News & Notes

Rowan Williams: Morality & Transcendence

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:36:55 -0400

An interesting interview with the ever-thoughtful Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams:

Can we make sense of morality without a religious notion of a transcendent or supernatural being?
I think that, to make sense of unconditional rights or claims, we need to be clear that there is such a thing as universal human nature and that it has some intrinsic dignity or worth. To try and ground this independently of the idea of a transcendent source of value seems to me not finally feasible. People do, of course, make such claims, and do so in good faith, but I don't see how you can define a universally shared, equal, independent-of-local-culture-and-habit conception of human flourishing without something more than a pragmatic or immanent basis.

In other words, I think morality ultimately needs a notion of the sacred - and for the Christian that means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.

What are the consequences of pushing religion to the margins of the public sphere?
If religion is pushed into private spaces, as increasingly it tends to be by our public discourse, we lose one of the most emotionally and imaginatively resourceful ways of seeing human behaviour; we lose something of the sense that certain acts may be good independently of whether they are sensible or successful in the world's terms. I suppose you could say that we lose the "contemplative" dimension to ethics, the belief that some things are worth admiring in themselves.

Are there forms of secularism that religious believers can accept?
Certainly a religious believer can be firm in their faith without assuming that their point of view should be privileged in public discussion or has any absolute right to be followed. Elsewhere I have distinguished between a "procedural" and a "programmatic" secularism. The first recognises that public discussion must make room for explicit reference to the roots of moral judgements, including their roots in religious belief. It makes for a fuller and more lively argument in society, and it avoids the creeping assumption that all reasonable people think in exactly the same way, for the same reasons...

Here's the whole thing.

Signposts In Post-Christian England

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:21:02 -0400

Eegad:

From classical concerts to sophisticated dinners, Liverpool Cathedral is a venue with a difference. Fanfares, fashion, cocktails... from belinis to Beethoven, Liverpool Cathedral has the perfect event space for you...

With its magnificent gothic arches the central space offers historical beauty with a modern twist. Liverpool Cathedral is a versatile space and we are open to creative ideas. Whether it is a candlelit dinner, star-studded awards ceremony or a stylish canapé reception the central space will wow your guests.

Here it is, by way of First Thoughts.

Manute Bol, Sports & "Redemption"

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:42:20 -0400

From the Wall Street Journal, and apropos of Fr. Sanderson's homily this past Sunday, an assesment of Manute Bol's Christian legacy:

Bol reportedly gave most of his fortune, estimated at $6 million, to aid Sudanese refugees. As one twitter feed aptly put it: "Most NBA cats go broke on cars, jewelry & groupies. Manute Bol went broke building hospitals."

When his fortune dried up, Bol raised more money for charity by doing what most athletes would find humiliating: He turned himself into a humorous spectacle. Bol was hired, for example, as a horse jockey, hockey player and celebrity boxer. Some Americans simply found amusement in the absurdity of him on a horse or skates. And who could deny the comic potential of Bol boxing William "the Refrigerator" Perry, the 335-pound former defensive linemen of the Chicago Bears?

Bol agreed to be a clown. But he was not willing to be mocked for his own personal gain as so many reality-television stars are. Bol let himself be ridiculed on behalf of suffering strangers in the Sudan; he was a fool for Christ.

During his final years, Bol suffered more than mere mockery in the service of others. While he was doing relief work in the Sudan, he contracted a painful skin disease that ultimately contributed to his death.

Bol's life and death throws into sharp relief the trivialized manner in which sports journalists employ the concept of redemption. In the world of sports media players are redeemed when they overcome some prior "humiliation" by playing well. Redemption then is deeply connected to personal gain and celebrity. It leads to fatter contracts, shoe endorsements, and adoring women.

Yet as Bol reminds us, the Christian understanding of redemption has always involved lowering and humbling oneself. It leads to suffering and even death.

It is of little surprise, then, that the sort of radical Christianity exemplified by Bol is rarely understood by sports journalists. For all its interest in the intimate details of players' lives, the media has long been tone deaf to the way devout Christianity profoundly shapes some of them.

Obituary titles for Bol, for example, described him as a humanitarian rather than a Christian. The remarkable charity and personal character of other NBA players, including David Robinson, A. C. Green and Dwight Howard, are almost never explicitly connected to their own intense Christian faith. They are simply good guys.

Christian basketball players hope that their "little lights" shine in a league marked by rapacious consumption and marital infidelity. They could shine even brighter if sports journalists acknowledged that such players seek atonement and redemption in a far more profound way than mere athletic success.

Read the whole thing.

Of Confession.

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:26:31 -0400

Eve Tushnet on making a confession:

There's an objection that Protestants sometimes pose to Catholics: Why should I confess my sins to a man, when I could simply confess alone, in my room, to God? I'm sure there are all kinds of theological answers to this question.

But I want to talk about what the presence of the "other person," and the other structural elements of the sacrament, add to the experience and spirituality of confession.

Praying alone in one's room, recalling one's sins and intentionally holding them up for God to inspect, can be deeply humbling. It can also be an alienating and very lonely experience. There's a joke about an old Jewish man who went every day to pray for peace at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem -- every day for 50 years, even as the rockets roared above him. At last a younger Jew, in awe of the man's piety, asked him, "What does it feel like to speak with God every day for so long?"

And the man replied, "It feels like I'm talking to a [expletive] wall!"

The room can feel very empty when you pray. No matter how much you know, intellectually, that God is there, the feeling remains.

Here's the whole thing.

Atheists Don't Have No Songs.

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:34:09 -0400

Oldest Known Images of Apostles Discovered

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:20:24 -0400

From beneath the streets of Rome:

The oldest known image of the apostles Andrew and John have been discovered in catacombs under the city of Rome, dating back to the 4th century AD, archaeologists announced Tuesday.

The paintings were found in the same location where the oldest known painting of St. Paul was discovered last year, the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology said Tuesday.

They are part of a group of paintings around an image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd on the ceiling of what is thought to have been a Roman noblewoman's tomb, experts said.

A painting of St. Peter makes up the fourth member of the group, but older images of him are thought to exist, Vatican experts said.

Read the whole thing and view the images.

Adam & Eve: Jewish

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 14:37:00 -0400

We had occaision to note Stephen Prothero's book God Is Not One here. Now Prothero is interviewed by Stephen Colbert, to our very great edification:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Stephen Prothero

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

Dawn Eden: Sexual Healing & Holiness

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:28:19 -0400

Our 2008 Family Retreat speaker and general Friend-of-the-Parish Dawn Eden has completed and successfully defended her Masters Thesis - Towards a 'Climate of Chastity': Bringing Catechesis on the Theology of the Body into the Hermeneutic of Continuity - at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington D.C., and she has made a version of that thesis available as an eBook (she humbly asks for a small donation to support this work - click here for ordering and donation information).

Dawn recently gave a talk summarizing her thesis. An excerpt:

What concerns me is West's insistence that the "long and painful journey" of sexual healing and integration has to precede holiness. As Mark Lowery noted back in 2001, sexual healing comes from grace—not the other way around.

Moreover, in a point also made by Lowery, grace does not always heal us of everything from which we would like to be healed. It is not a zero-sum game. Self-control is possible with the gift of the Holy Spirit, but, as Paul learned, God does not remove every thorn in the flesh.

A major concern of my thesis is the divergence between West's presentation and John Paul II's teachings with regard to continence. I mentioned earlier that West says mature purity is found only in those who are willing to "risk" concupiscence so that they might reap the benefits of "union with Christ and his Church." To underscore the importance of taking this "risk," he attacks the notion that an engaged couple wishing to stay chaste should "never spend any extended time alone together."

Now, the concern that engaged couples may be too chaste seems anachronistic in the wake of the sexual revolution. But remember that West spent his late teens and early 20s living in a community where engaged couples were in fact barred from spending time alone together. So this is a very real concern for him, and he is understandably eager to point out that Catholic teaching permits individuals a certain amount of latitude to responsibly exercise their freedom.

Unfortunately, in his desire to counter puritanical attitudes, West ends up promoting an ideal that has the net effect of promoting puritanism. I discuss this in detail in my thesis, and explain how it is based upon a misinterpretation of both John Paul II and St. Thomas, whose theology is the basis for John Paul's discussion of the virtue of continence. Essentially, West says that not only must an engaged couple be continent, they must possess the virtue of perfect chastity prior to marriage. That is, they should have no fear of being alone together, because they should have no lust for one another. West said in a talk just last year that an engaged couple who are merely continent cannot be called virtuous because "[t]here is no magic trick on the wedding day that suddenly makes what you do that night an act of love. If you could not be alone together the day before you got married and not sin, there is no magic trick, there is no waving at the wand at the altar, that suddenly makes your sexual behavior beautiful, true, good, lovely, and pure."

What is wrong with this picture? As I explain in my thesis, what is wrong is, (A) the implication that continence is an insufficient preparation for marriage, and (B) the claim that the sacrament of marriage in no way affects the development of virtue. In fact, the Church does not expect perfect chastity of couples before marriage, precisely because she recognizes that the grace of marriage is what enables couples to transform their imperfect virtue of continence to the perfect virtue of chastity. All that is required of an engaged couple is that they control themselves "in holiness and honor," as St. Paul writes in First Thessalonians.

By raising the bar so high, to the point where any feeling of lust is proof that one is not ready for marriage, West is effectively promoting the very angelism that he decries. In an age when Catholics—along with singles in general—are marrying later and later, such a misinterpretation of Church teaching has real pastoral implications. I see them when speaking on chastity to young adults. Twice when I have spoken in Manhattan, someone in the audience has asked me, "Why are Catholics in New York City so afraid of dating?"

