international development agencies do not put in place a concerted effort quickly, then we are looking at a very serious problem,” Mr. Nwanze said.
You can read the whole article here.
A letter from the Bishop of North Dakota
What a breath of fresh air to read this statement from Bishop Michael Smith! It is one of the clearest, most charitable, concise and helpful contributions to the current divisions that are wracking the Episcopal Church—a superb combination of biblical theology, courageous leadership, and pastoral care.
For the second time in three weeks a priest of the church has gone to the secular news media with a protest about my policy and expectations for the sexual behavior of clergy in this diocese: “Faithfulness for those called to marriage and abstinence from sexual relationships for those not called to marriage.”
I am extremely disappointed that sensitive pastoral issues have been politicized by these actions. They serve to divide, polarize and work against the sense of community in the diocese we have sought to build.
As one whose responsibility it is to guard the faith, unity and discipline of the church, let me be clear. The diocesan policy I uphold is not one of my own invention or devising. Rather, it is the teaching of the Church for 2,000 years as derived from the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. It is based on the order of creation as recorded in Genesis and reasserted in the Gospels when Jesus says: “From the beginning of creation ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’” (Mark 10:6-8).
Obviously, there have always been people who for one reason or another are unable or unwilling to live by this standard. These “exceptions to the rule” are matters of personal conscience between the individual and God. They do not, however, supplant or replace the traditional teaching of the Church, which until recent times was unquestioned as the behavior expected of all Christians.
The Episcopal Church and the other churches of the Anglican Communion have traditionally held together the Liberal, Catholic and Evangelical wings of the church by common worship and a common relationship with a bishop in the historic succession. This theoretically provides us with balance, correction and comprehension for the sake of truth.
What we are seeing in our national church and in other parts of the Anglican world is Liberals moving out on their own without benefit of the moderating and balancing effects of Catholic and Evangelical perspectives. In other places, Evangelicals and Catholics are choosing to walk apart from the Liberals. Either way, we are diminished as a community of Christians.
Read the rest of this letter here.
For the second time in three weeks a priest of the church has gone to the secular news media with a protest about my policy and expectations for the sexual behavior of clergy in this diocese: “Faithfulness for those called to marriage and abstinence from sexual relationships for those not called to marriage.”
I am extremely disappointed that sensitive pastoral issues have been politicized by these actions. They serve to divide, polarize and work against the sense of community in the diocese we have sought to build.
As one whose responsibility it is to guard the faith, unity and discipline of the church, let me be clear. The diocesan policy I uphold is not one of my own invention or devising. Rather, it is the teaching of the Church for 2,000 years as derived from the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. It is based on the order of creation as recorded in Genesis and reasserted in the Gospels when Jesus says: “From the beginning of creation ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’” (Mark 10:6-8).
Obviously, there have always been people who for one reason or another are unable or unwilling to live by this standard. These “exceptions to the rule” are matters of personal conscience between the individual and God. They do not, however, supplant or replace the traditional teaching of the Church, which until recent times was unquestioned as the behavior expected of all Christians.
The Episcopal Church and the other churches of the Anglican Communion have traditionally held together the Liberal, Catholic and Evangelical wings of the church by common worship and a common relationship with a bishop in the historic succession. This theoretically provides us with balance, correction and comprehension for the sake of truth.
What we are seeing in our national church and in other parts of the Anglican world is Liberals moving out on their own without benefit of the moderating and balancing effects of Catholic and Evangelical perspectives. In other places, Evangelicals and Catholics are choosing to walk apart from the Liberals. Either way, we are diminished as a community of Christians.
Read the rest of this letter here.
Friday, April 11, 2008
American Idol shouts to the Lord
Generally, I’d rather have the TV off than watch American Idol. But I was in turn surprised, fascinated, and moved when, channel surfing during the ads a couple of nights ago, this flipped up on my screen:
The singers were the eight Idol finalists, and the show averaged 17.6 million visitors. Quite an impressive witness, even if they did change the opening words from “My Jesus” to “My Shepherd”! I’m sure everyone knew who they were singing about.
