The Rev. Astrid Storm, vicar of the Church of St. Nicholas-on-the-Hudson, writes about Akinola's upcoming visit to install the Rt. Rev. Martyn Minns as CANA's missionary bishop in The Huffington Post. In her essay, she remarks on how the departure of certain Virginia churches sowed a deeper dissent this past December:

As has been noted plenty of times before, the decision these churches made to leave the Episcopal Church because of its gay-friendly leanings is monumental, involving complex property disputes, legal wrangling, and the possible—probable—loss of dearly loved church buildings. That's not to mention the risks that come with aligning with an erratic bishop with a dubious human rights record from a country with problems that these Virginians probably can't begin to fathom—problems that have and will continue to have an enormous impact on the church and society in Nigeria.

In showing their willingness to take on such risks, the people in these parishes are making a strong statement against friends, acquaintances, and members of their own families who are gay or at least sympathize with gay people—sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings. Through those emails last December, I got but a glimpse of the sadness and alienation that must have resulted in many homes.

She continues, bearing witness to her own church, where people with opposing opinions came together in worship.

Read the whole thing here: A Split Episcopal Church.

The Falls Church News-Press comments on the visit to Virginia by Abp Akinola:

While the political elites in Abuja will use guns to maintain dominion over voters, Akinola will be lording over a ceremony in Old Dominion to install church rector Martyn Minns as the bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a subsidiary of the Nigerian church. Basically, conservatives who think the Episcopal Church is too liberal, are refusing to submit to its authority, and instead have opted to align themselves with Akinola.

Read more »

Where have all the letters to Archbishop Peter J. Akinola gone?

Read more »

Giles Fraser writes in the Church Times:

I have a deep ambivalence about the word “community”. We talk a great deal about the pathologies of individualism, but not enough about the moral dangers of human togetherness.

Last Saturday night, I walked into the wrong pub in the East End of Glasgow. Celtic had been playing at home. The pub was decked out in green. And I was inadvertently wearing a blue jumper. Had I thought about it, I’d have remembered that blue is the colour of Glasgow Rangers, and that, in this city, a blue jumper does not go unnoticed in a Roman Catholic pub.

That’s an understatement: the moment I walked through the door, eyes swivelled to meet me like the guns on a destroyer. With my shaven head, I might well have been mistaken for someone looking for trouble. I also suspected that the polite explanation that I’m: (i) English; (ii) a Protestant minister; and (iii) support Chelsea wasn’t going to make my life any easier, either. So I left sharpish. In that pub, community felt like another word for sectarianism.

Generally, the Church only ever sees the good in the idea of community. Yet, in the name of community, all manner of nastiness and bigotry is frequently excused. Precisely because we are so focused on the sins of the first person singular, our radar is insufficiently attuned to those committed in the first person plural. It’s a moral blind spot.

Read it all.

Promoting a faith based culture of reconciliation is the hope of 65 Episcopalians attending "The Third Way" training seminar led by The Rev. Brian Cox, who developed the program

"Our purpose is not to solve the conflict in the Episcopal Church but rather to promote a culture of reconciliation in the life of the church, a paradigm shift away from win-lose advocacy to faith-based reconciliation," said Cox, rector of Christ the King Church in Santa Barbara, California.

About 65 lay and clergy Episcopalians from across the nation are attending "A Third Way," a faith-based reconciliation training seminar being held through May 25 at St. James Church in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles.

Pat McCaughan, Episcopal News Service, writes that participants learn, "This is about creating a third way, a positive way, a proactive way, in the life of the Episcopal Church. It also offers people hope. Our experience has been that the whole seriousness of the conflict hasn't changed but people come away with a feeling of hope."

Cox developed the training following a 1995 Eastern European visit a few months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Marxism. He recognized the need for a compelling individual and collective moral vision and that "as a person of faith from the Abrahamic tradition, I was carrying in my heart the seed of an ancient moral vision whose time on the world stage had finally come."

The first faith-based reconciliation training seminar was offered in 1996 and "we witnessed the transforming power of the Spirit in bring together polarities to build bridges, demolish walls of hostility and promote the dynamic of forgiveness," said Cox.

"We found it also challenged people at the deepest level of being about their relationship with God, to come to that place to surrender and submission to God."

Submission to God, ironically, was a turnoff for Joanne O'Donnell, now a trainer. "When I first attended this training, I stumbled hard over this area and refused to participate in the follow-up exercise," said O'Donnell, an L.A. Superior Court Judge and General Convention deputy who authored Resolution A039, that called for church-wide faith-based reconciliation training.

"As a lesbian committed to the cause of full participation by gay and lesbian people in all ministries of the church, I had an underlying deep suspicion that the notion of God's sovereignty was being used to browbeat me into acknowledging that my life was sinful," she recalled.

"I've thought a lot about it since then; God's sovereignty is the single-most important element of faith-based reconciliation. It's the factor that distinguished it from secular forms of diplomacy and peacemaking, which don't seem to be terribly effective these days."

During her presentation to the gathering, she outlined eight core values which will frame their conversation during the next few days: pluralism; inclusion; peacemaking; justice; forgiveness; healing wounded communities and submission to God and atonement.

Read is all HERE

Over on the Comment Is Free group blog, Guardian columnist Andrew Brown issues a challenge to the Archbishop of Canterbury in light of Akinola's call to boycott Lambeth: Stand up for yourself, Rowan.