I was last asked that when I spoke at Columbia University in March. The questioner added, "Catholics here in the city think that they can't date before marriage—they can only be friends. And these are Catholics who know the theology of the body."

Young Catholics who are told that they are not ready to marry until they have not only continence, but perfect chastity, are simply avoiding the rituals of courtship. I have since discussed this problem with others, including a priest who is a vocations director, and am confirmed that it is a genuine pastoral issue.

Here's the whole thing.

Bonus Dawn: St. Maron & the Maronites

Taking Secularism Seriously.

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:02:17 -0400

A helpful talk on contemporary apologetic challenges, via the Dominican Province of St. Joseph.

Watch the video above of a talk delivered on June 2, 2010 by Archbishop Augustine DiNoia, O.P., Secretary of the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Archbishop DiNoia argues that the most effective way of overcoming challenges to faith in the uniqueness of Christ, or demonstrating the nature of the moral law, is to take the conceptual underpinnings of secularism and pluralism seriously before, in order to better make the intellectual case for Catholic faith and practice. "St. Thomas Aquinas tried so hard to understand positions with which he did not agree that he was said to be able to formulate them more forcefully than their proponents could. Only then did he set out to respond to them. This is what I mean by taking the intellectual challenges to faith seriously." The talk, which was given at the Yale Club of New York in midtown Manhattan.

Miss Kitty, Saint.

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:44:30 -0400

At Touchstone Magazine's Mere Comments blog, Anthony Esolen lists his top 11 Christian television shows, including:

2. Gunsmoke. This show started off great, and got better as the seasons went on; the very best episodes are those of its second decade, in color, with Ken Curtis as Festus, the wise fool and television's greatest sidekick. Yes, there were saloon girls, and yes, Miss Kitty was (in the early shows especially) obviously Matt Dillon's woman. But it is hard to find a show more affirmative of the holiness of marriage, or the need to uphold the law, or the terrible beauty of a man willing to put his life on the line for his fellows -- and often his unappreciative fellows. Possibly the greatest show in television history, or it would be, were it not for

1. The Twilight Zone. Not science fiction, this! These were half-hour morality plays, laying bare the shame of man, but also celebrating his dignity. Rod Serling was a liberal back in the day when that meant an uncompromising affirmation of the value of every individual, including the weakest and the least among us, as against the brazen claims of technocrats, social engineers of the right and the left, and the power of brute nature. The writing ranges from very good to stupendous, as does the acting -- by an astonishing medley of old stars (Gladys Cooper, Buster Keaton, Cedric Hardwicke), new stars (Lee Marvin, Robert Redford, Anne Francis, Dennis Weaver, Cliff Robertson), and incomparable character actors (Burgess Meredith, Nehemiah Persoff, Jeannette Nolan, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, John Dehner, John Anderson). A down-and-out boxer who can't believe; a young woman who doesn't want to be made pretty; a man stranded alone on a planet; a little boy who wants everybody to think only happy thoughts --it seems that there was not a single human situation that this show did not probe.

Here's the entire list.

Not Perfect, But Good

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:39:49 -0400

Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal on the moral example of Armando Galarraga's perfect game and the umpire who ~~screwed~~ blew the biggest call of his career:

What was sweet and surprising was that all the principals in the story comported themselves as fully formed adults, with patience, grace and dignity. And in doing so, Galarraga and Joyce showed kids How to Do It.

A lot of adults don't teach kids this now, because the adults themselves don't know how to do it. There's a mentoring gap, an instruction gap in our country. We don't put forward a template because we don't know the template. So everyone imitates TV, where victors dance in the end zone, where winners shoot their arms in the air and distort their face and yell "Whoooaahhh," and where victims of an injustice scream, cry, say bitter things, and beat the ground with their fists. Everyone has come to believe this is authentic. It is authentically babyish. Everyone thinks it's honest. It's honestly undignified, self-indulgent, weak and embarrassing.

Galarraga and Joyce couldn't have known it when they went to work Wednesday, but they were going to show children in an unforgettable way that a victim of injustice can react with compassion, and a person who makes a mistake can admit and declare it.

Read the whole thing.

Love & War

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:16:51 -0400

Over and over again – and I have video of this – guys will stand up and risk getting hit in order to do their job up in the platoon and keep everyone safe. They’re choosing to participate in a potentially suicidal act in order to safeguard everyone else. That is a very profound choice that a person makes for the welfare of another person. Putting someone else’s welfare above your own – it’s at the heart of combat, but ironically it’s also at the heart of much of religious thought. There are real parallels between the two.

From a series of interviews with Sebastian Junger on his new book, War, based on his time embedded with embedded with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, making five trips to the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. Watch a portion of the interview here.

Sacred Made Real

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:08:50 -0400

Mary Eberstadt (one of my favorite exegetes of our culture) lauds and ponders the National Gallery's soon-to-close exhibition of 16th-century Spanish religious art, "The Sacred Made Real":

Here a bleeding, suffering Christ stretches tautly on the Cross, staring both piteously and pitiably at the penitent near his feet. There a dewy yet tormented Mary Magdalen, her dazzling soiled skin wrapped roughly in a penitent's coat of rushes, hunches in sorrow over a crucifix. A statue of Saint Ignatius Loyola looms so lifelike and animated that a recitation of his Exercises seems a strong possibility. Many more shocks await. Of course, the extreme realism owes plenty to the esoteric artistic minutiae – inserting carved elephant ivory for finger and toenails; painting gilt under a coat of white paint to make it glow eerily; using glass for eyes and then painting them on the inside for particularly vivid effect; and all the rest of the stagecraft discreetly enriching these pieces. Even so, no one viewing this exhibition will think that the overall effect is simply equal to the parts of such parlor tricks – beginning with the people who made the pieces in the first place. In fact, some were certain enough of their encounter with the divine via this work that they inserted written confessions of their own into the statues before sealing them.

"They're marvelous," as an abstract sculptor remarked to the Wall Street Journal reviewer: "Why are they so marvelous?" It's a question that goes to the heart not only of the exhibition, but also to the creation of all great sacred art, period. And thereby hangs an interesting historical tale. What really accelerated the appearance of these Spanish Baroque masterpieces was the Council of Trent – which beginning in 1545, and working against the influences of Protestantism, specifically affirmed the Catholic need for realistic images that might, by their aesthetic power, draw the viewer into contemplation and emulation.
In other words, while making clear that Catholic art was not to become what some Protestants accused it of – namely, idol worship – the Council nevertheless maintained as the Church traditionally had that such images were an asset to those seeking God, rather than an impediment. This, then, was the great historical fountain from which these astonishing works flowed: from the need to re-affirm, at a time following scandal and corruption, that the truth of the Church still remained the truth.

Quite obviously, whatever effect these pieces may have had on the prayerful between then and now, the Council's mandate ultimately worked at least one near-miracle. Four centuries later, it would capture throngs of Western people who say no penance, know no fasts beyond those designed to burn ketones, and who are generally more ignorant about their Christian heritage than any baptized Christians who came before, including the illiterate ones. Yet as the respectful and wondering public reception of "The Sacred Made Real" goes to show, this Catholic art nevertheless still speaks to them anyway, calling even the restless and relentlessly quotidian Western mind to the possibility of a transcendent realm.

Here's the whole thing.

The Empathy Shortage [Updated]

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:55:05 -0400

Maia Szalavitz, in Psychology Today:

College students who hit campus after 2000 have empathy levels that are 40% lower than those who came before them, according to a stunning new meta-analysis presented to at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science by University of Michigan researchers. It includes data from over 14,000 students.

Although we argue in Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential--and Endangered that modern child-rearing practices are putting empathy at risk, this is the largest study presented so far to quantify the decline.

Previous research done by psychologist Jean Twenge had measured what she labeled a "narcissism epidemic," with more students showing selfish qualities and with increases in traits that can lead to a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. That is a condition in which people are so self-involved that other people are no more than objects to reflect their glory.

But I was less than convinced by that data because some of the measures of narcissism--statements like "I am a special person," --might reflect a lifetime spent in classrooms aimed at raising self-esteem rather than a true increase in self-centeredness.

The survey on empathy used in this study--which you can take for yourself here--however, is another matter. While it so obviously measures empathy that you could easily game it to make yourself look kinder and nicer, the fact that today's college students don't even feel compelled to do that suggests that the study is measuring something real. If young people don't even care about seeming uncaring, something is seriously wrong. Another survey in the research found that people also think that others around them are less compassionate...

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat takes note and asks questions:

The fact that the tipping point seems to coincide with the rise of the internet should send everyone rushing off to read Christine Rosen's 2007 essay on social networking, "Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism," which could have been written with just these findings in mind. But it's also interesting to consider this trend in light of the oft-heard claim that the millennial generation is more idealistic, more civic-minded, and more engaged with the world than its cynical Gen X predecessors.

On the face of it, these seem like contradictory portraits — how can the same generation be more solipsistic and more interested in human betterment and ambitious social activism? But maybe they actually go hand in hand. There's a kind of humanitarianism that's more interested in an abstract "humanity" than in actual people, and a kind of idealism that's hard to distinguish from moral vanity. Perhaps this is the spirit that's at work among the empathy-deficient world-changers of Generation Y — visible, for instance, in the way that community service has become a self-interested resume-padding exercise for ambitious young climbers, or in the way that Barack Obama's rhetoric ("we are the ones we've been waiting for," etc.) managed to appeal to younger voters' idealism and flatter their egos all at once...
Read the rest.