The singers were the eight Idol finalists, and the show averaged 17.6 million visitors. Quite an impressive witness, even if they did change the opening words from “My Jesus” to “My Shepherd”! I’m sure everyone knew who they were singing about.
Sad news for Canadians
My wife and I have become addicted Corner Gas watchers, so we were greatly saddened to read this in today’s Globe & Mail:
They won’t be pumping gas in Dog River, Sask., any more.
Saying he wants to retire at the top of his game, Canadian comedian Brent Butt has announced the sixth season of Corner Gas will be the last. The popular sitcom set in a Saskatchewan gas station will air its final episode some time in spring, 2009.
“It was a very tough decision to make, but it was time,” Mr. Butt, the show’s star and creator, said in an interview yesterday. “The only way for you to end the show in a way that people are not going to think it’s too soon is to do it when it’s too late. And Corner Gas, it’s too special. I couldn’t stand to watch it get to where people were ready for it to leave. Mr. Butt said broadcaster CTV “was very upfront” about wanting the series to continue, but he told them he wanted viewers to remember the show at its peak.
The sitcom, routinely watched by more than a million viewers on Monday night and hitting the two million mark with special episodes and finales, is considered a breakthrough in Canadian television: a prime-time, made-in-Canada hit on a schedule increasingly given over to U.S. programming.
“If that is the legacy of the show, there would be nothing that could make me prouder,” Mr. Butt said. “There are so many funny, talented people in this country who are making about 80 bucks a week telling jokes to drunks. If more of them have the opportunity to do what I did for the last six years, it would be terrific.”
Corner Gas stars Mr. Butt as gas station owner Brent Leroy … and is seen in 26 countries around the world, including the United States. Mr. Butt said he believes the show is so successful because he and his co-writers didn’t go into production with an “agenda”. “The only kind of mandate I put forward to anybody was, ‘Walk away from this thinking we made a funny show.’ That was it.”
While Mr. Butt said his decision was in the best interests of the show, he said he has accepted an offer from CTV to work on future television projects. He hinted at another one-camera comedy. But for now, he said, his focus will be on completing the final 19 episodes of Corner Gas, which begins production for its final season on May 15.
Nowhere did news of the series’ looming end hit harder than in the 400-person town of Rouleau, Sask., where Corner Gas has been shot for the past five years. Much of the fictional Dog River's attributes, such as the combined liquor and insurance store, are based on Rouleau's existing landscape. The town's grain elevator was repainted to read “Dog River” instead of “Rouleau”.
Rouleau’s mayor, Allen Kuhlmann, said the show’s impact on the town has been tremendous. It has pumped about $800,000 into the economy. “To put that into context, that’s about eight years of taxes in the town,” Mr. Kuhlmann said, adding that doesn’t include the financial boon from the hundreds of tourists, many international, that often visit in a single day. “We knew the day was coming some day that Corner Gas wouldn’t be there any more, but that doesn't make it any less painful.”
Oh well, we’ll still own the DVDs (until they go obsolete)! The whole story can be found here. The Corner Gas website is here.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Presiding Bishop Presses Efforts to Remove More Bishops
From the Living Church:
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori continued preparations for a vote to depose Bishop Robert Duncan at a special House of Bishops’ meeting before the Lambeth Conference this July. E-mail messages were sent April 8 to all members of the House of Bishops entitled to vote. A disciplinary “Review Committee” of bishops found sufficient evidence to conclude that Bishop Duncan had abandoned communion , a charge he has formally denied. Bishop Duncan has never been inhibited, a canonical objection raised by John Lewis, a lawyer retained by Bishop Duncan…
Bishop Jefferts Schori also inhibited pending trial the Rt. Rev. Edward H. MacBurney, retired Bishop of Quincy, on April 2. Bishop MacBurney, 80, has been charged with performing confirmations last June at an Anglican parish within the geographic territory of the Diocese of San Diego that had previously affiliated with the Province of the Southern Cone.