Taken at face value, this suggests that he and all his bishops will boycott the whole conference unless their invasion of the US is ratified by Dr Williams. There is no doubt that Akinola thinks of himself as the true leader of the Anglican communion, and Dr Williams as a pathetic post-colonial relic. Although Dr Akinola has several times trembled on the brink of marching right out of the Anglican communion, he has not so far had to choose whether this is what he really wants. "He [Williams] will do whatever we tell him to", he was overheard telling one of his advisers at an earlier meeting; but this arrogance is what Dr Williams is banking on. If there is a long-term plan to hold the Anglican churches more or less together, it is based on the belief that most of them would much rather not be led by Dr Williams than by whipped about by Dr Akinola.

But is there such a plan at all? Or is the simple explanation for this subtle man the right one? This is the question the Nigerian boycott threat will answer. Now that the threat has been made, it can't be withdrawn without someone backing down; in Dr Akinola's eyes, the obvious someone will be Dr Williams. There are 14 months before the conference; 14 months in which every effort possible will be made to bully him out of his original decision.

...

Dr Williams caved in over Jeffrey John in July 2003, nearly four years ago; we will find out soon enough if he has learned anything from the experience. If he has not, and if he caves in once more, no one will ever listen to him again. Why should we care what he believes about anything if we know he won't stand up for it?

Read the whole thing.

Scott Gunn at Inclusive Church blog has done his history homework on former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey. Comparing "then" with "now" he finds "there is a bit of conservative revisionism going on with respect to Anglican polity. Witness Carey's two letters. In one, he unequivocally supports unity, and in the next, he implies that those conservative bishops who would imperil unity should be invited to Lambeth."

In Lord Carey's letter of 2000 he says:

"To talk of the Primates disciplining the Episcopal Church of the USA or any other Province for that matter, goes far beyond the brief of the Primates' Meeting." After noting that Lambeth resolution 1.10 "reflects the traditional teaching of the church," and "Nevertheless, in many parts of the Communion, faithful Christians, some of whom are homosexual themselves, are seeking to engage the Church in a challenging reassessment of its teaching on human sexuality, because they have felt excluded from the Church for many years. I believe that it is wholly in the spirit of the resolution, and that is why the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA and I set up an international conversation between bishops of different views, an experiment which was so successful that it will meet again later this year. I have also sought to encourage such conversations more locally as well."
Carey reminded the Communion that "we must guard against the risk of allowing one issue to divert all our attention from the primary task of mission to which we are called."

"It is not too much to say that everything has changed in the Anglican Communion as a result of the consecration of Gene Robinson." and he now writes that ECUSA "clearly signalled its abandonment of Communion norms, in spite of warnings from the Primates that the consecration of a practising homosexual bishop would 'tear the fabric of the Communion'."

Read it all Here

Syndicated columnist Michael J. McManus seems to be a raving fan of Nigeria's CANA initiative, writing, among other things:

As Minns summed it up, "We are here to give people a freedom of choice." At present, CANA has 34 parishes and nearly 7,000 members, which is more than 40 Episcopal dioceses. About a third are ethnic Nigerian churches in America, a third are in Northern Virginia and the others scattered.

Bill Mehr responds to the entire column (available here) in the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star:

In "Missionaries to America?" Michael J. McManus asks, "Why would the United States need a missionary bishop?" The answer is: it doesn't. Mr. McManus claims outnumbered orthodox Episcopalians must reach out to Anglicans in the Global South for "safe haven." There's the flaw. They don't need to reach out for what they already possess.

According to historical Anglican tradition, the Episcopal Church, like America itself, welcomes diverse points of view within a broader set of canons. The problem for Mr. McManus' orthodox is that they constitute a minority that is frustrated they can't impose one viewpoint upon the entire church.

Their strategy is to claim a majority within an international Anglican Communion, but that association carries no binding authority over the Episcopal Church in America.

If individuals feel they want to attend a church with a narrower theological doctrine, they are free to exercise that choice. There are no provisions, however, for whole entities like dioceses or parishes to leave. There isn't a diocese or parish in the U.S. where everyone wants to secede.

What about freedom of choice for those who want to stay? That's the focus of the lawsuits.

The diocese is acting on behalf of loyal members who simply want to reclaim the space to worship in their own church and offer that blessing to their children.

My choice, like that of the majority of Episcopalians, is to remain a member of a denomination that provides safe haven for disagreement and that entertains diversity.

When the lawsuits are over, and the issue of property is cleared up, the Episcopal Church will stand as firmly as ever upon the principles on which it was founded, and will grow and flourish, once more, as a shining example of the freedom offered to all who follow Jesus Christ.

Found here.

The child-rearing world is profoundly ambivalent about male aggression. Should it be suppressed, cultivated, channeled? Which of these? Read Walter Kirn's insightful essay. Then discuss.

Deviancy! Immorality! Racism! If you read enough of the papers—not to mention the bloggers-- this is what one might think the Episcopal Church stands for. Have you heard? The Episcopal Church is swinging the door open to deviants! Also, six Anglican bishops want Canadian Anglicans want to approve immorality so they won't be distracted from global warming. And don't forget, when the Executive Council disagrees with African Archbishops, it's racism.

Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative columnist, Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a popular public speaker for conservative causes, whose reputation as a race-baiter was established by his book, The End of Racism, trains his animus on gays, lesbians and the Episcopal Church in his most recent blog entry. Under the heading "Attention Social Deviants! The Episcopal Church Wants You," D'Souza likens the Church's acceptance of gays and lesbians to the acceptance of child molesters and serial killers.