Holy Ascension Piccolo Event

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 11:43:32 -0400

++Rowan William: Pentecost Letter to the Anglican Communion

Fri, 28 May 2010 08:55:51 -0400

The Archbishop of Canterbury has written an important letter to the bishops, clergy, and faithful of the Anglican Communion. An excerpt:

From the very first, as the New Testament makes plain, the Church has experienced division and internal hostilities. From the very first, the Church has had to repent of its failure to live fully in the light and truth of the Spirit. Jesus tells us in St John’s gospel that the Spirit of truth will ‘prove the world wrong’ in respect of sin and righteousness and judgement (Jn 16.8). But if the Spirit is leading us all further into the truth, the Spirit will convict the Church too of its wrongness and lead it into repentance. And if the Church is a community where we serve each other in the name of Christ, it is a community where we can and should call each other to repentance in the name of Christ and his Spirit – not to make the other feel inferior (because we all need to be called to repentance) but to remind them of the glory of Christ’s gift and the promise that we lose sight of when we fail in our common life as a Church.

Our Anglican fellowship continues to experience painful division, and the events of recent months have not brought us nearer to full reconciliation. There are still things being done that the representative bodies of the Communion have repeatedly pleaded should not be done; and this leads to recrimination, confusion and bitterness all round. It is clear that the official bodies of The Episcopal Church have felt in conscience that they cannot go along with what has been asked of them by others, and the consecration of Canon Mary Glasspool on May 15 has been a clear sign of this. And despite attempts to clarify the situation, activity across provincial boundaries still continues – equally dictated by what people have felt they must in conscience do. Some provinces have within them dioceses that are committed to policies that neither the province as a whole nor the Communion has sanctioned. In several places, not only in North America, Anglicans have not hesitated to involve the law courts in settling disputes, often at great expense and at the cost of the Church’s good name.

All are agreed that the disputes arising around these matters threaten to distract us from our main calling as Christ’s Church. The recent Global South encounter in Singapore articulated a strong and welcome plea for the priority of mission in the Communion; and in my own message to that meeting I prayed for a ‘new Pentecost’ for all of us. This is a good season of the year to pray earnestly for renewal in the Spirit, so that we may indeed do what God asks of us and let all people know that new and forgiven life in Christ is possible and that created men and women may by the Spirit’s power be given the amazing liberty to call God ‘Abba, Father!’

It is my own passionate hope that our discussion of the Anglican Covenant in its entirety will help us focus on that priority; the Covenant is nothing if not a tool for mission. I want to stress yet again that the Covenant is not envisaged as an instrument of control. And this is perhaps a good place to clarify that the place given in the final text to the Standing Committee of the Communion introduces no novelty: the Committee is identical to the former Joint Standing Committee, fully answerable in all matters to the ACC and the Primates; nor is there any intention to prevent the Primates in the group from meeting separately. The reference to the Standing Committee reflected widespread unease about leaving certain processes only to the ACC or only to the Primates.

But we are constantly reminded that the priorities of mission are experienced differently in different places, and that trying to communicate the Gospel in the diverse tongues of human beings can itself lead to misunderstandings and failures of communication between Christians. The sobering truth is that often our attempts to share the Gospel effectively in our own setting can create problems for those in other settings.

3.

We are at a point in our common life where broken communications and fragile relationships have created a very mistrustful climate. This is not news. But many have a sense that the current risks are greater than ever. Although attitudes to human sexuality have been the presenting cause, I want to underline the fact that what has precipitated the current problem is not simply this issue but the widespread bewilderment and often hurt in different quarters that we have no way of making decisions together so that we are not compromised or undermined by what others are doing. We have not, in other words, found a way of shaping our consciences and convictions as a worldwide body. We have not fully received the Pentecostal gift of mutual understanding for common mission.

It may be said – quite understandably, in one way – that our societies and their assumptions are so diverse that we shall never be able to do this. Yet we are called to seek for mutual harmony and common purpose, and not to lose heart. If the truth of Christ is indeed ultimately one as we all believe, there should be a path of mutual respect and thankfulness that will hold us in union and help us grow in that truth.

Yet at the moment we face a dilemma. To maintain outward unity at a formal level while we are convinced that the divisions are not only deep but damaging to our local mission is not a good thing. Neither is it a good thing to break away from each other so dramatically that we no longer see Christ in each other and risk trying to create a church of the ‘perfect’ – people like us. It is significant that there are still very many in The Episcopal Church, bishops, clergy and faithful, who want to be aligned with the Communion’s general commitments and directions, such as those who identify as ‘Communion Partners’, who disagree strongly with recent decisions, yet want to remain in visible fellowship within TEC so far as they can. And, as has often been pointed out, there are things that Anglicans across the world need and want to do together for the care of God’s poor and vulnerable that can and do go on even when division over doctrine or discipline is sharp.

Please read the entire letter.

St. Gianna

Tue, 25 May 2010 09:02:03 -0400

Sancta Gianna ora pro nobis!

St. Gianna Beretta Molla may be the first saint ever canonized while her children are still alive. She spent her life in her native Italy as a physician, wife and mother. In 1962, pregnant with her fourth child, she developed a uterine tumor. She refused to have an abortion or hysterectomy, and insisted that if a choice had to be made between herself and the baby, doctors were to save the baby. She died at age 39, a week after giving birth to a healthy girl. St. Gianna was beatified in 1994 and was canonized May 16, 2004, the last saint canonized by Pope John Paul II before his death. She is honored especially for her courageous witness to life, and she is being promoted in particular as a patron of couples struggling with infertility.

She also was chosen as patron by the Gianna Center - The Catholic Healthcare Center for Women, a facility in Manhattan that offers general health care for women of all ages, including prenatal care and special treatment for infertility. The Center, founded by two physicians, Anne Mielnik, MD and Kyle Beiter, MD, is the only women's health care center in New York metropolitan area that is explicitly committed to following the teaching of the Catholic Church in all of its services to women and married couples. This is the first medical practice in the New York metropolitan area that uses NaPro Technology, an approach to treating infertility and recurrent miscarriage.

Earlier in the day, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, visited the Gianna Center for the enshrinement of a photograph and relic of St. Gianna. The archbishop led a prayer service and blessed the image and the Center's offices. Archbishop Dolan, in remarks at the enshrinement ceremony, told the two doctors, "You've really taken Jesus at his word by casting out into the deep." "Great things will happen here," he continued. He cited the center's "powerful pro-life message," and added, "We've got to get the word out, because our enemies have been successful in promoting the caricature that the Church is against science and technology, and that there are no moral, ethically defensible, technologically savvy ways for couples...to bring about new life." He also commended the Dominican Friars Health Care Ministry of New York for their historic and sustained commitment to protecting and defending the dignity of the human person from conception to natural death.

Kreeft: Learning From Islam

Thu, 20 May 2010 10:19:57 -0400

Catholic philospher and prolific author Peter Kreeft has a new book viewing Islam from a Christian prospective, Between Allah & Jesus: What Christians Can Learn from Muslims. Here's an excerpt from the Introduction:

Why the West Fears Islam

Many Christians today have a deep fear of Islam, as of no other religion. They have reasons: over three thousand of them after 9/11. Yet many Muslims, most Muslims in the West, and the vast majority in America, want to be our friends, not our enemies in our battle against our real common enemy, which is sin, Satan, selfishness and secularism. If those are not our real enemies, then Jesus and all the saints were fools. Why do Christians believe our irreligious media's picture of Muslims as hate-filled, violence-prone, ignorant, superstitious, irrational, fanatical terrorists? To the secular media, the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim, that is, a secularized one. The same media believes that the only good Christian is a bad Christian; that is, a secularized, de-supernaturalized, modernized, liberalized, compromised, rationalized one – especially one that worships the gods of the Sexual Revolution (the old one, I mean, not the new one expressed in John Paul II's Theology of the Body). To let this media define a religion for us is idiocy.

The secular media fear Islam for two reasons: (1) because they think it is the reason, or the rationalization, for nearly all the terrorism, murder and war in the world today, and (2) because it is deeply religious. The media believe these two things naturally go together. They are wrong.

What Christians should not learn from Muslims

While the subtitle of this book, and its main focus, is What Christians Can Learn from Muslims, there are many things that Christians should not learn from Muslims; for instance:

Anger or jealousy at Western civilization

Proneness or addiction to violence

Politicizing religion (that always messed us up whenever we tried it!)

Preventing apostasy by murdering apostates

Treating women like slaves

Prioritizing justice over mercy and forgiveness

The continued chewing of centuries-old grudges

Fear of freedom

Fear of reasoning and dialogue

Terrorism

Theological voluntarism (the doctrine that God's will has no reason)

Unitarianism (the theology that insists that the one God is only one Person, not three, and that

Christ is only human, not divine)

With the exception of the last item, however, these are not essential parts of Islamic orthodoxy. If these ideas appear in the Qur'an at all, they are disapproved rather than approved. And they are not typical of all or even most serious Muslims in the world today, especially in the West, though they are typical of the ones we usually hear about in the news. For quiet piety does not make headlines; loud terrorist explosions do.

Please ask yourself whether you would like others to judge Christianity based on the picture of it now being presented in the modern Western media. Then please remember the Golden Rule, and apply this to the picture of Islam presented by the same source.