The timing of the disciplinary notice deeply saddened the Rt. Rev. Keith Ackerman, Bishop of Quincy, who said he had pleaded with Bishop Jefferts Schori to delay the action for a short while out of pastoral consideration for the MacBurney family. Bishop MacBurney’s son, Page, has been in hospice care and died April 4. “I am beside myself with grief over this unnecessary action taken against my predecessor especially at a time when he is mourning the death of his son this past Friday,” Bishop Ackerman said…
The whole article is here.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori continued preparations for a vote to depose Bishop Robert Duncan at a special House of Bishops’ meeting before the Lambeth Conference this July. E-mail messages were sent April 8 to all members of the House of Bishops entitled to vote. A disciplinary “Review Committee” of bishops found sufficient evidence to conclude that Bishop Duncan had abandoned communion , a charge he has formally denied. Bishop Duncan has never been inhibited, a canonical objection raised by John Lewis, a lawyer retained by Bishop Duncan…
Bishop Jefferts Schori also inhibited pending trial the Rt. Rev. Edward H. MacBurney, retired Bishop of Quincy, on April 2. Bishop MacBurney, 80, has been charged with performing confirmations last June at an Anglican parish within the geographic territory of the Diocese of San Diego that had previously affiliated with the Province of the Southern Cone.
The timing of the disciplinary notice deeply saddened the Rt. Rev. Keith Ackerman, Bishop of Quincy, who said he had pleaded with Bishop Jefferts Schori to delay the action for a short while out of pastoral consideration for the MacBurney family. Bishop MacBurney’s son, Page, has been in hospice care and died April 4. “I am beside myself with grief over this unnecessary action taken against my predecessor especially at a time when he is mourning the death of his son this past Friday,” Bishop Ackerman said…
The whole article is here.
Clock is ticking for fate of Bishop Duncan
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
The leader of the Episcopal Church will poll bishops nationally next month in an effort to move the possible deposition of Pittsburgh Bishop Robert W. Duncan Jr. ahead to May. While Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s reasons have not been made public, the impact of accelerating the deposition could be far reaching not only for Bishop Duncan but the entire worldwide Anglican Communion…
Bishop Duncan is widely recognized throughout the communion as a leader of those upset with actions in the past few years of the American church, such as same-sex blessings and the consecration of an openly gay bishop. He is moderator of the Anglican Communion Network, an alliance of biblically traditional dioceses and parishes that comprises about 10 percent of the Episcopal Church’s 111 dioceses and 2.2 million members.
The bishop is also a key broker between conservative Episcopalians and the leaders of millions of Anglicans in Africa, Asia and South America who also disagree with the actions of the American church. If the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, disregarded the deposition of Bishop Duncan, it would be a tantamount admission that the Episcopal Church is out of step with the rest of the communion.
According to an e-mail sent this week from David Booth Beers, the chancellor to the presiding bishop, to about two dozen Pittsburgh Episcopalians representing a spectrum of the diocese, he wrote that the Rev. Jefferts Schori would “poll the House of Bishops in April to see when the House would next like to meet to discuss, among other things, the certification respecting Bishop Duncan. It is not accurate to say that she is seeking approval to proceed; rather, she seeks the mind of the House as to when to proceed.” The next scheduled meeting of the roughly 300-member House of Bishops is in September…
In a related vein, several parishes within the Pittsburgh diocese formed an organization this week dedicated to advancing realignment. Called Coalition for Realignment, it seeks to reassure people in the diocese “that we’re still on track to realign,” said the Rev. Jonathan Millard, rector of Church of the Ascension in Oakland, and the group’s spokesman. The diocese will vote on realignment at its November diocesan convention.
The full article can be read here.
The leader of the Episcopal Church will poll bishops nationally next month in an effort to move the possible deposition of Pittsburgh Bishop Robert W. Duncan Jr. ahead to May. While Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s reasons have not been made public, the impact of accelerating the deposition could be far reaching not only for Bishop Duncan but the entire worldwide Anglican Communion…
Bishop Duncan is widely recognized throughout the communion as a leader of those upset with actions in the past few years of the American church, such as same-sex blessings and the consecration of an openly gay bishop. He is moderator of the Anglican Communion Network, an alliance of biblically traditional dioceses and parishes that comprises about 10 percent of the Episcopal Church’s 111 dioceses and 2.2 million members.