“--Convicts Who Have Been Found Guilty of Violent Crimes (more marginalized now than ever before)
“--Child Molesters (marginalized even within the prison population!)
“--Serial Killers (admired in the movies, but otherwise very marginalized since at least the days of Jack the Ripper)
“--Pedophiles (so marginalized that even gays keep their distance, and all for holding that there's nothing magical about being "of age")
“--Polygamists (marginalized for holding the view, "Why Stop at Two?")
“--Skinheads (more marginalized today than the groups they seek to marginalize)
“This is hardly a complete list, and I'm sure I'll be hearing shortly from nudists, swingers, wife-swappers, Nazis, and other groups I've left off my list.”

So, in one swipe D'Souza includes a faithfully partnered gay man with child molesters and serial killers. Does this make any sense at all? Only if one's goal is to stir up rage. Keep in mind that D'Souza's career has been financed since his college days by the same foundations that keep the Institute on Religion and Democracy in business. Not only does this kind of thing make happy people who agree with D'Souza, he knows that it will illicit rage from some quarters of the people he opposes.

D'Souza is certainly not alone in this approach.

Washington Times columnist Mark Steyn claims that the plea of six Anglican bishops to this weeks General Synod to allow for some provision to bless same-sex couples is another fashionable stand along with their concerns for Global Warming, both of which lead to global moral depravity.

And just last week, Chris Sugden of the Anglican Maintream says disagreeing with certain African Archbishops is racist. It was all well and good, he tells us, for the 1998 Lambeth Conference to condemn genocide in Rwanda, but now the tables are turned when it comes to the ordination of openly gay bishops, Americans should be quiet and listen. “Now,” Sugden says, “something that was regarded as acceptable when dealing with Africans is not acceptable to the Americans. It sniffs of racism.”

To make this analysis work, one must equate the deaths of 800,000 Rwandans in the late 1990's—and what this horror did to the Church and the people of Rwanda-- to the ordination of one man in 2003 in New Hampshire.

By themselves, these statements seem irrational. Most faithful Episcopalians ignore them, perhaps with a sigh and a roll of the eyes. Small shots across the bow don't stop the vast majority of the faithful from going about the business of living faithfully. But taken together, these statements are 'red meat' for a loyal base—many of whom are not even Episcopalian—in a nasty war of words. And when ideas don't work, exaggeration, smear and outright lies will.

And the worst part is this: most of the time it's not about the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Communion per se. For most of these writers, it about using the Church as a symbol of all that is wrong with the world from their point of view. Which sure beats writing about what's right.

Anti-religion books and books on atheism have been bestsellers this year. John Cornwell writes of his struggles with his faith and why he thinks Richard Dawkins and others fail to understand what it means to believe.

Cornwell writes in The Guardian:

It is a year since Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion prompted a torrent of adulation and anguished riposte. The crucial issue he raised is not so much that religious believers can morph into violent extremists (which they patently can), but what is to be done about it. Dawkins thinks that religion is irrational, because it means accepting truths without logic and evidence; and dangerous, because such systematic irrationality can lead to extreme acts of violence. So hideously irrational and dangerous is the disease of faith, he claims, that faith instruction to the young is worse than paedophile abuse. Dawkins wants to rid the world of religion.

Cornwell's response to Dawkins et al is:

As someone who had wavered between agnosticism and atheism for two decades, before having returned queasily to Christianity, I empathised with Greene's faith as "doubt of doubt" as opposed to faith as certitude. Faith is a journey without arrival, complicated by false turns, breakdowns, dead ends and wheel-changes. Faith, like love, is seldom entirely constant; nor is it irrevocable. While frequently assailed by doubt, faith is open to provisional, symbolic interpretations (most Christians outside the American bible belt do not take the book of Genesis literally). Those who pursue a religious vocation are not spared vicissitudes of faith and doubt, any more than card-carrying atheists. Mother Teresa, the Albanian nun who worked for the poor in Calcutta, left letters in which she spoke of her doubts right up to her death: "Where is my faith?" she once wrote to a confidant. "Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be a God - please forgive me." By the same token, Professor AJ Ayer, the most ardent atheist of his day, proclaimed that he believed in an afterlife following a near-death experience in 1988 when he was clinically dead for four minutes. After a few days, and an outcry from the atheists' society, of which he was the president, he partially recanted: "What I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my attitude towards that belief." Doubt of doubt.

Dawkins' recourse to the analogies of disease and medicine is, of course, entirely well meant, and I know him to be a man of the most liberal sympathies, but has he considered the far-reaching consequences of similar metaphors employed by far less well-meaning figures? It was only to be expected that a bold thesis that condemned religion en masse would have profound socio-political implications. Dawkins is a brilliant natural historian, whose science books I have celebrated in a string of reviews. The God Delusion has been criticised for trespassing clumsily in the realms of theology; but my own objections are more in the ambit of socio-politics. Put bluntly, The God Delusion is liable to persuade religious fundamentalists that a pluralist secular society is every bit as hostile to the practice of faith as they ever thought it to be. By urging the elimination of religion in the name of all that civil society holds dear, Dawkins is inviting fundamentalists to be even more fundamentalist. His book, then, is a counsel of despair as well as an incitement to the very thing he deplores and seeks to remedy.