What Christians should Obviously Learn from Muslims

There are also many things we Christians already know we can and should learn from Muslims, or be reminded of by Muslims. These are things which we already believe, though we do not practice them very well; for instance:

Faithfulness in prayer, fasting and almsgiving

The sacredness of the family and children and hospitality

The absoluteness of moral laws and of the demand to be just and charitable

The absoluteness of God and the need for absolute submission, surrender and obedience ("islam") to him

You will not find many Muslims anywhere who are indifferentists, moral pragmatists, hedonists, utilitarians, materialists, subjectivists, relativists or libertines.

The list of things Christians should not learn from Muslims is a list of things we already recognize as evils, and the list of things Christians should obviously learn from Muslims is a list of things we already recognize as goods. But there is a third thing, which is good, not evil, but which we do not clearly recognize as obviously good, and this is the thing we very much need to learn from Muslims. That's what this book is about.

It is not unique to Muslims. We could learn it from anyone, but Muslims seem to be the ones who are most clearly manifesting it today. So it is to the Muslims that we should turn to learn it – not primarily for the sake of being nice to Muslims or for religious harmony or ecumenism or even world peace, but for our own holiness and wholeness and humanity, our own supernatural and natural completing.

I find it hard to give a single name to this thing. I could call it something like the "spirit" of Islam, but that is far, far too slippery and subjective a term. Rather than telling you what it is, by defining it, like a philosopher, or by selling it, like a motivational speaker, I want to show you what it is, by exemplifying it, in a fictional character, like a novelist.

Here's the entire Introduction, and here's the book on Amazon.

Living with Limits (or Not)

Tue, 18 May 2010 12:06:11 -0400

Georgetown political philosopher Patrick Deneen:

Two crises are unfolding half a world apart, competing for space on the front pages of the world’s newspapers and otherwise apparently disconnected. The first has been the unfolding disaster of the “spill” in the Gulf of Mexico (this word, “spill,” seems highly inaccurate to me – it is a hole, a gash, a cavity in the earth that we have created and from which crude oil is spewing forth. “Spill” makes it sound like it’s an accidental tipping out of liquids we have gathered, giving the impression that somehow we are in control. It’s not a spill, it’s a “spew”). The other crisis – suddenly arriving at everyone’s doorstep yesterday – is the Greek debt situation, precipitating what was momentarily a 1,000 point fall in the Dow yesterday, before settling in for a 3% loss and similar losses overnight around the world.
Despite their apparent disconnection, each of these crises arise from a similar source – our collective inability to live within our means. All accounts of the “spew” suggest that in our insatiable search for replacement of declining amounts of crude oilavailable in places where it’s relatively easier to bring it to the surface (i.e., on land), we are now increasingly forced to probe for oil in highly inhospitable places where the odds of just such disasters are substantially increased. Our national policy of “drill, baby, drill” in deep sea environments – endorsed alike by such political “opponents” as Sarah Palin and President Obama – can only be expected to result in growing numbers of such accidents, just as a nicotine addict can be expected to burn his fingers when he probes more deeply at the bottom of an ashtray for a butt that still might have something left to inhale.
The Greek debt crisis – what many “in the know” believe to be the first of several, and even many such national crises, likely to be replayed in some form in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, even England and possibly even the U.S. – is quite simply a consequence of a nation that has grown accustomed to living beyond its means for a long time, and which now believes itself entitled to that condition on a more or less permanent basis.

Here's the whole thing.

Henry in Hell?

Tue, 18 May 2010 09:10:02 -0400

A very fine sermon on the Carthusian martyrs by Archbishop Rowan Williams:

The God who has, it seems, been vanquished, is yet a God who cannot be abolished. In many ages and many places, authorities even more appalling than Henry VIII have believed that they could abolish God and the cross of God; and they have had to discover that while they may vanquish, they cannot destroy. That which is the last hope, the last longing of the condemned and tortured, remains. The cross stands while the world turns. And whatever human power and human injustice can achieve and effect, the hanged God, the failed God, remains a sign forever.

The cross stands while the world turns: the sign of our terrible human failure, the sign that God is not to be abolished, that justice cannot be extinguished forever; that the voice of the poor and the lost and the tormented cannot finally be silenced – not by any power that the universe can show, because it is rooted in what does not change. The cross stands and the world turns. The world changes, the world comes and goes – powers rise and fall, fashions come and go - sometimes the Christian faith looks attractive and fashionable in the world, and sometimes it looks stupid and marginal. And always it is what it is because the cross stands.

The Christian who knows his or her business is the Christian who has the freedom to return again and again into that silent unchanging presence - the hanged God, whose love, whose generosity, springs out of depths we can never imagine. It is the sounding of those depths that is the heart of the contemplative life – that life lived in such an exemplary way by the Carthusians then and now, lived by so many others in our world over the centuries, lived, we hope and pray, for many centuries and millennia to come.

We treasure with perhaps a particular intensity the martyrdom of the contemplative, because the contemplative who knows how to enter into the silence and stillness of things is, above all, the one who knows how to resist to resist fashion and power, to stand in God while the world turns. In that discovery of stillness lies all our hope of reconciliation, the reconciliation of which John Houghton spoke in this place, this place where we are met to worship, before the community gave its answer to the King's agents. A reconciliation of which he spoke (as do so many martyrs) on the scaffold, a reconciliation which is not vanquished, defeated, or rendered meaningless by any level of suffering or death. If Henry VIII is saved (an open question perhaps) it will be at the prayers of John Houghton. If any persecutor is saved it is at the prayers of their victim. If humanity is saved, it is by the grace of the cross of Jesus Christ and all those martyrs who have followed in his path.

Here's the whole thing.

And yet another opportunity for me to urge folks to see the great and beautiful documentary film Into Great Silence.

Naming Mary

Mon, 17 May 2010 13:30:45 -0400

Fr. Michael Monshau, O.P. on the titles of Our Lady:

In many ways, expressions of love for Mary rank among the products of Catholic devotional spirituality at its best. As Our Lord assured us from the Cross, Mary is our Mother. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, "Mary has truly become the Mother of all believers. Men and women of every time and place have recourse to her motherly kindness and her virginal purity and grace, in all their needs and aspirations, their joys and sorrows, their moments of loneliness and their common endeavors. ... Mary, Virgin and Mother, shows us what love is and whence it draws its origin and its constantly renewed power." The Pope's carefully chosen words "Mary has truly become the Mother of all believers..." with its inclusion of the expression "all believers" (meant to include each one of us individually) introduces an intimate aspect of Marian devotion that can intensify and personalize one's relationship to Mary.

If Mary is mother to us all, it stands to reason that many of us will use a particularly beloved name for Our Mother, and indeed, it is part of our Catholic devotional patrimony to do so. Whereas Mary has many names and titles, and whereas many of us use many of these names and titles for her, the favored use of a particular name for her draws each of us individually into greater intimacy with her. The same is true for the various communities to which we belong. When any group, including a family, chooses a particular name or title for Our Lady, their use of that title draws them closer to Mary and to the mystery represented by the title in question. For example, if a family prays to the Madonna under the title of "Our Lady of Peace," the designation of that title presents an image of Mary who has a mission: the mission of peace. It's well known that many friendships (and even marriages) are formed because people became more intimately acquainted with each other by working together, by sharing a project; it becomes easier to relate to another if we share a mission with them. By calling upon Mary as Our Lady of Peace, it is reasonable to believe that not only will the believer find peace in his life through Our Lady's intercession, but that person will somehow become more intimately grounded in peace and become more of a peacemaker himself. One cannot pray to Our Lady of Peace without being reformed into a more ardent peacemaker himself or herself. Any title used in prayer for Mary draws one more intimately into the virtue or mystery represented by that title. Therefore, it behooves one to identify one's own favored title for Mary. Nations, religious communities, municipalities and families have been doing precisely that for centuries, and in doing so have been drawn into a closer relationship with Mary while simultaneously finding themselves drawn more deeply her work.

Here's the whole thing.

Youth Sunday Sermon

Wed, 12 May 2010 11:45:03 -0400

Katie-Greta Lester's Youth Sunday Sermon:

Truth or "Tolerance"?

Wed, 12 May 2010 10:59:01 -0400

Today is the 131st anniversary of John Henry Newman's "Bigglietto Speech," delivered upon receiving news that he had elevated to the office of Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII:

In a long course of years I have made many mistakes. I have nothing of that high perfection which belongs to the writings of Saints, viz., that error cannot be found in them; but what I trust that I may claim all through what I have written, is this,—an honest intention, an absence of private ends, a temper of obedience, a willingness to be corrected, a dread of error, a desire to serve Holy Church, and, through Divine mercy, a fair {64} measure of success. And, I rejoice to say, to one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth; and on this great occasion, when it is natural for one who is in my place to look out upon the world, and upon Holy Church as in it, and upon her future, it will not, I hope, be considered out of place, if I renew the protest against it which I have made so often.

Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. {65} Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith. Men may go to Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both and belong to neither. They may fraternise together in spiritual thoughts and feelings, without having any views at all of doctrine in common, or seeing the need of them. Since, then, religion is so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man. If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man's religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society.

Here's the whole thing, and here is some commentary by Fr. James Schall, S.J.

Churchly Dissonance

Mon, 10 May 2010 14:45:30 -0400

Reflecting on a quick trip to London, Alan Jacobs points up a sad and common dissonance in Anglican life (to which we can only say, "Behold the harmony which is the Church of the Holy Communion!"):

Great St. Bart's remains, as Iain Sinclair has said, the most numinous of London's churches.

The current rector seems to be Anglo-Catholic in sympathies: I smelled incense as I came in the door, and noted some classes to be offered in the thought of John Henry Newman. And yet I saw also an assertive notice proclaiming that, whatever other churches might do, this one offers Communion to anyone who wants it, regardless of baptism or belief—something that would have horrified Newman, who believed that, as some theologians have put it, that Communion is the sacrament of the reconciled, but Baptism must come before as the sacrament of reconciliation itself. Aesthetic Anglo-Catholicism needs to be distinguished from doctrinal Anglo-Catholicism, I think.