The bishop is also a key broker between conservative Episcopalians and the leaders of millions of Anglicans in Africa, Asia and South America who also disagree with the actions of the American church. If the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, disregarded the deposition of Bishop Duncan, it would be a tantamount admission that the Episcopal Church is out of step with the rest of the communion.
According to an e-mail sent this week from David Booth Beers, the chancellor to the presiding bishop, to about two dozen Pittsburgh Episcopalians representing a spectrum of the diocese, he wrote that the Rev. Jefferts Schori would “poll the House of Bishops in April to see when the House would next like to meet to discuss, among other things, the certification respecting Bishop Duncan. It is not accurate to say that she is seeking approval to proceed; rather, she seeks the mind of the House as to when to proceed.” The next scheduled meeting of the roughly 300-member House of Bishops is in September…
In a related vein, several parishes within the Pittsburgh diocese formed an organization this week dedicated to advancing realignment. Called Coalition for Realignment, it seeks to reassure people in the diocese “that we’re still on track to realign,” said the Rev. Jonathan Millard, rector of Church of the Ascension in Oakland, and the group’s spokesman. The diocese will vote on realignment at its November diocesan convention.
The full article can be read here.
Episcopalian Showdown
From Quin Hillyer of the American Spectator:
The national media tend to portray the split between these parishes and the Episcopal Church as being mostly about issues of sexuality, particularly homosexuality. And to be sure, those differences exist, although the conventional portrayal—of the conservative parishes as being brutally censorious while the national Episcopal Church is merely “tolerant”—is both simplistic and skewed. But the differences between CANA and the Episcopal Church involve issues both more numerous and deeper, theologically, than mere battles over whether to ordain lesbians or perform same-sex rituals. And it’s also not a mere battle of conservative political activists versus liberal political activists; it’s more a case where the conservatives abjure politics within worship, whereas the national Episcopal Church seems to believe that politics itself—specifically, liberal politics—is a form of worship.
Go to the national church website, and the site map doesn’t even include the word “Creed”—not Nicene, not Apostles”—because almost nothing in the national church seems focused on internal spiritual beliefs. To quote one of the site’s featured mini-essays (a highly representative example), “It’s not about having answers as much as it is about engaging a story. It is about your story and how your story connects to an ancient story of desert wanderers that, in time, came to see that humanity and this energy they called God mingled and existed through Christ and thus, exists in all of humanity.”
But even the Episcopal Church website’s vapid pop psychology is overwhelmed by the volume of political statements and programs that make the site little distinguishable in tone or focus from that of, say, the Americans for Democratic Action. The first listed “mission” of the church is “justice and peacemaking”, which has subsets that advocate “speak[ing] truth to the powerful”, “social justice ministry”, “criminal justice”, “racism” defined not just as prejudice but only as “prejudice coupled with power”, (hint: black Americans therefore can’t be racist), and an “Office of Government Relations” which sees its goals as “including issues of international peace and justice, human rights, immigration, welfare, poverty, hunger, health care, violence, civil rights, the environment, racism and issues involving women and children”.
Who has time to save souls when Caesar needs so much guidance?
Well said, Mr Hillyer! You can find the rest of this op-ed piece here.
The national media tend to portray the split between these parishes and the Episcopal Church as being mostly about issues of sexuality, particularly homosexuality. And to be sure, those differences exist, although the conventional portrayal—of the conservative parishes as being brutally censorious while the national Episcopal Church is merely “tolerant”—is both simplistic and skewed. But the differences between CANA and the Episcopal Church involve issues both more numerous and deeper, theologically, than mere battles over whether to ordain lesbians or perform same-sex rituals. And it’s also not a mere battle of conservative political activists versus liberal political activists; it’s more a case where the conservatives abjure politics within worship, whereas the national Episcopal Church seems to believe that politics itself—specifically, liberal politics—is a form of worship.
