We are still under construction. Come back and visit us on April 19. We may still be under construction then, too. But maybe not.

Hello, we are still working out a few kinks, but hope to have our site ready for public consumption by Thursday April 19.

Welcome to the Episcopal Café, a ministry of the Diocese of Washington in partnership with The Episcopal Church and Visual Arts.

The Café is a collaborative effort by more than two dozen writers and editors, and an ever-growing list of visual artists. Together, we aspire to create a visually appealing, intellectually stimulating, spiritually enriching and at least occasionally amusing site where Episcopalians and those interested in our church can read, watch, listen and reflect upon contemporary life in a context informed by faith and animated by the spirit of charity.

Our aim is frankly, but we hope gently, evangelical. To the extent that we can speak intelligently, passionately, persuasively and truthfully—and to the degree that we manifest wisdom, humility and genuine concern for those we disagree with—we will succeed in drawing Episcopalians more deeply into their faith, and in persuading those without a spiritual home to explore our Church.

The new site includes Daily Episcopalian, a blog previously devoted to news and commentary on events in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. News items can now be found on The Lead blog. Commentary on the Church and Communion can still be found on Daily Episcopalian, but in its new incarnation the blog also features articles on theology, peace and justice initiatives and popular culture. A new blog, Speaking to the Soul, includes sermons, reflections, multimedia meditations and excerpts from books on spirituality.

Most of the art on the Café is provided by The Episcopal Church and Visual Arts. The Art Blog offers additional information, and sometimes a brief meditation, on each piece. We also feature a growing collection of multimedia meditations.

Today is our first day online, and we are having trouble with our comment function, so it is turned off for the time being. In the future, we will be accepting comments, but not from anonymous or pseudonymous posters. Please check our feedback policy before posting.

It has taken a while to work out the bugs, but the blogs of the Episcopal Cafe can now receive comments. Before posting a comment, please read our feedback policy. Comments will be moderated, but regular posters will find that a good track record will move their comments through the moderation process more quickly.

An unconfirmed leak published today on the internet suggests that when invitations go out later this year for the 2008 Lambeth Conference, all Bishops in the Anglican Communion will be invited.

Ruth Gledhill, who writes "Articles of Faith" for Times OnLine wrote "a well-informed source who indicated to me a few weeks back that everyone, including Gene Robinson and those who consecrated him, was to be invited. "

The Lambeth Conference Official Website says on its FAQ page only that invitations will be mailed later in 2007, and "Those attending the Lambeth Conference are bishops and archbishops of the Anglican Communion, and those in communion with the Anglican Communion. The Archbishop of Canterbury invites the participants to the conference." No other criteria is spelled out.

Much of Gledhill's blog is devoted to strange speculations about another possible invitation, and that is whether or not Mark Andrew, Bishop Gene Robinson's partner, would be invited as well. How this speculation is written, and the pictures chosen to accompany the post, seem to be intended to stir up outrage from those quarters who would wish for Bishop Robinson, if not the rest of the Episcopal Church, to be excluded from the conference.

At the same time, if Ms. Gledhill's "deep purple" (as she calls it) source is correct, this would prove to be a significant development.

Having a bulletin insert devoted to your ministry is about the highest accolade the Episcopal Church can provide, so we are delighted to announce that the Episcopal Church and the Visual Arts is the subject of this week's insert, prepared by the staff at Church Center in New York. We're especially pleased because Mel Ahlborn, Brie Dodson and the gang were gracious enough to drop the Cafe's name and address.

Father Jake reflects on the comment policy at Episcopal Café:

I initially was uncomfortable with this policy, but after giving it some thought, I've come to see the wisdom in it.

If our contributions to the conversation are to be of value, an ethic of transparency, of honesty, needs to be upheld.

No, I'm not going to adopt this policy at Jake's place. As one who has used a nom de plume for many years, I understand the need some folks have to protect their privacy. However, I am encouraging those who are comfortable doing so to begin using their real names.

To launch this effort towards more tranparency, it seems appropriate to begin with myself.

The bios of the contributors to the Café are here. Information on the sponsorship of the Café is here.

The Café's comment policy is here.

To register to comment , simply click on the word "comments" in gray type at the bottom of this, or any other individual blog entry.

The Diocese of Upper South Carolina is featuring the Café in its Web site spotlight. It's always nice to be noticed, but that much nicer when the people doing the noticing are Canon Peggy Hill and her assistant Bethany Human. The Diocece of USC generally needs a wheelbarrow to take home all the awards it receives at the Episcopal Communicators annual convention.