A little later, walking east along London Wall, I noted the odd solitary tower of St. Alban's—a Christopher Wren church otherwise destroyed, sitting incongruously in the middle of a street—and then the blank brick flank of All Hallows-on-the-Wall. Turning down Bishopsgate I passed, almost without seeing it, the shy façade of St. Ethelburga's, flush with the surrounding office buildings: it's not a parish church anymore, after a 1993 IRA bomb nearly destroyed it, but houses the St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace. Then I crossed a building site, rounded a corner, and came up on St. Helen's—which is unseeable to any such walker for a moment, thanks to the great looming bulk of the Gherkin just behind it.

But when you go in, you discern a beautiful space, not quite as old as Great St. Bart's but 13th century, and yet utterly different in aspect and atmosphere. To some extent this results from the large clear windows, some of which were installed after the IRA bomb that devastated St. Ethelburga's and much of Bishopsgate shattered the ancient stained glass. The restoration that followed seemed bent on transforming this Gothic structure into a Wren-style auditory church. The space is open and strongly lit—it seems a place for listening to sermons and taking notes in your Bible, which is quite fitting when you consider the strongly evangelical character of the congregation today.

There's no parish in London more dynamic than St. Helen's: any time you walk in—as you know from experience, Brett—the devotion and zeal are palpable. In St. Helen's I automatically smile. Visit on a weekday morning and you're likely to find people wheeling in bag lunches and placing Bibles in the stackable chairs in preparation for lunchtime Bible studies (heavily attended by workers in this financial district). It's great.

And yet there's something just a little odd about it: the drum kit and amplifiers next to the 17th-century pulpit, the folding tables and styrofoam cups set up around the great marble monuments to the distinguished dead of the City … the space seems just a space, somewhere to meet and praise. If the very stones of Great St. Bart's feel numinous, those of St. Helen's feel just functional, as though an old hall or gymnasium would serve the purpose just as well. Which of course they would: the people of God can find his presence anywhere, and the vibrancy of worship at St. Helen's is immensely attractive. But I'm still trying to account for my feelings of dissonance.

In any event, when I think about our recent trip, this polarity—Great St. Bart's at one end of the City and of my walk, St. Helen's at the other—comes first to my mind.

Here's the whole thing.

Right and Wrong and Babies

Mon, 10 May 2010 13:27:02 -0400

As the Apostle saith, "They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts" (Rm 2.15). From the New York Times, fascinating insights into the moral life of babies:

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

This incident occurred in one of several psychology studies that I have been involved with at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University in collaboration with my colleague (and wife), Karen Wynn, who runs the lab, and a graduate student, Kiley Hamlin, who is the lead author of the studies. We are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of babies...

...

In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the baby “a perfect idiot,” and in 1890 William James famously described a baby’s mental life as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby’s large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves. Many developmental psychologists will tell you that the ignorance of human babies extends well into childhood. For many years the conventional view was that young humans take a surprisingly long time to learn basic facts about the physical world (like that objects continue to exist once they are out of sight) and basic facts about people (like that they have beliefs and desires and goals) — let alone how long it takes them to learn about morality.

I am admittedly biased, but I think one of the great discoveries in modern psychology is that this view of babies is mistaken.

Here's the whole thing.

Embarrasment Is Dead.

Tue, 04 May 2010 11:49:10 -0400

Christine Rosen ponders the rise in public displays of just about anything:

It is not only public grooming that you'll see more of these days; public displays of affection have become more frequent (and more amorous) as well. As one young Manhattan resident recently complained in the New York Times, "Everywhere I go, people are fondling each other as if the entire city were a cheap motel room." At work, over-sharing is becoming as vexing an office problem as gossip. Wall Street Journal reporter Elizabeth Bernstein wrote recently of the challenge of erasing from her mind the image of a colleague who, in pursuit of his bicycling hobby, described "shaving his entire body to reduce aerodynamic drag." We have even devised an acronym - TMI, or "Too Much Information" - to capture the uncomfortable experience of listening to people natter on about their personal problems.

What ever happened to embarrassment? Why are an increasing number of us comfortable bringing our private activities - from personal hygiene to intimate conversation - into public view? Bernstein and others place some of the blame on the desensitization wrought by reality television and social networking sites like Facebook, both of which traffic in personal revelation. To be sure, television and Internet video sites such as YouTube have made all of us more comfortable in the role of everyday voyeurs. We watch others cook, work, shop, argue, sing, dance, stumble, and fall - all from a safe remove. The motley denizens of reality television regularly put themselves into questionable and embarrassing situations so that they can later discuss, for our viewing enjoyment, how questionable and embarrassing their conduct was. If we are less easily embarrassed, it must be in part from vicariously experiencing so much manufactured embarrassment on the screen.

Read the rest.

Religious Harmony?

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:20:43 -0400

An article in the Boston Globe, adapting a section of Stephen Prothero's new book God Is Not One:

...Of course, those who claim that the world’s religions are different paths up the same mountain do not deny the undeniable fact that they differ in some particulars. Obviously, Christians do not go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and Muslims do not practice baptism. Religious paths do diverge in dogma, rites, and institutions. To claim that all religions are basically the same, therefore, is not to deny the differences between a Buddhist who believes in no god, a Jew who believes in one God, and a Hindu who believes in many gods. It is to deny that those differences matter, however. From this perspective, whether God has a body (yes, say Mormons; no, say Muslims) or whether human beings have souls (yes, say Hindus; no, say Buddhists) is of no account because, as Hindu teacher Swami Sivananda writes, “The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same. There is difference only in the nonessentials.”

This is a lovely sentiment but it is untrue, disrespectful, and dangerous.

The gods of Hinduism are not the same as the orishas of Yoruba religion or the immortals of Daoism. To pretend that they are is to refuse to take seriously the beliefs and practices of ordinary religious folk who for centuries have had no problem distinguishing the Nicene Creed of Christianity from the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism from the Shahadah of Islam. It is also to lose sight of the unique beauty of each of the world’s religions.

But this lumping of the world’s religions into one megareligion is not just false and condescending, it is also a threat. How can we make sense of the ongoing conflict in Kashmir if we pretend that Hinduism and Islam are one and the same? Or of the impasse in the Middle East, if we pretend that there are no fundamental disagreements between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?

This naive theological groupthink — call it Godthink — is motivated in part by a laudable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you and your kind will make it to heaven or nirvana or paradise. For most of world history, human beings have seen religious rivals as inferior to themselves — practitioners of empty rituals, perpetrators of bogus miracles, and purveyors of fanciful myths. This way of seeing has given us religious violence from the Crusades and the Holocaust to Rwanda and Nigeria. In response to such violence, the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment popularized the ideal of religious tolerance, and we are doubtless better for it.

I understand what these people are doing. They are not describing the world but reimagining it.

Read the whole thing.

Neighborly Arts

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:49:06 -0400

Via Front Proch Republic:

There is a connection between what might be called the “neighborly arts” and a life well lived. When we make it a point to learn various skills, we become better equipped to help our neighbors. When we can grow a tomato, we can then share it with others. When we can build a fence, install a light fixture, or repair a carburetor, we can not only take better care of ourselves and our families, we can better serve our neighbors. Learning to tend livestock, cultivate fruit trees, and keep bees provides the satisfaction of doing for oneself, but we can also share the bounty. When times are hard, the neighborly arts are at a premium. In times of affluence, they can atrophy under the illusion that specialization and purchasing power are all we need. But if we fail to cultivate these practical arts, the hard times will be harder and the opportunity to help our friends and neighbors in practical ways will be diminished. The bonds of community will be attenuated even as our collective need for a strong and energetic state will correspondingly increase.

Could the neighborly arts be one facet of the art of freedom? Could these practical skills expand our opportunities to engage others in the associational life that is the best bulwark against the nanny state? Could these skills serve to bind families together even as they facilitate one aspect of economic independence? Could the neighborly arts provide the opportunity for healthy interaction with the natural world unencumbered by the weight of institutions and expectations that distort reality by virtue of their scale? ...

...

The neighborly arts, like all arts, are cultivated in practice and passed on from one person to another in a particular place and time. The neighborly arts are placed arts, for they are embodied in the particulars of a local community. They are the humble arts that consist of persons living in proximity with each other and sharing particular knowledge in a way that improves the lives of family, friends, and neighbors. The neighborly arts bind people together in mutual help and affection.

The neighborly arts begin at home, extend outward in service to others, and return in the form of gratitude, friendships, and commitments born of practical skills shared and received. In this sense, I think, the art of hospitality represents in a concrete and intimate way how the neighborly arts can foster good will, good conversation, and good times (not to mention good food). Ultimately, a life together in the presence of extended family, friends, and neighbors is more possible, more durable, and more enjoyable when the bonds of nature, proximity, and affection are strengthened by the mutual assistance born of the neighborly arts. True happiness begins at home.

Time Saver

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:18:52 -0400

Every work hanging at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art on 10 April 2010 in just two minutes:

Chesterton Lecture

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:14:49 -0400

"Who is the Apostle of Common Sense?"