Go to the national church website, and the site map doesn’t even include the word “Creed”—not Nicene, not Apostles”—because almost nothing in the national church seems focused on internal spiritual beliefs. To quote one of the site’s featured mini-essays (a highly representative example), “It’s not about having answers as much as it is about engaging a story. It is about your story and how your story connects to an ancient story of desert wanderers that, in time, came to see that humanity and this energy they called God mingled and existed through Christ and thus, exists in all of humanity.”
But even the Episcopal Church website’s vapid pop psychology is overwhelmed by the volume of political statements and programs that make the site little distinguishable in tone or focus from that of, say, the Americans for Democratic Action. The first listed “mission” of the church is “justice and peacemaking”, which has subsets that advocate “speak[ing] truth to the powerful”, “social justice ministry”, “criminal justice”, “racism” defined not just as prejudice but only as “prejudice coupled with power”, (hint: black Americans therefore can’t be racist), and an “Office of Government Relations” which sees its goals as “including issues of international peace and justice, human rights, immigration, welfare, poverty, hunger, health care, violence, civil rights, the environment, racism and issues involving women and children”.
Who has time to save souls when Caesar needs so much guidance?
Well said, Mr Hillyer! You can find the rest of this op-ed piece here.
The Case for Civility
Christian author and social critic Os Guinness spoke earlier today at the Town Hall Forum at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. You can hear his 25-minute lecture, and the half-hour question period that followed it, by clicking here.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
History of the “Abandonment of Communion” Canons
What follows is an excerpt of an illuminating and thoroughgoing history of the canon now being invoked against some bishops in the Episcopal Church, by church attorney A.S. Haley:
The Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America (and its predecessor, the Church of England in the Colonies) had managed for 246 years without any need for a canon dealing with “abandonment of communion” by a Bishop. The issue first arose on account of the Rt. Rev. Levi Silliman Ives, one of the most respected bishops in the Church and a leader of the “Oxford” or “high church” movement in America, who served as the second Bishop of North Carolina from 1831 to 1852. Originally a Presbyterian, he had converted to the Episcopal Church after receiving a copy of the Book of Common Prayer as a gift from a fellow clergyman, and rapidly rose to a position of leadership. He was just thirty-four years old when he was elected bishop of the struggling Diocese of North Carolina, with only sixteen congregations and nine hundred communicants. Roads to the interior were barely passable, but Ives was constantly on the move in his Diocese, establishing new parishes and even a monastic community in the hills of Western North Carolina, called Valle Crucis. He was the recipient of much criticism in his Diocese for the Oxfordian rites, prayers and vestments he introduced at the monastery and elsewhere, and he began to absent himself from diocesan conventions due to illness. A report prepared for the convention of 1851 found that for several years the Bishop had been in a state of “mental excitement that had impaired his memory and judgment”.
In the summer of 1852, Ives asked for and was given a leave of absence on grounds of poor health. He set sail with his wife for Europe in the fall. Rumors soon reached North Carolina that Bishop Ives had converted to Catholicism. On December 22, 1852 Ives wrote a letter to the Diocese resigning his see. Shortly thereafter he was received by Pope Pius IX. Although he resigned as Bishop of North Carolina, Ives had not resigned from the House of Bishops. At the General Convention of 1853, a new canon (Canon 1 of that year) was adopted to deal with this problem… At the General Convention of 1856 an attempt to amend the Canon, which was generally recognized as imperfect and hastily drafted, was rejected by the House of Bishops, and it was not revised until the General Convention of 1859…
This revised Canon received its first test in November 1873, in connection with the events that led to the formation of the Reformed Episcopal Church. This movement was led by the Rt. Rev. George D. Cummins (the name is frequently misspelled, even on REC sites, as “Cummings”), the assistant Bishop of Kentucky, in reaction to the “high church” movement of which Bishop Ives had been such an advocate. Bishop Cummins objected strongly to the pomp and pageantry introduced by the Oxfordians, and crossed diocesan boundaries in his crusade to rescue the Church from what he saw as “Ritualism”. On November 10, 1873 Bishop Cummins resigned his position in a passionate letter written to his diocesan, the Rt. Rev. Benjamin Bosworth Smith, who also happened to be the Presiding Bishop. Although he stated that he found it necessary to "leave the communion in which I have labored in the sacred ministry for over twenty-eight years," he did not expressly resign his position in the House of Bishops, and thereby created an ambiguity which forced the Presiding Bishop to act.
