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The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, bishop of Indianapolis, has written a response to this morning’s mass shooting at a FedEx facility near the Indianapolis airport
“So much gardening activity happens on our knees, in the position of prayer and supplication. I kneel to weed, plant and harvest and often find myself meditating and praying. If I am troubled by some seemingly insurmountable problem, there is no better place to thrash it out than kneeling in the garden. If I am irritable or depressed, there is no better therapy than weeding.”
Biden reverses course on refugee cap after faith groups, in The Episcopal Church, express outrage.
The University of the South, commonly known as Sewanee, has made two recent moves addressing racism in its past. A stain-glass window in the chapel will be updated to remove the Confederate flag. And a School of Theology lecture series named for William Porcher DuBose, a slavery and KKK apologist will be renamed.
Special guest Maya Little-Saña joins discuss the story of Jesus’ resurrection appearance to the disciples from this week’s Gospel
We do some venerating before we continue to talk about what the BCP catechism has to say about Jesus.
A conversation about giving pop culture a second chance
“So much gardening activity happens on our knees, in the position of prayer and supplication. I kneel to weed, plant and harvest and often find myself meditating and praying. If I am troubled by some seemingly insurmountable problem, there is no better place to thrash it out than kneeling in the garden. If I am irritable or depressed, there is no better therapy than weeding.”
“Most importantly, God is love. Learning what that means is a life-long study. It isn’t warm feelings and the removal of stumbling blocks from our paths. It is a profound showing up for the essence of who we are.”
“In church, we are taught that Mary chose the better part, sitting and learning from the Master while he was on earth. At that time, the disciples didn’t know Jesus would soon be gone, but we benefit from knowledge in retrospect. It makes all the difference.”
“I’ll admit it wasn’t until after becoming Christian that I truly began to examine the structural evils of the present day, and how Christianity has played a part in them. But by then, something had changed in me: Christianity was my home.”
Biden reverses course on refugee cap after faith groups, in The Episcopal Church, express outrage.
The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, bishop of Indianapolis, has written a response to this morning’s mass shooting at a FedEx facility near the Indianapolis airport
The University of the South, commonly known as Sewanee, has made two recent moves addressing racism in its past. A stain-glass window in the chapel will be updated to remove the Confederate flag. And a School of Theology lecture series named for William Porcher DuBose, a slavery and KKK apologist will be renamed.
The governing board of the majority-white Episcopal church voted to hang the banner after internal discussion of racism last year following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It was stolen before. It was again as the trial of former officer Derek Chauvin, charged with Floyd’s murder, proceeds in Minneapolis.
You believed you would be welcome and safe in a country full of others yearning to breathe free.
You are not welcome by all in this country. You are not safe because of our faces.
Maybe they hate our faces because we remind them of what they used to be and are afraid of becoming again.
So, what do we do right now?
Every once in a while, I sit and think about one of my first ever challenging youth group kids, who, instead of sitting down with and having a hard conversation without relationship, I just continually loved on, showed respect to, and got to watch Jesus change her life instead. We can preach and teach and lecture and “pull aside,” but if we don’t have love, our clanging cymbals will drive someone away from truth. Love draws in.
She thinks back to Easter in the home country. Were they still conducting open air Easter sunrise services? Mid-April will probably be really hot. She checks the weather for Hyderabad on her smartphone. It is thirty-eight degrees Celsius there, at six-fifteen in the evening. She is glad she is here in B.C. If only they could see an actual sunrise over the mountains.
It is not the intent here in these offerings to damn the institutional Church for its complicity in ageism. As we well know, “isms” are pervasive and finds their expression in mandates, protocols, exclusion. We have heard it said, maybe, who it is who loves the details. But this “ism” for my focus leads, I believe, to images of fragile, incompetent, disabled men and women with “white collars around their necks.
The Episcopal Café seeks to be an independent voice, reporting and reflecting on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican tradition. The Café is not a platform of advocacy, but it does aim to tell the story of the church from the perspective of Progressive Christianity. Our collective sympathy, as the Café, lies with the project of widening the circle of inclusion within the church and empowering all the baptized for the role to which they have been called as followers of Christ.
The opinions expressed at the Café are those of individual contributors, and, unless otherwise noted, should not be interpreted as official statements of a parish, diocese or other organization. The art and articles that appear here remain the property of their creators.
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