More thoughts by John Cornwell here.

Christianity Today's John Wilson lists his top 5 books on atheism. On the Nature of the Universe by Lucretius So you are a little weary of reading Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and such? Take a break with Lucretius—not an atheist, strictly speaking, but a first-century B.C. materialist forerunner of Dawkins & Co.

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
For bright young Christians who are engaging the atheist boomlet of 2007 and for whom existentialism is merely one of many isms in the last century's garbage dump, it would be instructive to read this novel, first published in French in 1938.

Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America
by James C. Turner
There's a Catholic argument that blames the Reformation for the rise of atheism. Aha! That's where the trouble started. Turner offers a subtler version, showing how developments within Christendom prepared the ground.

Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England
by Timothy Larsen
Larsen tells the fascinating story of Victorians who renounced their faith, campaigned vigorously for atheism—in print and on the speaker's platform—and then reconverted to Christianity.

Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life
Louise M. Antony, ed.
This Atheists R Us compilation differs markedly in tone from Hitchens and Dawkins. Excellent fare for Christian small groups whose members are genuinely interested in the arguments raised by atheists.

I find that Dawkins and others set up a God is not recognizable to this follower of Jesus Christ. He attacks and trivializes this "non-God" and in the process sells books.

What books would you recommend for seekers with doubts?

Tobias Haller announces an ambitious project.

[W]hat I would like to begin to do in this and succeeding posts to this blog is to begin to unpack and challenge what I perceive to be the underlying premises or assumptions of the traditional view, in an effort to get behind the “reassertions” to find out if there is an actual basis of agreement from which a different settlement might be reached — or if we really are thinking and working from two radically incompatible bases.

The Anglican Scotist has been on a hot streak lately. This item in which he captures the tortured logic of anti-Episcopal Anglicans --Christians are obligated to break communion with material heretics only if they are from the Episcopal Church and against separation; any mistake about the faith is a sin only for an Episcopalian against separation.--is especially good.

Mark Harris joins Cafe contributor Greg Jones in recommending that Archbishop Drexel Gomez resign as chair of the Anglican Communion's covenant design group as he can no longer be trusted as an honest broker.

And Cafe newshound Nick Knisely points us to an article from Fred Clark (aka Slacktivist) on the influence that Reinhold Niebuhr has had on Sen. Barack Obama.

John Humphreys became an angry agnostic but he does not find an answer in the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins and others either. He writes:

My spiritual journey – if that’s not too high-falutin’ a notion – took me from my childish Big Questions to my ultimate failure to find any corresponding Big Answers. I have ended up – so far, at any rate – as a doubter. It’s clear that I’m far from alone.

In almost half a century of journalism I have never had such a response to anything I have written or broadcast as I did to last year’s Radio 4 series Humphrys in Search of God. The letters arrived by the sackful. It felt a bit like putting my fingers on the religious pulse of the nation; and the pulse is still strong. However empty the pews may be there are plenty of people with a sincere and passionate belief. There are also plenty of people who think it’s all a load of nonsense.

What surprised me is how many think of themselves as neither believers nor atheists but doubters. They, too, are sincere. Devout sceptics, if you like. And many of them feel beleaguered. I’m with them. SINCE starting to write my book, I have fallen into the habit of asking almost everyone I meet if they believe in God. And here’s the interesting thing: it was only the atheists who seemed absolutely certain.

He concludes:

Trite it may be, but most of us can see the beauty as well as the horrors of the world and, sometimes, humanity at its most noble. We sense a spiritual element in that nobility and, in the miracle of unselfish love and sacrifice, something beyond our conscious understanding. You don’t need to be an eastern mystic or a devout religious believer to feel that. We should not – we must not – be browbeaten by arrogant atheists and meekly accept their “deluded” label. They are no more capable of understanding this most profound mystery than a small child making his first awe-inspiring discoveries.

As for the fanatics – religious or secular – history suggests they succeed only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be defeated by our own irrational fear. For every fanatic there are countless ordinary, decent people who believe in their own version of a benevolent God and wish no harm to anyone. Many of them regard it as their duty to try to make the world a better place. It is too easy to blame the evils of the world on belief in God. In the end, if we make a mess of things, we shall have ourselves to blame – not religion and not God. After all, he doesn’t exist. Does he?

Read it all in The Times online.

An op-ed in Uganda's Weekly Observer reflects on the state of the Anglican Communion and Africa's role in ongoing disputes over homosexuality and the church. The unbylined article expresses a sympathy for people who find homosexuality "revolting," but notes that African churches may hurt people more by exerting so much energy over the matter when there are other, graver issues threatening God's flocks in Uganda and beyond:

... some religious leaders seem to have forgotten the virtues of tolerance and forgiveness so well articulated in the Bible in their zeal to condemn and pass judgment on homosexuality.

As a result of this fixation, such religious leaders tend to keep a blind eye on other evils going on under their noses everyday but are quick to jump onto the gay bandwagon.

Every other day some religious leaders are cited in cases of theft, witchcraft or adultery, but they are not treated as outlaws as much as gays are. Yet the Bible clearly says that all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.

...

If the Church is to be a true house of God, it should accept all its children, regardless of their flaws or tendencies. We need to tolerate each other’s faults.

If the enthusiasm with which the clergy are fighting homosexuality were applied to evils such as theft, adultery and discrimination, Uganda would perhaps be a better world!

The whole thing is here, with a hat tip to Episcope.