Tuesday, 25 May, 7.00PM
The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist
120 Broad Street, Charleston

"Who is the Apostle of Common Sense?"

with Dale Alquist, president of the American Chesterton Society

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) cannot be summed up in one sentence. Nor in one paragraph. In fact, in spite of the fine biographies that have been written of him, he has never been captured between the covers of one book. But rather than waiting to separate the goats from the sheep, let’s just come right out and say it: G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century. He said something about everything and he said it better than anybody else. But he was no mere wordsmith. He was very good at expressing himself, but more importantly, he had something very good to express. The reason he was the greatest writer of the 20th century was because he was also the greatest thinker of the 20th century...

Photos: The Beauty of Holiness

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:02:00 -0400

Local artist Steven Hyatt has recently completed a stunning photo essay of the Church of the Holy Communion for his "Churches of Charleston Project." You may view the images (and purchase prints) via the Churches of Charleston Project webpage.

Sea-born Goddess or Crucified God?

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 09:47:58 -0400

Orthodox theologian and general Christian provocateur David Bentley Hart laments the lameness of the New Atheism (which he thoroughly eviscerated in this book):

If I were to choose from among the New Atheists a single figure who to my mind epitomizes the spiritual chasm that separates Nietzsche's unbelief from theirs, I think it would be the philosopher and essayist A.C. Grayling. For a short time I entertained the misguided hope that he might produce an atheist manifesto somewhat richer than the others currently on offer. Unfortunately, all his efforts in that direction suffer from the same defects as those of his fellows: the historical errors, the sententious moralism, the glib sophistry. Their great virtue, however, is that they are mercifully short. One essay of his in particular, called "Religion and Reason," can be read in a matter of minutes and provides an almost perfect distillation of the whole New Atheist project.

The essay is even, at least momentarily, interesting. Couched at one juncture among its various arguments (all of which are pretty poor), there is something resembling a cogent point. Among the defenses of Christianity an apologist might adduce, says Grayling, would be a purely aesthetic cultural argument: But for Christianity, there would be no Renaissance art—no Annunciations or Madonnas—and would we not all be much the poorer if that were so? But, in fact, no, counters Grayling; we might rather profit from a far greater number of canvasses devoted to the lovely mythical themes of classical antiquity, and only a macabre sensibility could fail to see that "an Aphrodite emerging from the Paphian foam is an infinitely more life-enhancing image than a Deposition from the Cross." Here Grayling almost achieves a Nietzschean moment of moral clarity.

Ignoring that leaden and almost perfectly ductile phrase "life-enhancing," I, too—red of blood and rude of health—would have to say I generally prefer the sight of nubile beauty to that of a murdered man's shattered corpse. The question of whether Grayling might be accused of a certain deficiency of tragic sense can be deferred here. But perhaps he would have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and the significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization's moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them.

Here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling's casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified God (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling does not: the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.

Here's the whole thing.

No Greater Love: The Movie

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:50:08 -0400

This looks to be a fine documentary film about a congregation of Carmelite nuns, particularly for those of us who were enamored of Into Great Silence - which is to say, all of us who have seen it.

From a review in the Times of London:

I suspect that many people, Catholic or not, would form instinctive ideas about a group of women who spend the vast proportion of their days in silence, rarely venture outside of their monastery walls, and who have made vows of poverty, chastity and obedience before God.

As No Greater Love begins we are led into the Carmelite Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Notting Hill, which houses these devout women and clarifies their lifestyle from the outset.

Consequently my immediate expectations assumed a story of naïve, well-meaning and dedicated nuns whom I would respect and admire, but whose narrative might prove slightly tedious after half an hour.

As the film progressed and introduced Sister Christine Marie I began to question the very notions underpinning my preconceptions. I am of the Shuffle Generation - constantly craving to be plugged in to some sort of noise, whatever sound most gratifies me for the present moment - essentially anything but the tedium of silence. So naturally I did not look forward to this film's predominantly silent soundtrack.

The director Michael Whyte paints an interesting picture of contrasts and the unexpected. We see surprisingly strong women giggling away as they saw heavy branches in the Monastery's garden and you can't help but smile at an elderly nun's equal dexterity with her knitting needles as well as her Apple Mac. Dutiful ordering and unloading of the weekly Sainsbury's online shop is also punctuated by intense prayer and worship.

But exposing these women's superficial adaptations to modern technology loses its intrigue after some time and does not compare with the gravity of their profound deviance from modern mentalities. Sister Christine introduces a rather beautiful and liberating idea through her appraisal of silence as the shepherd of the human mind, guiding our intellect as to what is truly worthy of thought.

It was at this point that I began to think more deeply. It dawned on me that if you're only allowed to talk for disciplined periods of time you must naturally learn to prioritise what really necessitates thought and discussion and what does not. In the subsequent interview Sister Mary explains that the Carmelite's way of life is not an escape from reality as so often perceived by the outside world, quite the contrary: "You're brought to face to face with yourself and the hardest thing for anyone to face is themselves. Once you can face that you can face anything."

Here's the whole thing.

Via the Anchoress.

Dave Ramsey: Financial Peace!

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:40:58 -0400

The Church of the Holy Communion is hosting Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University This 13 week course begins Wednesday evening, 21 April, 6.30-8.30pm. Cost is $100.00. Call the parish office (843.722.2024) for further details & registration, or register online.

What is Financial Peace University?

Most people struggle to make ends meet. They just have too much month left at the end of the money. If you have made mistakes and feel like your money vanishes each month, you are not alone. In fact, 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, regardless of income.

Financial Peace University is designed to teach you and your family how to get out of debt, stay out of debt, and build wealth. You'll meet with your class each week to watch the video lesson and participate in discussion and accountability groups that will change your whole attitude about money!

Dave breaks through the common financial jargon and explains how money really works in a simple, easy-to-understand style. You'll actually have fun as you learn about saving, budgeting, investing, insurance and more! FPU is, without a doubt, the best program available for personal finance.

During this Life-Changing class, you will learn how to:

Get Control Of Your Money
Follow the step-by-step process for getting out of debt and staying out of debt
Put together a monthly spending plan that really works
Set financial goals and communicate about money Stop Struggling To Make Ends Meet
Protect your family from life's emergencies
Eliminate the stress that comes from financial problems
Save and invest for your future Tell Your Money What To Do
Know what insurance to buy...and what to avoid
Get great deals on the things you buy
Buy or sell a home the right way
Plan for your retirement and make the right investment choices Change Your Family's Future
Utilize a good money plan to strengthen your marriage
Unlock the power of giving to change your community

Are you ready to take the first step?

Join us at the Church of the Holy Communion, Wednesday, 21 April, at 6.30pm.

Powerful. Enlightening. Fun. Class members meet with their class each week to watch a video lesson and participate in discussion groups. Dave's style is simple and easy to understand. He will change the way you think about money. You'll actually have fun as you learn! Watch a preview and take a look at the 13 lessons.

So Much For the 'Historical Jesus'

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:25:34 -0400

Professor Scott McKnight ponders the end of the the so-called "quest for the historical Jesus":

Sitting on my desk is volume four of J. P. Meier's Rethinking the Historical Jesus. What began as a two-volume venture has doubled, and one or two more volumes are forthcoming. Volume one generated all kinds of conversation; volume four entered the market with barely a notice. Sitting next to Meier on my desk is Martin Hengel's Jesus und das Judentum, over 700 pages and perhaps the last volume from the titan of scholarship. Someone will translate Hengel, doctoral students will read it, professors will use it, reviewers will say that it's brilliant, an occasional pastor will find it useful, but in a decade it will all be forgotten. Why? Historical Jesus scholarship has come to the end of the road.

Two recent scholars have read the obituary for historical Jesus studies. James D. G. Dunn, in both the hefty Jesus Remembered and the slender A New Perspective on Jesus, argues that the furthest we can get behind the Gospels is to the underlying strata of Jesus as his earliest followers remembered him. That is as far as we can go. That is the Jesus who gave rise to the Christian faith, and that is the only Jesus worth pursuing. In Dunn's view, the "remembered" Jesus contains the faith perspective of the earliest followers of Jesus, and behind that faith perspective we cannot go.

Dale Allison, whom I consider the most knowledgeable New Testament scholar in the United States, is less sanguine and more cynical than Dunn in his newest book, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, which in my judgment plays Taps for the quest for the historical Jesus. After three decades of work in and around the historical Jesus, Allison sketches the variety of views about the historical Jesus and the supposed modern theory that if we put our heads together we will arrive at firm conclusions. Allison offers this depressing conclusion: "Progress has not touched all subjects equally, and whatever consensus may exist, it remains mostly boring."

We must be willing to ask, Whose Jesus will we trust? Will it be that of the evangelists and the apostles? Will it be the church's orthodox Jesus? Or will it be the latest proposal from a brilliant historian? Allison admits this about one of his own books on Jesus: "I opened my eyes to the obvious: I had created a Jesus in my own image, after my own likeness." He's not done: "Professional historians are not bloodless templates passively registering the facts: we actively and imaginatively project. Our rationality cannot be extricated from our sentiments and feelings, our hopes and fears, our hunches and ambitions." So, he ponders, "Maybe we have unthinkingly reduced biography [of Jesus] to autobiography."

Read the whole thing.

Notes on Spiritual Disciplines

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:55:21 -0400

Our MUSC ministry, Caritas Fellowship, has just concluded its spring study on Spiritual Disciplines. Links to the study notes (.pdf files) are below, and notes from previous studies may be found on the Caritas Fellowship website.

