September 14th, evening posts
Below are Kendall's post from yesterday evening after this elf had signed off for the evening.
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The Retired Bishop of South Carolina Chimes In
September 14th, 2006 posted by kendall at 8:09 pmThe troubles facing the Episcopal Church (and other denominations) have to do with being divided between two faiths. A new religion has arisen that uses the terminology of Christianity but is a serious alternative to it. Oxford Prof. V.A. Demant in 1947 described it as ” … an unsupernatural and unevangelical religion. It equates Christianity with good ideals. It attaches no vital meaning to sin, grace, redemption or to the church as a divine society.”
This religion paid no attention to the psychiatrist Karl Menninger when he warned the churches about ignoring the essential human problem in his book, “Whatever Became of Sin?”
E. Brooks Holifield’s “A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization” sums it up in his subtitle.
Individuals can be reconciled but these two faiths cannot. Those who are substituting good ideals for Christian hope are so unconcerned with Christian doctrine that they do not notice its prevailing denial among our leaders and seem undeterred by its shrinking numbers and repudiation by the worldwide Anglican Communion.
The churches that acknowledge the reality of sin and persist in their trust in forgiveness, redemption and salvation will not only survive but prevail.
–The Rt. Rev. C. Fitzsimons Allison in a letter to the editor in today’s local paper
Diocese of Fort Worth Executive Council Affirms Alternative Provincial Oversight appeal
September 14th, 2006 posted by kendall at 8:04 pmThe Executive Council of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, meeting in regular session, today approved the following Resolution supporting the diocesan Standing Committee’s June 18 decision to seek Alternative Primatial Oversight. Be it resolved that the Executive Council of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort
Worth endorses and affirms the appeal made to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates of the Anglican Communion by the Standing Committee and Bishop of our diocese for Alternative Primatial Oversight and pastoral care.
The resolution came before the Council on the day following the conclusion of a special Summit Meeting in New York City. The Summit was called by the Archbishop of Canterbury for the purpose of “finding an American church solution to an American church problem,” as Bishop Iker expressed it in his statement on the meeting, which was also released today. Participants at the Summit, who included Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold and Presiding Bishop-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori, failed to reach any agreement….
Read it all (pdf).
A Very Important Request from a Blog reader for Spanish Books of Common Prayer
September 14th, 2006 posted by kendall at 7:05 pmOne of the great things about this blog is the possibility of networking it allows for because of the large number of readers and contacts readers have from different parts of the world. I need to take advantage of this today by asking for your help.
I received a telephone call from a faithful Anglican and blog reader in a location outside the United States who is desperate–and I mean desperate–for at least two dozen 1979 Books of Common Prayer in Spanish. If you know how to obtain these or know someone who knows how to, could you please email me with that information?
The link for my email is under *About This Blog — Essential Titusonenine Info* on the right hand border of the blog. There you will see:
3. Contact Addresses:
Where my email is listed.
Many, many thanks–KSH.
The Papal Address at the University of Regensburg: Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization
September 14th, 2006 posted by kendall at 6:59 pmAnd so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: We are all grateful for the marvelous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity.
The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them.
We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.
Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions.
A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based.
Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought — to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding.
Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being — but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss.”
The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur — this is the program with which a theology grounded in biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.
“Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary to the nature of God,” said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.
All Crabs to Heaven?
September 14th, 2006 posted by kendall at 6:53 pmThe seven members of the College of Crustaceans make their way around the perimeter of the nave, solemnly sidestepping to the hymn “In Christ There Is No East or West.” As they progress, they open and close their hands like castanets; the antennae-like eyes atop their crab hats bob softly. Some members wave primary-color crab flags. One sports an orange tie-dye shirt proclaiming “Peace, Love, and Crabs.” Another, draped in a checkered picnic cloth, carries an aluminum-handled fishing net like a scepter.
More than two decades have passed since St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill held its first crab feast, and the event has blossomed into an annual celebration with its own kooky, much- anticipated traditions. One of them is naming a parishioner “Crab of the Year” (known within the congregation as a COTY), a recognition of some mildly annoying offense that brings with it a crab hat and inclusion in the College of Crustaceans, the group responsible for organizing the feast.
Doris Burton acquired the hats from a shop in Annapolis. “They were thrilled to get rid of them. I got them on sale for $7 apiece,” says Burton, who won a COTY two years ago for planning a Fourth of July church outing and then not showing up for it.
With a professional, mostly liberal congregation of about 750 people, St. Mark’s has always embraced a certain spiritual mischievousness….
Hmmm, spiritual mischievousness. One is tempted to make a comment but one restrains oneself. Read it all.
A Resolution of Greetings to the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina
September 14th, 2006 posted by kendall at 6:12 pmWhereas, the Reformed Episcopal Diocese of the Southeast and the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina share a commitment to orthodox Anglicanism as evidenced by our connections via the Anglican Communion Network, and
Whereas, the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina will, D.V., elect a new bishop on 16 September 2006, and
Whereas, the Reformed Episcopal Diocese of the Southeast is thankful for the warm relations that we share with the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina.
Now, therefore, the 34th Annual Synod of the Reformed Episcopal Diocese of the Southeast, meeting at Grace Church in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, gives thanks to Almighty God for the faithful leadership of the Rt. Rev. Edward L. Salmon, Jr., in both his diocese and the larger Church, wishes him and Mrs. Salmon a long and happy retirement, and prays for the Diocese of South Carolina as they prepare to elect his successor.
–Submitted by the Rev. Charles A. Collins, Jr., S.B.R.
APPROVED UNANIMOUSLY: 14 September 2006
Isn’t this just fantastic? We thank our sisters and brothers in the Reformed Episcopal Church for their thoughtfulness and their support–KSH.
posted by t19elves at 9:27 AM
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