The Most Rev. John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, says the situation in "Zimbabwe cannot any more be seen as an African problem needing an African solution - it is a humanitarian disaster" and that Britain needs to overcome "colonial guilt" which he says has paralyzed a response to that nations needs under a regime that Sentamu has likened to that of Idi Amin.

Even as the Archbishop calls decisive action a moral duty, President Robert Mugabe has turned his reputation as a freedom fighter into a symbol of African resistance to the West, even as the political structure and economy of his nation deteriorate.

Sentamu writes in The Observer:

The statistics alone are devastating: the average life expectancy for women in Zimbabwe is 34 years; for men, it is 37. Inflation rages at 8,000 per cent; the shelves are empty of bread and maize; in the hospitals and clinics, children die for lack of vitamins, food and medicine, while the ravages of AIDS are exacerbated by government indifference.

In the cramped townships now home to those supporters of the opposition whose homes Mugabe destroyed in a frenzy of destruction called 'Clean Out the Filth', there is no electricity or fresh running water and sewage spews out of the dilapidated buildings. The first cholera deaths were reported last week.

The Archbishop, who suffered at the hands of Idi Amin's regime in his native Uganda, compares the Zimbabwean regime of Robert Mugabe to Amin's saying,

Britain needs to escape from its colonial guilt when it comes to Zimbabwe. Mugabe is the worst kind of racist dictator. Having targeted the whites for their apparent riches, Mugabe has enacted an awful Orwellian vision, with the once oppressed taking on the role of the oppressor and glorying in their totalitarian abilities.

Like Idi Amin before him in Uganda, Mugabe has rallied a country against its former colonial master only to destroy it through a dictatorial fervour. Enemies are tortured, the press is censored, the people are starving and meanwhile the world waits for South Africa to intervene. That time is now over.

Sentamu calls for targeted sanctions against the regime, saying that sanctions could not hurt the poor than they are now.

Watch this interview on the BBC.

The Archbishop is not alone in calling Mugabe a tyrant, but in a strange way, Mugabe uses this very criticism to solidify his position in Zimbabwe.

Peter Kagwanja, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, says that while Mugabe repels the west, he attracts much applause in Africa:

In less than seven years, Zimbabwe has witnessed the fastest peace-time economic dip in history since Weimer Germany – plunging one of Africa's strongest economic and regional breadbaskets into a crisis with 4 million people reportedly starving and in need of food aid.

Mugabe may have lost the economic war, but he has won every political battle with the West. As the oldest freedom fighter still in office, he has always drawn the biggest applause in African meetings, including the recent SADC summit. The Africa-West standoff has emboldened him and turned him into a symbol of African resistance, a liberation hero.

Even though foreign humanitarian aid has flowed steadily to the poor in Zimbabwe, the West's asset freezes and travel bans on Mugabe and a hundred of his associates and spouses are seen in some quarters as "racial" retribution for his seizing of white farms and handing them over to black Zimbabweans. But invoking a moral mission, the West insists that its "smart" sanctions have targeted elements of the ruling elite "engaged in actions or policies to undermine Zimbabwe's democratic processes or institutions."

Kagwanja says that Mugabe's status as elder statesman and anticolonialist hero has ensured unwavering regional support. His article provides useful background as well as concrete steps that might give form to Sentamu's call for moral courage in responding to this humanitarian crisis.

An editorial in the Anglican Journal begins by recounting the history of a case of alleged abuse against students at a school connected to the Anglican Church of Canada. Leanne Larmondin, the author, then lists some specific recommendations for all churches in terms of how they work with institutions inside and alongside them.

First a bit of the history and background of the allegations being made against Grenville Christian College and the way the Anglican Church of Canada responded:

"Initially, when the story broke in the secular media, the church tried to distance itself from the school, saying there was ‘no direct relationship at all between the Anglican Church of Canada and Grenville Christian College.’ Yes, church officials said, three of the former headmasters were Anglican priests, including the most recent holder of that office, but they were there in a private capacity. Yes, the school used Anglican prayer books and hymnbooks, but it used other forms of worship too. Yes, bishops and other Anglican church dignitaries presided at ceremonial functions, but church officials are invited to many events."

Later on, Larmondin makes some specific recommendations:

What lessons should the church have learned from the residential schools affair?

For one, the church ought to be scrupulous about the groups with whom it associates. Regardless of whether the Anglican church was a founding body of Grenville, there appeared to be a close relationship between church and school that was cemented with the regular worship “in the Anglican tradition” in the school’s chapel, with the regular visits from church dignitaries and the Anglican flag that flew on the campus. Any rumours of misconduct at the institution should have been investigated. It was not a matter of whether the school was an Anglican school, it was thought of as such and the church must protect its integrity and care for society’s most vulnerable members.

Additionally, an Anglican priest on leave is still a priest. Although the allegations have not been proven in court, the strange stories about cultish practices at the school did reach the diocese; failure by the diocese to investigate those claims when the school headmaster was a member of the clergy seems pure folly.

A week or so after the story broke in the media, the church did make an effort to redeem itself. By mid-September, it appeared to be making more of a pastoral effort, with the bishop meeting with former students to hear their complaints and the diocese launching an investigation of the incidents.

Read the rest of the editorial here.