Caritas Bible Study:

SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES

"Everybody thinks of changing humanity, but nobody thinks of changing himself." --Leo Tolstoy

1/28: Meditation.pdf (File Size - 105K)

2/11: Prayer.pdf (File Size - 90K)

2/18: Fasting.pdf (File Size - 86K)

2/25: Examination.pdf (File Size - 84K)

3/11: Silence & Solitude.pdf (File Size - 93K)

3/25: Simplicity.pdf (File Size - 99K)

4/1: Service.pdf (File Size - 123K)

4/8: Self-Denial.pdf (File Size - 115K)

The Glory of Jesus

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 10:33:41 -0400

From Fr. Clarke's sermon yesterday:

"What God has done in Jesus Christ is to destroy the logic of revenge, the symmetry of getting even. The wounds he bears, the wounds we gave him, in his hands and in his feet - these Wounds are his Glory. It is the Shekinah of God, the glory of Jesus, that these wounds are unavenged, that rather than send a thousand legions of angels to requite the Death of a Son (which you and I would do yesterday), God accepted our rage and hate against himself, against his Beloved, and loves us within these wounds, because of them.

The Glory of God, this merciful loving-kindness, becomes a clear and shining Truth to Thomas: that in these wounded hands and feet and side, in these wounds received without reprisal; in this pain taken and born; in this Death freely accepted; in this Forgiveness Incarnate before him - somehow Thomas is standing in the Presence of Something Radiant, Something Holy, Something Divine. They are the very Keys of Death and Hades: all earthly logic is so much straw, and God's Logic is standing before him in the Flesh of his Teacher and Friend.

Small wonder, then, that the iron bands fell from his heart, that faithlessness fled, and that the eternal confession springs to his lips: My Lord and My God!"

Click here to hear.

PASCHA NOSTRUM

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 10:15:41 -0400

Beneventian chant, via the shrine of the Holy Whapping:

Loser Letters

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:50:00 -0400

Mary Eberstadt's wise and hysterically satiric answer to the New Atheism, with a twist. The Loser Letters: I highly recommend it.

A wickedly witty satire, The Loser Letters chronicles the conversion of a young adult Christian to atheism. Amid the many current books arguing for or against religion, social critic, and writer Mary Eberstadt's The Loser Letters is truly unique: a black comedy about theism and atheism that is simultaneously a rollicking defense of Christianity.

And here's an excerpt from Letter One:

Dear Sirs (again),

First, let's talk about something You Atheist guys all like to talk about (judging by those latest books especially!), which is sex and the role that it plays in separating the benighted believers from the enlightened rest of us.

As I get it, our Atheist position on sex boils down to this: the believers with their tard regulations are all wrong about it, while we Brights have been — I'm reaching here for the words that You guys might use — so groovy and hip by throwing out the Christian rule book on all that stuff. Or to put it another way: thanks to Atheism and Secularism, more generally, words and phrases like "privacy", "consenting adults", and "behind closed doors" are in; and ones like "monogamy", "self-restraint", and "staying together for the kids" are out. If there's anything we Brights are all on the same page about — and again, I've read all those pages of Yours pretty carefully! — it would seem to be this; am I right?

Now, as a fresh convert myself, who is in a more or less delirious state at all times just thinking about what my new Atheism will mean for my personal life now that I've been freed from all those commandments, I'm certainly not here to argue with You about the appeal of doing what comes Naturally. At the same time, though, I have to warn You about something. A lot of what the new Atheism says about sex strikes me as strategically dangerous to us — the kind of talk that runs the risk of turning off some of the very believers, especially the younger believers, who might otherwise be tempted to switch over to our side.

Let's start with that generational difference between You new Atheists and some of the rest of us. Did Your parents ever leave home for the weekend when any of You were kids, putting You in the care of teenage siblings? Do You still remember the two-day nonstop party, and the expressions on Your parents' faces Sunday night when they saw the overflowing ashtrays and empty kegs and someone else's clothes in the laundry and throw-up in the fish tank? Well, You should know that's pretty much what it was like for those of us who went through life after You baby boomers did, a decade or so after what might be called the godless generation swept through first.

And this brings us to why Atheists run the risk of losing among this younger generation when You talk about sex the way new Atheists all have so far: because everybody on the godless team writes about sex and freedom from the religious moral rules as if all the years from I960 on never even existed. As if the Sexual Revolution hadn't been staggering along for nearly a half century now! Hello? Well, for better or worse from the point of view of our side, it has. And what that means is that all kinds of people now know that if we try and make a selling point out of trashing Christian sexual morality — as Atheists have been doing since the beginning — a whole lot of Dulls today are going to raise their hands and call us losers again on the subject of sex and say that we don't know what we're talking about. So in this Letter I'd like to draw Your attention to just some of the legacy of the Sexual Revolution, in the hopes of making our Movement less vulnerable to the unfortunate facts.

We can begin where most Americans really begin to learn about sex, i.e., on the typical American campus of the past few decades. To live it is to see up close and personal that Dostoevsky's mantra — when "God" is gone, everything is permitted — is not some lame old literary prophecy, but a vibrating social fact. Of course, by saying "everything" is permitted on campus I don't literally mean everything, after all; these upper-middle-class children, some still wearing braces and nearly all still depending on their doting parents for every library fine, have for the most part proved unlikely to take up mass murder or grand theft auto. But the part of "everything" that involves everybody's favorite something, i.e., risk-and-supposedly-consequence-free sex (or at least the promise thereof), has been different...

Read the rest of Letter One.

Watch Your Words

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:39:16 -0400

Preach it, sister:

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's new book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, is a warning against industrialized language prevalent in contemporary America, where words "come to us processed like cheese, depleted of nutrients, flattened and packaged, artificially colored and mass marketed." To combat this, she advocates a strenuous connoisseurship that insists on "useable, flexible, precise, enlivening language."

While the author's Christian commitment is clear throughout—Caring for Words grew out of her 2004 Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary—the book is focused on the "horizontal" dimension of language, on its primary role as man's chief social tool. As she puts it, "caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words." The state of English therefore concerns everyone—not just poets and English teachers like herself.

McEntrye forthrightly identifies the villains: biased journalists and cynical advertisers, entertainers, and politicians. These usual suspects, she says, are the titans of the word industry who have inundated us with cheap language designed not to tell the truth, but to manipulate, evade, or sell. Public language is thus (to adopt McEntyre's preferred, ecological metaphor) polluted and depleted by "thoughtless hyperbole, unexamined metaphors, slogans and sound bites, grammatical confusion, ungrounded abstractions, overstatement, and blather" which seep malignantly into ordinary speech and thought.

Here's the whole thing.

Hitler Tried To Bogart The Shroud

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:30:33 -0400

From the Perth Sunday Times:

Hitler dispatched aides to swipe the sacred relic - believed to have been used to wrap the dead body of Christ - after visiting Italy in 1938.

Vatican officials had it moved south from Turin to the Montevergine monastery in the country's Campania region, but the Fuhrer's henchmen eventually stumbled across the shroud's hiding place.

However they were unable to find it because of a group of brave monks who surrounded the altar in which the artifact was stashed and pretended to pray, Italian news agency ANSA reported today.

Their quick-thinking meant Hitler - who historians say was obsessed with religious symbols and the occult - was never able to get his hands on the linen relic, which has captivated the minds of worshipers and skeptics alike for more than 500 years.

Here's the whole thing.

The Science of Sainthood

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:56:43 -0400

Saintly ‘science’: When doctors and doubters are called upon to prove miracles

Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, a hematologist, lapsed Anglican and firm atheist, was desperate for work in the mid-1980s when she took on a small contract in Ottawa to interpret a set of laboratory slides for a colleague and write a report.

She was given no information about the patient and assumed her report would be used in a malpractice lawsuit, which is common for that kind of blind medical analysis.

Instead, her findings and subsequent oral testimony became the last piece of “evidence” of a miracle in the 200-year cause for canonization of Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, the first Canadian to be made a saint.

That an atheist scientist would be conscripted to the cause is not unusual in the complicated business of proving sainthood.

Dr. Ronald Kleinman, also an atheist, was a top pediatrician at Massachusetts General Hospital in March 1987 when he treated a little girl who was moments from death. The result of what he witnessed that day became critical medical evidence that led to Edith Stein being declared a saint...

Click here to read the rest.

Holy Week Homilies

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:37:07 -0400

Your Holy Week homilies in one convenient location:

Monday in Holy Week: audio / text
Jn 12.1-11
March 29, 2010
Fr. Dow Sanderson

Tuesday in Holy Week: audio / text
Mk 11.15-19
March 30, 2010
Fr. Patrick Allen

Wednesday in Holy Week: audio / text
Jn 13.21-35
March 31, 2010
Fr. Dow Sanderson

Maundy Thursday: audio / text
Jn 13.1-15
April 01, 2010
Fr. Dan Clarke

Good Friday: audio / text
Jn 18.1-19.42
April 02, 2010
Fr. Patrick Allen

Great Vigil of Easter: audio / text
Mt 28.1-10
April 03, 2010
Fr. Dan Clarke

Easter Day: audio / text
Lk 24.1-10
April 04, 2010
Fr. Dow Sanderson

Holy Communion Video

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:39:39 -0400

Video of Fr. Tobin's talks from the 2010 parish retreat are now available via our video page. Keep an eye on that page for other forthcoming video from the Church of the Holy Communion!