Thanks, too, to the Diocese of Bethlehem and the Diocese of East Tennessee for featuring us on their homepages.

The Café is not a branch of the Public Broadcasting System. But we are trying to raise a little money this week to defray our development costs, which were paid by the Diocese of Washington. So, we are asking you today just what we asked you yesterday, to make a donation to the diocese's fourth annual Bishop's Appeal. You can donate online in as little as two minutes, or write a check to the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, and mail it to:

Bishop's Appeal
Episcopal Church House
Mount Saint Alban
Washington D. C., 20016

Please put the word "Café" in the subject line of your check or in the dedication line of your online donation. Thanks. Now back to Part 27 of Asphalt: an American Odyssey, by Ken Burns.

Our thanks to everyone who supported the Café by contributing to the Diocese of Washington's annual Bishop's Appeal. You will be receiving a more formal expression of our appreciation in the mail, but we wanted to be sure you heard it from us first. If you haven't contributed but would like to, please visit this link, or mail a check made out to the Episcopal Diocese of Washington to:

Bishop's Appeal
Episcopal Church House
Mount Saint Alban
Washington D. C. 20016

A story on the Church of England's General Synod that originally appeared in this space was out of date.

Video is coming to the Episcopal Café.

Through a partnership with Trinity Church Wall Street, the Café will begin offering a weekly video feature produced by Trinity Television and New Media on Monday July 16. The initial video features the Rev. Thomas Keating, a Cistercian monk and popular author, talking about the practice of Centering Prayer.

Future installments include reflections from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jim Wallis, John Hockenberry, and Phyllis Tickle, as well as profiles of Sister Helen Prejean and author Kathleen Norris.

“We’ve envisioned video as an integral part of the Café right from the beginning,” said Jim Naughton, founding editor of the Café, a group blog site that went online in late April, “but we wanted to team up with people who did quality work. Trinity fits that bill in spades.”

According to Nathan Brockman, editor of Trinity Church Wall Street's website and publications, “Trinity's website is a sacred parish space that receives nearly as many visitors annually as our historic church buildings. Virtual outreach is essential to church vitality, and our partnership with Episcopal Cafe helps us extend that outreach in service of the wider Church.”

The Café, a partnership between the Diocese of Washington and Episcopal Church in the Visual Arts (ECVA), currently features news, art, spiritual readings, multi-media meditations, and a daily essay from one of 30 contributors from around the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Parish of Trinity Church was established in lower Manhattan and attracts over 1.8 million visitors annually. Parish ministries include St. Paul's Chapel, the Trinity Institute, a national theological conference and Trinity Grants, which has provided $72 million in funding in 85 countries around the world since 1972. The parish maintains www.trinitywallstreet.org, a premier website providing faith formation resources throughout the Anglican Communion.

Our new video feature has made its debut. You'll find a fresh segment in that slot every Monday morning. Daily Episcopalian and the Speaking to the Soul blogs are still available. You can find them in the blue navigation bar on your left.

If you are new to the Episcopal Café and have dropped in to read about the House of Bishops meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the conflict within the Anglican Communion, please have a look at some of our subtler charms, particularly the Art blog and Speaking to the Soul.

We welcome your comments. The Café is, well, a café. So we encourage kibbitzing, correction, debate, advice, engagement and other comment from our readers.

To make a comment to a post:

Visit https://www.typekey.com/t/typekey/register?lang=en-us

Set up your account. To ensure that you're ALWAYS authorized to comment to the Café, include your real name in your registration, either under 'display name' or 'membername'. Even though Typekey says it will not publish your real name unless you choose to, the Episcopal Café's Ethic of Transparency requires that you use your real name in order to have your comments published on the site. You may wish to register an ID specifically for interacting with the Cafe if you have a 'handle' you use elsewhere.

The first few times you comment, it may take a while for your comment to show up. Never fear! We keep an eye out and have to hand-approve people their first time round. But if you start commenting regularly, you'll get a status that will allow your comments to appear instantly.

When you go to comment on the Café blogs, you'll be told to "login" first. Clicking the login link will take you to a Typekey page where you enter your newly registered name and password.

More about our Ethic of Transparency, and other guidelines to comments can be found here.

"'At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge,' said the gentleman, taking up a pen, 'it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. ... We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices."

Each day on its Advent calendar, the Diocese of Washington presents giving opportunities, many of them drawn from Episcopal Relief and Development's Gifts for Life Catalog.