You can read the whole of the first installment at his blog (Anglican Curmudgeon) here. Let’s hope the next one will appear soon.
The Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America (and its predecessor, the Church of England in the Colonies) had managed for 246 years without any need for a canon dealing with “abandonment of communion” by a Bishop. The issue first arose on account of the Rt. Rev. Levi Silliman Ives, one of the most respected bishops in the Church and a leader of the “Oxford” or “high church” movement in America, who served as the second Bishop of North Carolina from 1831 to 1852. Originally a Presbyterian, he had converted to the Episcopal Church after receiving a copy of the Book of Common Prayer as a gift from a fellow clergyman, and rapidly rose to a position of leadership. He was just thirty-four years old when he was elected bishop of the struggling Diocese of North Carolina, with only sixteen congregations and nine hundred communicants. Roads to the interior were barely passable, but Ives was constantly on the move in his Diocese, establishing new parishes and even a monastic community in the hills of Western North Carolina, called Valle Crucis. He was the recipient of much criticism in his Diocese for the Oxfordian rites, prayers and vestments he introduced at the monastery and elsewhere, and he began to absent himself from diocesan conventions due to illness. A report prepared for the convention of 1851 found that for several years the Bishop had been in a state of “mental excitement that had impaired his memory and judgment”.
In the summer of 1852, Ives asked for and was given a leave of absence on grounds of poor health. He set sail with his wife for Europe in the fall. Rumors soon reached North Carolina that Bishop Ives had converted to Catholicism. On December 22, 1852 Ives wrote a letter to the Diocese resigning his see. Shortly thereafter he was received by Pope Pius IX. Although he resigned as Bishop of North Carolina, Ives had not resigned from the House of Bishops. At the General Convention of 1853, a new canon (Canon 1 of that year) was adopted to deal with this problem… At the General Convention of 1856 an attempt to amend the Canon, which was generally recognized as imperfect and hastily drafted, was rejected by the House of Bishops, and it was not revised until the General Convention of 1859…
This revised Canon received its first test in November 1873, in connection with the events that led to the formation of the Reformed Episcopal Church. This movement was led by the Rt. Rev. George D. Cummins (the name is frequently misspelled, even on REC sites, as “Cummings”), the assistant Bishop of Kentucky, in reaction to the “high church” movement of which Bishop Ives had been such an advocate. Bishop Cummins objected strongly to the pomp and pageantry introduced by the Oxfordians, and crossed diocesan boundaries in his crusade to rescue the Church from what he saw as “Ritualism”. On November 10, 1873 Bishop Cummins resigned his position in a passionate letter written to his diocesan, the Rt. Rev. Benjamin Bosworth Smith, who also happened to be the Presiding Bishop. Although he stated that he found it necessary to "leave the communion in which I have labored in the sacred ministry for over twenty-eight years," he did not expressly resign his position in the House of Bishops, and thereby created an ambiguity which forced the Presiding Bishop to act.
You can read the whole of the first installment at his blog (Anglican Curmudgeon) here. Let’s hope the next one will appear soon.
Monday, April 7, 2008
London Times Cryptic Crossword for April 6
Apologies for the slight delay in getting this out. I have just returned from a short vacation.
Court restores access for Anglican rebels
From the Victoria (Canada) Times Colonist:
A last-minute court injunction cleared the way for temporarily ousted priests at Metchosin’s St. Mary of the Incarnation Anglican Church to return to the pulpit Sunday. The court decision came as a surprise to the Anglian Diocese of B.C., which had issued a statement Saturday saying alternate leadership at the long-serving Metchosin Road church would be in place for Sunday services.
The situation at the church began with a February vote in which St. Mary parishioners decided 105-14 to separate from the national Anglican body over a variety of issues, including interpretation of scripture and the blessing of same-sex marriage. As has been the case in similar church votes that have taken place in Canada, the majority of Metchosin parishioners are now aligned with the parallel Anglican Network in Canada, which opposes same-sex unions.