The Rev. Matthew Dutton-Gillett has written a new essay for The Episcopal Majority. He says:

If Anglicanism falls apart, with “conservatives” going their way and “liberals” going their way, the world will not be surprised. Because that is exactly what human beings do and have done over and over again throughout history. They choose sides, they throw rocks at their enemies and they ultimately split up – or else destroy one party to the conflict. Most of the world will not see the break up of the Anglican Communion as a great heroic defense of Truth. They will see it as a failure even among Christian people to live any better with each other than the rest of humanity. The falling apart of the Anglican Communion will not be an evangelistic triumph for the True Faith. It will be a conspicuous example of the inability of the followers of Jesus to actually follow him.

Read it all.

Garrison Keillor writes in Salon:

In Baltimore with friends Sunday morning, a splendid fall day under blue skies, we marched off to the nearest church and found ourselves in an old brownstone temple of 1852, wooden box pews, stained glass on all sides, old tiled floor, for a high Anglican-Catholic Mass, a troop of choristers in white, altar boys, bearded priests in medieval vestments, holy water and puffs of smoke and bells and chanting of scripture, precision bowing and genuflecting, all rather exotic for an old fundamentalist like me but deeply moving, and it made me think about my father, whose birthday was Oct. 12, and brought me to tears.

It was formal high Mass, none of that "hi and how are we all doing this morning" chumminess, and the homily only summarized the scripture texts about healing, it didn't turn into an essay on healthcare. Ten voices strong and true in the choir and positioned as they were under the great arch of the chancel, their tender polyphonic Kyrie and Gloria infused the whole building with pure kindness.

He continues:

Now I'm an old, tired Democrat, sick of this infernal war that may go on for the rest of my life and in which more of our brethren will die miserably, both American and Iraqi. I'm sick of politics today, the cleverness and soullessness of it. But here in an old brownstone church at an ancient ceremony, there is a moment of separation from all the griefs of this world. Ten men and women are singing a cappella, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name," and their voices drench us fugitive worshippers kneeling, naked, trembling, needy, in the knowledge of grace, and when we arise and go out into Baltimore, the blessing follows us.

Read it all here.

For those of us used to stories of people giving up the rat race to save their souls, Melissa Hirshon's story reflects on the opposite. She talks about what she gained and lost in moving from the non-profit, charitable sector into the private, corporate sector.

It all started when she grew up in a progressive Episcopal Church....

Having been raised in 1970s Cambridge, and in a "progressive" Episcopal church to boot, I was determined to make a difference from day one.

No imperialist, soulless job for me. From the moment I graduated from college, I worked to save the world or, at least, people with vision impairments.

For 15 years, I transcribed braille books and magazines at a braille printing and publishing house in Boston.

But it couldn't last. Something was happening that posed a painful choice:

After 15 years, I knew it had to end. It was a hard choice. Didn't I want to save the world? But while the company was not a Dilbert-ian hell, any job has its aggravations, and I was starting to go batty over the company's penny-pinching and their slow pace in dealing with growing pains....

...But the worst problem was that the raises were not keeping up with any sort of cost of living increases in the Boston area; when I threatened to leave without a decent raise and was told, "we'll miss you," I knew that I had to stop saving the world, but save myself instead.

Attitude at the workplace was one issue--how are employees cared for and how is work managed so that even good work does not become overwhelming?--are questions that are often not considered in the non-profit world because of the importance of the "cause." So she made the change to the for-profit world and discovered some surprising things.

Having known no other work life other than the nonprofit one, I was absolutely dumbfounded at some of the basic perks of the rat race.

The improved salary was only the tip of the iceberg.

She found that in her company, allowances were made for--and the company actually has the money to afford--the things that employees need to work more efficiently and feel supported.

She concludes:

Whether you want to save the world or take care of yourself, it's important to do both.

And it really doesn't matter what order you do it in.

Read: The Boston Globe: Time to make a difference - join the rat race.

Anglicans Online asks whether the Communion is becoming like Facebook or another social networking site with people adding and deleting each other at will. The essay encourages ideas for how our relationships can be strengthened and deepened across time and space.

The more we considered it, the more we began to see that Anglicans may be in danger of regarding relationships of ecclesial communion with the same degree of seriousness as Facebook users treat adding and deleting 'friends' or creating, joining and leaving special interest groups online. The primary point of intersection is in the non-reciprocity of the relationships of Facebook friendship and Anglican communion. One can, apparently, be in communion with a central figure in Anglicanism, yet not with other people, dioceses and provinces in communion with that bishop's province and diocese.

Christian communion is historically reciprocal, deliberate, public, duty-creating, love-impelling, and church-strengthening. As the ground of Christian life it is not something we choose, but something we are given: given from God the Father through God the Son, enlivened by and filled with God the Holy Spirit. It is a profound, ideally eternal relation with people we may never meet or befriend on this side of the veil. It is a far cry from the point-and-click ecclesiastical relationships we watch unfold week by week in Anglicanism. Anything less than reciprocal, public, sacramental, Christ-grounded, God-given communion is less than what it ought to be, and less than the people of God need to really serve and know the one 'unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid'.

Do what you can this year to keep our Anglican Communion from becoming a Facebook communion, and to enliven your friendships with handshakes, telephone calls, letters, shared meals, good walks and good deeds

Read it all here

Mark Harris counters at his blog Preludium that perhaps a commonwealth in cyberspace has advantages for relationships and the inclusion of all Anglicans not just those with money to travel for face to face meetups.