Elsewhere, Mad Priest and Elizabeth Kaeton have teamed up to raise money for Christ the King Anglican Church in the impoverished Cidade de Deus section of Rio de Janeiro where seminarian Luiz Coelho, known to many in the Anglican blogosphere, had a placement.

I have to mention my own favorite charity, Beisbol y Libros, a sports-related outreach effort in the Dominican Republic, run by my friend John McCarthy of the Home Run Baseball Camp in D. C. They accept donations here.

And if you are feeling especially generous, you might also consider an end of the year gift to support the Cafe. You can contribute to our annual Bishop's Appeal here.

Feel free to add your own causes in the comments section.

If you could see your way clear to making a year-end contribution to the Episcopal Café, we'd appreciate it. Even $20 would make a difference if enough of our daily visitors chip in.

To donate online, visit the Episcopal Diocese of Washington's Bishop's Appeal.

Some time along about noon yesterday, the Episcopal Café received its one millionth visit since opening for business in late April, 2007. Just a day earlier, we reached 2.5 million “page views.” Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who visits the site, especially those of you who drop by daily to keep up with the news here on The Lead, read the essays on Daily Episcopalian appreciate the art and perhaps spend a little time in meditation.

We hope you will journey with us through Lent.

Special thanks to our contributors and our partners, Episcopal Church in the Visual Arts and Trinity Television and New Media which supplies our weekly video clip. And congratulations to our Facebook group, which reached 300 members yesterday.

You can support the work of the Café by contributing to the Diocese of Washington's annual Bishop's Appeal.

We are celebrating our first anniversary today. We actually began operations in this incarnation on April 19, but we’ve decided that today is easier to remember, and probably represented the first day we had most of the bugs worked out and were getting a relatively clean read on our Web statistics.

We’d like to thank all of our visitors, especially those who make us a part of their daily routine. You make doing this work seem worthwhile.

As the Café’s creator, I’d also like to thanks our partners Episcopal Church in the Visual Arts and Trinity Television and New Media, without whom we’d be nothing more than words.

Thanks also to our terrific line-up of contributors, who recently won the Polly Bond Award for best Web writing from the Episcopal Communicators.

I owe my deepest thanks to the people who are elbows (and sometimes neck) deep in the works of the blog every day: Andrew Gerns (Mondays); Ann Fontaine (Tuesdays); John B. Chilton (Wednesdays); W. Nicholas Knisely (Fridays); Helen Thompson (Saturdays); Chuck Blanchard (Sundays) and Mel Ahlborn (art).

In our first year, we received about 1.36 million visits and 3.36 million page views. Our biggest sensation was an essay on a Japanese tourist begin kicked off a train for taking pictures, which drew nearly 60,000 visitors to the site in November—not quite double the 30,000 visitors (and 125,000 visits) per month we’ve been averaging since then. More people visit The Lead, our news blog, than any of our other offerings, but all of the blogs receive an average of at least 250 visits per day.

While people visit to keep up with the Anglican controversies and news of the Episcopal Church (and to read rip-snorting essays like this address by Marilyn McCord Adams to the Chicago Consultation), we’ve also had some off-beat hits like this April Fool's piece on the Episcopal Church being named the official denomination of Major League Baseball and Carol Barnwell’s interview with one of the students portrayed in Denzel Washington’s recent movie The Great Debaters.

Now comes the part where we ask for money.

The Diocese of Washington provided what might be called our start-up capital, but we no longer draw on its budget. As we’d like to redesign the home page of the Café and several of the blog pages (so that all of features and recent postings are visible at a glance) and as we’d like to throw you all a party at General Convention in 2009, we could use a little financial help.

Please consider making a donation to the 2008 Bishop’s Appeal, and marking your contribution “Episcopal Café.” You can do the job here.

Thanks again. Now back to the news.

Cheers,
Jim Naughton

Mike Croghan, the Rude Armchair Theologian, examines a day in the life of The Lead (yesterday as it happens) and asks some pertinent quesitons about the usefulness of hierarchy. Have a look.

We promise not to go all PBS on you and raise money 'round the clock, but it is the fund raising season, and we ask your support of our work here on the Café.

As we mentioned in an early posting:

The Diocese of Washington provided what might be called our start-up capital, but we no longer draw on its budget. As we’d like to redesign the home page of the Café and several of the blog pages (so that all of features and recent postings are visible at a glance) and as we’d like to throw you all a party at General Convention in 2009, we could use a little financial help.

Please consider making a donation to the 2008 Bishop’s Appeal, and marking your contribution “Episcopal Café.” You can do the job here.