After several weeks of allowing activities to continue as usual for St. Mary following the vote, the Anglican Diocese of B.C. decided it was time to assert its position at the church. Locks were changed and a monitored alarm system was installed a few days ago, effectively barring incumbent clergy—the Venerable Sharon Hayton and Rev. Andrew Hewlett—from using the building. Hewlett said the changing of the locks was completely unexpected in light of a negotiation process underway between the two sides.
Cheryl Chang of the Anglican Network in Canada said in a statement that there are “serious legal issues” over ownership of the affected church properties in Metchosin “and we have asked the courts to preserve the status quo in the parishes while these bigger issues are being determined. We regret that court proceedings were necessary to defend the right of the congregation to continue worshipping in their church buildings.”
Other accounts report the bishop himself personally overseeing the changing of the locks. It suggests a whole new meaning for episcopé!
A last-minute court injunction cleared the way for temporarily ousted priests at Metchosin’s St. Mary of the Incarnation Anglican Church to return to the pulpit Sunday. The court decision came as a surprise to the Anglian Diocese of B.C., which had issued a statement Saturday saying alternate leadership at the long-serving Metchosin Road church would be in place for Sunday services.
The situation at the church began with a February vote in which St. Mary parishioners decided 105-14 to separate from the national Anglican body over a variety of issues, including interpretation of scripture and the blessing of same-sex marriage. As has been the case in similar church votes that have taken place in Canada, the majority of Metchosin parishioners are now aligned with the parallel Anglican Network in Canada, which opposes same-sex unions.
After several weeks of allowing activities to continue as usual for St. Mary following the vote, the Anglican Diocese of B.C. decided it was time to assert its position at the church. Locks were changed and a monitored alarm system was installed a few days ago, effectively barring incumbent clergy—the Venerable Sharon Hayton and Rev. Andrew Hewlett—from using the building. Hewlett said the changing of the locks was completely unexpected in light of a negotiation process underway between the two sides.
Cheryl Chang of the Anglican Network in Canada said in a statement that there are “serious legal issues” over ownership of the affected church properties in Metchosin “and we have asked the courts to preserve the status quo in the parishes while these bigger issues are being determined. We regret that court proceedings were necessary to defend the right of the congregation to continue worshipping in their church buildings.”
Other accounts report the bishop himself personally overseeing the changing of the locks. It suggests a whole new meaning for episcopé!
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Cryptic Crossword Solution for March 30
I didn’t manage to solve last week’s puzzle properly. (I must have been too preoccupied with my granddaughter!) But here is the official solution:
Friday, April 4, 2008
Episcopal parishes awarded property, assets
Here is the latest news from Virginia, which many of us have been anxiously waiting to here, as published in today’s Washington Times:
A Fairfax circuit judge has awarded a favorable judgment to a group of 11 Anglican churches that were taken to court last fall after breaking away from the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia in late 2006. In an 83-page opinion released late last night, Judge Randy Bellows ruled that Virginia’s Civil War-era “division statute” granting property to departing congregations applies to the Northern Virginia congregations, which are now part of the Nigerian-administered Convocation of Anglicans in North America.
“The court finds that a division has occurred in the diocese,” the judge wrote. “Over 7 percent of the churches in the diocese, 11 percent of its baptized membership and 18 percent of the diocesan average attendance of 32,000 [per Sunday] have left in the past two years.”
The lawsuit, which is the largest property case to date in the history of the Episcopal Church, involves millions of dollars of real estate and assets. With the finding that a division has occurred, the congregations get to keep the property under Virginia law. Because the diocese and the national Episcopal Church are expected to challenge the constitutionality of Virginia’s division statute, the judge has already scheduled arguments for that trial for May 28.
Now we wait to see both how this is challenged by the Episcopal Church and how similar cases play out in other states. You can find the whole news brief here. The full 83-page ruling can be found here, at Stand Firm.