More from Jason Wells at [lab]oratory

In a delightfully incisive essay in The Wilson Quarterly, Benjamin R. Barber writes:

Whatever we make of it, today competition dominates our ideology, shapes our cultural attitudes, and sanctifies our market economy as never before. We are living in an age that prizes competition and demeans cooperation, an era more narcissistic than the Gilded Age, more hubristic than the age of Jackson. Competition ­rules.

We need only look at America’s favorite ­activities—­sports, entertainment, and ­politics—­to notice the distorting effect of the obsession with competition. Sports would seem to define competition, as competition defines sports. But beginning with the ancient Olympics, sports have also been about performance, about excelling (hence, excellence), and about the cultivation of athletic virtue. It is not victory but a “personal best” that counts. In the United States, however, athletics is about beating others. About how one performs in comparison with others. Ancient and modern philosophers alike associate comparison with pride and vanity (amour-propre), and have shown how vanity corrupts virtue and excellence. When Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar protests, “Such men as he be never at heart’s ease/While they behold a greater than themselves,” he captures what has become the chief hazard of a ­hyper-­competitive culture. No wonder ours is often an ­outer-­directed culture, unreflective, grasping, aggressive, and ­cutthroat.

It is, ironically, a culture that tries to pin on the animal world responsibility for human viciousness. Michael Vick, one of our great gladiatorial football competitors, recently admitted to sponsoring brutal dogfights. The real dogfights, of course, are the football games he played in, where injury and even death are not unavoidable costs but covertly attractive features of the sport. Where steroid use is forgivable, or at least understandable, on the way to a winning record. And where dogfighting itself (like bullfighting and cockfighting) is justified by an appeal to the “laws of nature,” though it is men who articulate those laws to rationalize their own warlike ­disposition.

It is much the same with entertainment. Our most successful shows, themselves in a competition for survival with one another (sweeps week!), pit ­on-­camera competitors against one another in contests only one can win. The eponymous show Survivor is the Darwinian prototype, but the principle rules on all the “reality” shows. On American Idol, singing is the excuse but winning the real aim. In the winners’ world of television, nothing is what it seems. Top Chef is not about excellence or variety in cooking, but about winning and losing. Project Runway turns a pluralistic fashion industry that caters to many tastes into a race (with clocks and time limits) in which there is but one winner. The competitive culture hypes winners but is equally (more?) fascinated with losers. “It is not enough that I win,” proclaims the ­hubris-­driven American competitor, “others must lose.” And Americans have shown themselves ready to become big losers in order to be eligible to become big ­winners—­however remote the odds. We are a nation of gamblers willing to tolerate radical income inequality and a large class of losers (into which we willingly risk being shunted) for the chance to ­win.

American politics too is founded on competition. Contrast electoral politics in our representative democracy with citizen politics in a participatory democracy, where the aim is not to win but to achieve common ground and secure public goods—a model of politics in which no one wins unless everyone wins, and a loss for some is seen as a loss for all. The very meanings of the terms “commonweal” and “the public interest” (the “res publica” from which our term “republic” is derived) suggest a system without losers. How different from this the American system has become. As each election rolls around, we complain that ideas and policy are shoved to the background and personality and the horse race it engenders are placed front and center.

What’s gone wrong here? Why, as a nation, are we so obsessed with competition, so indifferent to cooperation?

Read it all.

Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily.

If you have experienced a "dark night of the soul" and emerged stronger, or, if you've ever even dabbled in the arts, Eric G. Wilson's recent essay about melancholia and the creative impulse in The Chronicle Review might strike a chord with you.

He writes:

Melancholia, far from a mere disease or weakness of will, is an almost miraculous invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities for existence. Without melancholia, the earth would likely freeze over into a fixed state, as predictable as metal. Only with the help of constant sorrow can this dying world be changed, enlivened, pushed to the new.

These are not metaphysical claims, not some New Age claptrap. On the contrary, these statements are attuned to the sloppy world as it simply appears to us in our everyday experience. When we, with apparent happiness, grab hard onto one ideology or another, this world suddenly seems to take on a static coherence, a rigid division between right and wrong. The world in this way becomes uninteresting, dead. But when we allow our melancholy mood to bloom in our hearts, this universe, formerly inanimate, comes suddenly to life. Finite rules dissolve before infinite possibilities. Happiness to us is no longer viable. We want something more: joy. Melancholia galvanizes us, shocks us to life.

Melancholia pushes against the easy "either/or" of the status quo. It thrives in unexplored middle ground between oppositions, in the "both/and." It fosters fresh insights into relationships between oppositions, especially that great polarity life and death. It encourages new ways of conceiving and naming the mysterious connections between antinomies. It returns us to innocence, to the ability to play in the potential without being constrained to the actual. Such respites from causality refresh our relationship to the world, grant us beautiful vistas, energize our hearts and our minds.

Read it all.

Sarah Howell reflects on a holiday dedicated to radical love:

Here’s what Dr. King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

Go ahead and re-read that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

The Bible is a big long book and Lord knows within its many mansions of eccentricity finding justification for literal and figurative witch hunts is as simple as pretending “enhanced investigation technique” is not a synonym for torture. I happen to be with Dr. King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount’s call for love to be at the heart of Christian behavior, and one of us got a Ph.D in systematic theology.

Read the rest: New York Times: Radical Love Gets a Holiday.