A Fairfax circuit judge has awarded a favorable judgment to a group of 11 Anglican churches that were taken to court last fall after breaking away from the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia in late 2006. In an 83-page opinion released late last night, Judge Randy Bellows ruled that Virginia’s Civil War-era “division statute” granting property to departing congregations applies to the Northern Virginia congregations, which are now part of the Nigerian-administered Convocation of Anglicans in North America.
“The court finds that a division has occurred in the diocese,” the judge wrote. “Over 7 percent of the churches in the diocese, 11 percent of its baptized membership and 18 percent of the diocesan average attendance of 32,000 [per Sunday] have left in the past two years.”
The lawsuit, which is the largest property case to date in the history of the Episcopal Church, involves millions of dollars of real estate and assets. With the finding that a division has occurred, the congregations get to keep the property under Virginia law. Because the diocese and the national Episcopal Church are expected to challenge the constitutionality of Virginia’s division statute, the judge has already scheduled arguments for that trial for May 28.
Now we wait to see both how this is challenged by the Episcopal Church and how similar cases play out in other states. You can find the whole news brief here. The full 83-page ruling can be found here, at Stand Firm.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
I found this a fascinating discovery when it appeared in the newspapers a few days ago.
For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.
The 19th-century phonautograph, which captured sounds visually but did not play them back, has yielded a discovery with help from modern technology. The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.
Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.
But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers.
The rest of this article from the New York Times is here. You can hear the actual phonautograph recording here.
For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.
The 19th-century phonautograph, which captured sounds visually but did not play them back, has yielded a discovery with help from modern technology. The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.
Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.
But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers.
The rest of this article from the New York Times is here. You can hear the actual phonautograph recording here.
Resurrection
I am looking down from the airplane window on a beautiful (but still snowy) day in Minnesota. Karen and I are on our way to Vancouver, still exulting in yesterday morning’s glorious Easter celebration. We were still humming choruses of “I will ra-aise them up, I will ra-aise them up, I will ra-aise them up, on the la-ast day,” as we slowly advanced towards the security check in the airport.
The words, of course, are those of Jesus, spoken after he had fed a large crowd of more than five thousand people with a young lad’s lunch of a few fish and some small loaves of bread. “Do not toil for food that decays,” he said to them, “but for food that lasts to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” Then he pointed to himself as that food, the one who gives eternal life.
What Jesus was talking about was not some form of ongoing existence as a disembodied spirit. He promised to those who relied on him for life that he would raise them up at the last day. This may not have been as difficult a concept to grasp for his first hearers as it is for us today. They would have been exposed to the teachings of the Pharisees, who, consistent with broad sweep of biblical teaching, held to a firm faith in the resurrection of the dead.
It is a term we repeat week by week in our affirmation of the creed: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” What do we mean by this? Certainly not some crude reconstruction of our current bodies (for which many of us may be relieved!). It is something considerably more complex than that. The apostle Paul spoke of it as a “mystery”, by which “… we will all be changed …”
He used the metaphor of a seed being sown into the ground. As the plant that arises from it differs in so many ways from the seed, so the resurrection life will be distinct from all that we experience in the here and now. In many ways it is difficult even to compare the two. Yet at the same time there are correspondences. We can recognize, for example, the plant that comes from a kernel of corn, or an acorn, or a nasturtium seed.
We see this in the resurrection of Jesus in the gospels. At times the disciples found it difficult to recognize him. He was able to walk through a locked door as it were only a shadow. He could apparently be in Jerusalem at one moment and in Galilee the next. The limitations of time and space seemed to mean nothing to him. Yet he was the same Jesus they had known before the crucifixion, right down to the nail marks in his hands.
Much to our frustration, the Bible does not offer a detailed description of what the resurrection of the dead will be like. The one thing we can be sure of, though, is that it will be glorious. Glorious enough that all the sorrows, all the pain, all the tragedies and injustices of this life, will pale by comparison. Yet somehow I cannot but believe that even they will have significance—though, like everything else, unimaginably transformed.
As I complete these remarks, we are now in Vancouver, with our daughter and son-in-law and our new granddaughter, Maddie. Although there are still remnants of snow on mountain peaks, the forsythia and the cherry trees are in full blossom—all a marvelous annual foretaste of the true and final resurrection that is yet to come.
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