Over at the Christian Century blog Theolog, John Dart made an observation about the value of humor when it comes to the art of preaching and our own relationship with faith. Being able to connect with people's ability to laugh, he says, is a gift that helps diffuse tension:

One night last month Jay Leno, acting as both performer and writer while the writers guild strike dragged on, recruited a priest, a rabbi and a minister, each to tell a favorite joke on stage. The clerics told their tales smoothly and got laughs.

It made me long for more exposure to clergy who routinely touch funny bones with great one-liners and funny-yet-wise stories. Comedy is a difficult art in any venue, no less in church settings. But it can work in certain situations, such as with a pastor known for wry humor and congregants who expect and react to the humor.

Some evangelical churches have had success with special evening performances by Christian comics, one troupe calling itself “Clean Comedians” to reassure congregations of its family-friendly values. Robert G. Lee, performing at Bel Air Presbyterian Church, imagined meeting Moses in heaven and hearing him grumbling about the flock wandering with him through the desert for 40 years. “Every day people would come up to me and say, ‘Are we there yet?’”

He then wonders where we can go for religious humor these days. Pay a visit if you'd like to weigh in.

In April of 1819, right around the time that he began to suffer the first symptoms of tuberculosis -- the disease that had already killed his mother and his beloved brother, Tom -- the poet John Keats sat down and wrote, in a letter to his brother, George, the following question: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?"

So writes Eric Wilson, in an op-ed article for The Los Angeles Times, which is a bite-sized version of a longer essay from The Chronicle Review, that we featured last month.

Because you can never have enough melancholia.

The Wall Street Journal takes a closer look at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey of the religious landscape in the USA. Amidst all the trends and changes between and within religious traditions, they note a much bigger trend. They see "a country filled with dozens of minority religions, expressing diverse beliefs, and doing so free of coercion."

Some 60% of Americans say religion is "very important" to them. That's compared with 12% for the French and 25% for the Italians. The study describes a "competitive religious marketplace" in which 84% of Americans claim one of hundreds of religious affiliations -- from Pentecostalism and Judaism to Islam and Mormonism.

While they note the 44% of folks who have switched to another religious affiliation from the one they grew up with, the WSJ also notes that:

There are reasons to find this statistic troubling. People who leave one denomination for another may be more concerned with fulfilling their boutique church-going desires than with meeting the moral obligations of a religious group or the demands of a doctrine. That almost a third of respondents also said they were married to someone of a different faith suggests religion has become more a matter of individual conscience than of continuity and tradition.

Yet there is something remarkable about so much religious diversity. Elsewhere in the world, religious difference is often a cause for violence and ostracism. America so honors the principle of religious tolerance that it has brought it into the home. Pew's statistic about church-switching may be less a sign of spiritual flakiness than an emblem of freedom.

It should be noted that a third of the survey's "converts" have gone from one Protestant congregation to another. In short, America is not, on the whole, giving up serious worship for the sake of New Age platitudes. Half of Americans who grew up without any religious affiliation adopted one in adulthood. Clearly Americans are still convinced there is a such a thing as religious truth -- and it's worth their time to search for it. Sorry, Mr. Hitchens.

Read: The Wall Street Journal: God's Country.

See previous coverage in the Cafehere and here.

Anthony Robinson of the Seattle Times expounds on the perils of believing in one's own moral certainty.

A Cardinal Rule for a columnist, as for a preacher, is "Have only one subject, focus on one topic." I have a problem. I have three topics.

Topic 1: The revelations regarding Eliot Spitzer's little problem, a topic that has preoccupied front pages, talk shows, blogs and coffee-pot conversation all week long.

Topic 2: The anniversary (seems like the wrong word somehow) of the Iraq war. On Wednesday, it'll be five years since George W. Bush gleefully announced the "initiation of hostilities."

Topic 3: A new book about religion and politics by Washington Post journalist E. J. Dionne, who was in town this week, and with whom I spoke.

A trinity of topics, but one theme. The New York governor's fall, five years of war and Dionne's book all make clear how intoxicating, how politically useful, but how perilous it is to be absolutely certain that you are right.

All three point out the perils of moral certainty and the dangers of being sure of our own unassailable virtue. What a dangerous high is to be had by concentrating the mind on the evil of others, while being clueless about our own. If smugness isn't a sin, it should be.

Read the rest here.

Mick LaSalle is the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. His blog is called "Maximum Strength Mick." Here is what he says about going to church on Easter.

Every time I go to church, which isn't often, and I'm not bragging, I always come away frustrated at the way the mass is handled these days -- with lots of acoustic guitars and folk-style singing. Sometimes I actually end up developing a feeling of hostility toward the ensemble leader, which kind of negates the whole point of going to church right there. But even when I feel in sympathy with these people, who after all are devoting hours and hours and hours of practice to these Sunday performances, I usually get the sense that they're enjoying themselves a lot more than the Congregation is.

Usually the priest just stands there befuddled, as if thinking, well, if this is what people like, if this is what brings them in, fine with me. But I don't think this is what's bringing them in. I think the congregation in most cases is merely tolerating it. In some cases, it may be keeping people away.

I was talking to a former Episcopal pastor yesterday, and he told me that if he were to do it all over again, he'd go entirely the other way. Bring in organ music. Incense. Choirs. Maybe choirs singing in foreign languages. Things to make people feel that they've entered another world -- a mysterious place where God dwells. Instead what you get in church these days feels 30 years out of date, a throwback to the 1970s, and completely devoid of mystery or emotional power. There's nothing vi