Bp. Lawrence's Convention Address

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:21:53 -0400

From Bishop Lawrence's address:

Finally, what is it we want for this great and historic Diocese of South Carolina? I believe this diocese wants to be able to decide under God its destiny; to have a choice as to whether it goes down the same destructive path that has caused such statistical and spiritual decline as can be seen elsewhere among so many Episcopal dioceses and parishes across this country. I believe what we seek for this diocese is stated succinctly in Resolutions R-1: It is to be a gospel diocese, proclaiming an evangelical faith, embodied in a catholic order, and empowered and transformed by the Holy Spirit. To strive by God’s grace to remain unswerving in our belief that above all Jesus came into the world to save the lost, that those who do not know Christ need to be brought into a personal and saving relationship with him, and that those who do know Christ need to be taught by the Holy Scriptures faithfully to follow him all the days of their lives to the Glory of God the Father by taking their places as responsible members in His Church. As your bishop I also want us to be able to do this while maintaining mutually enriching missional relationships with dioceses and Provinces of the Anglican Communion, all the while exercising a responsible autonomy. That should an Anglican Covenant emerge as adopted by the breadth of the various Provinces of the Communion that we should hope for full participation in such a Covenant. To this end I will be attending the Global South to South Encounter gathering in Singapore in April. Along with Bishop John Howe from Central Florida, I will be one of the Communion Partner representatives. We, along with Bishops from The Anglican Church in North America, will be present as observers. This is all comes under the rubric of what I have summarized in last year’s Convention Address, as Making Biblical Anglicans for a Global Age.

Many speak to me of the difficult task I have as bishop at this time. They wonder how I am dealing with the stresses and pressures upon me. I respond by saying I draw strength from God’s call, and from the people of this diocese and from our history. For we have faced far more grievous challenges than the ones we face today; and as God was sufficient then He shall be so now. Forgive me if I remind you of chapters of gathering storms and seized opportunities, which you know far better than I. Among the catalogue of challenges I will remind you today of just one. You will remember that as the winds of war began to blow across this fertile land of South Carolina those Anglicans who professed and called themselves Christians had to make difficult decisions regarding not merely their allegiance to King and Country, but to the Church of England as well. Repeatedly I have drawn courage from the story of the Reverend Robert Smith, an Englishman who came to the colony of South Carolina to be the rector of St. Philip's Church, Charlestown, and who was later to become the first Bishop of South Carolina, and how he must have struggled as he faced the momentous decision before him. I reflect often upon his perseverance and the sacrifices he made. He, like many, stared boldly into the reality of his day. He faced reality not as it had been, but as it was at that time; and he along with others helped to create a future in which they and their children would live. Then as the young nation took form, these Anglicans or Episcopalians formed a diocese, elected a bishop, and helped to form the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America. Under a gracious Providence they controlled their destiny. Yet before these events unfolded he preached to the members of the Commons House of Assembly and the members of the Provisional Congress these words on February 17, 1775: “You have truly joined in owning the necessity of this day’s supplication and prayers; that as differences have arisen between our Mother Country and us; not on our part. I hope so some would insinuate through unreasonable [illegible] of power or factious discontent, but in the sole defense of undoubted rights, we should beg the Almighty to bless our endeavors and grant that peace, unanimity, harmony and love with healing in their wings, may again be established between us.” Such a prayer for peace and harmony was not answered as he had hoped. Though we believe God ultimately accomplished His purposes even showing, as the psalmist had once testified, His sustaining “love in a besieged city.”

Click here to read the whole thing. Click here for video.

Holy Week @ Holy Communion

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:44:51 -0400

Monday - Wednesday: Low Mass, 8.00am & 6.30pm
Maundy Thursday: The Mass of the Lord's Supper, 6.30pm
Good Friday: Stations of the Cross, 12.00pm; Good Friday Liturgy & Mass of the Pre-Sanctified, 6.30pm
Holy Saturday: Great Vigil of Easter, 8.00pm
Easter Sunday: Low Mass, 8.00am; Solemn High Mass, 10.30am (Children's Easter Egg hunt, 9.15am)

The Holy Sepulchre

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:12:35 -0400

Amazing 360 views of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem - just in time for a Holy Week virtual pilgrimmage.

Discipline & Desire

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:51:23 -0400

Georgetown professor of political philosophy Patrick Deneen on the twin moral shoals presented by food and sex:

I was struck by the juxtaposition of these events, since both dealt with the elemental kinds of appetite — for food and sex. Those two objects of our desire — both derived from instincts and impulses of the human body — are linked together by Aristotle in his discussion of the origins of political community. In “Politics” he wrote,

“Just as man is the best of animals when he perfected, when separated from law and justice he is the worst of all. … Without virtue he is the most unholy and savage of animals, particularly with regard to sex and food.”

Aristotle is pointing out that humans who are unable to restrain their most elemental appetites will prove unable to govern themselves in every other area of life.

The Christian tradition — building on this insight — named excesses in these areas lust and gluttony, and regarded them as two of the seven deadly sins. Indulgence in either was not to be considered a form of freedom, but the enslavement to desires without limit...

...We live too much in a “food positive,” as well as a “sex positive” age — one in which we tend to defend self-seeking satiation of appetites as the individual right to do with our bodies what we want without thought of the moral ecological system that is damaged by our consumption. This is a stance that contributes equally to industrial sex — or pornography — and industrial farming. The first treats people — and the second, animals — merely as objects for our use and enjoyment.

Both of these are obscene, but in our current political arrangement, each party finds only one sin to be problematic.

Here's the whole thing, and see this related reflection from theologian John Milbank:

Theology in a secular age has to give an account of the secular and of why secularization has occurred. This should include recognizing how Christianity secularizes (in a good sense) by desacralizing politics, law, and nature to some degree—but without total disenchantment. At the same time, I think we need an account of why secularity (in a bad sense) has left the West with realms autonomously indifferent to the sacred. Persons, land, and money without reference to God become, as Karl Polanyi pointed out, either idols or else mere instruments to be exploited—or both at once.

Here's the whole thing.

The Winning Bracket

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:01:24 -0400

Behold (for even better beholding, click to enlarge):

Bp. Lawrence & Lent

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:07:58 -0500

This Lent, Bishop Lawrence has written two very helpful pastoral letters (so far) on Lenten disciplines. Herewith are excerpts and links:

Self-Denial: A Delightful Refrain

“Self-denial…” wrote Cardinal John Henry Newman, “is a subject never out of place in Christian teaching.” It is never out of place because it is a way of putting the cross, the pattern of Christ’s sacrifice, at the very center of our daily lives. It is especially appropriate during the forty days of Lent. “If anyone would come after me,” said Jesus, “let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Let him deny himself--this is not just refraining from sin; nor practicing what earlier Christians called mortification, that action through the Holy Spirit of putting to death sin in the Christian’s life (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5): though certainly it includes this. Rather it is walking in the way of sacrificial obedience to Christ’s call. This includes at times giving up what one might rightly and legitimately use. As St. Paul writes “‘All things are lawful’ but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful but I will not be enslaved by anything.” (I Cor. 6:12-14; see also I Cor.10:23)

The Ash Wednesday liturgy includes self-denial, along with self-examination, prayer and fasting, as one of the disciplines for the observance of a holy Lent. Yet self-denial is rarely even mentioned these days within the Church. Is it any wonder in this increasingly indulgent society that it is not at the top of most lists or dimensions in Christian discipleship? To be sure this discipline, like the other spiritual disciplines can fall prey to a form of perfectionism which denies the grace and freedom we have in Christ; yet, nevertheless, when employed from grace and through God’s grace there is godly freedom, even delight, in these disciplines, especially the discipline of self-denial...

Read it all.

Self-Examination: Spiritual Stocktaking

Dear Friends in Christ,

If you have never lived in snow country where the roads are salted because of snow and ice, you may not know how salt can corrode the fenders and undergirding of your car. I remember seeing, one morning as I drove to work, an oncoming car lose its rear wheels and chassis. The trunk of the car hit the asphalt with sparks and scraping, while the rear axle and wheels went rolling off the road and into a vacant field. Since no one was hurt, I couldn’t help snickering to myself at the jocular scene, when I was suddenly arrested by the sobering thought: “Mark, when was the last time you examined the frame of your car?” Most of us, before we go on a cross-country trip, will check the oil, tires, brakes, and fill the gas tank. Yet surprisingly enough, many of us on the great journey of the Christian life, traveling over rough roads, in bad weather, icy passes and lonely barren deserts, demonstrate an all too lackadaisical attitude to the equipment of our spiritual lives.

Lent is a good season to do what Evelyn Underhill calls spiritual stocktaking. In the disciplines of the Christian life this is called “Self-Examination.” It is the first discipline mentioned in the Ash Wednesday invitation to a Holy Lent. The Prayer Book reads: “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s Holy Word.” (BCP, p. 265)

Although Self-Examination, or “the examination of conscience” as it used to be called, is a long honored discipline of the Christian life, too often the average Christian not only doesn’t know how to do it, he doesn’t even know what it is. This of course is not his fault; it is the fault of us who are pastors and teachers in the Church. Ironically, 12 Step groups like A.A. and N.A. make important use of this discipline. The Fourth Step of A.A. reads: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” The Fifth Step follows up: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” Sixth Step: “ Were entirely ready to have God remove these defects of character.”

Read it all.

"Mass Market Mysticism"

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:16:27 -0500

New York Times columnist (and token faithful Catholic) reflects on a recent essay by theologian Luke Timothy Johnson regarding modern mysticism:

...And yet Johnson may be right that something important is being lost as well. By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

What’s more, it’s possible that our horizons have become too broad, and that real spiritual breakthroughs require a kind of narrowing — the decision to pick a path and stick with it, rather than hopscotching around in search of a synthesis that “works for me.” The great mystics of the past were often committed to a particular tradition and community, and bound by the rules (and often the physical confines) of a specific religious institution. Without these kind of strictures and commitments, Johnson argues, mysticism drifts easily into a kind of solipsism: “Kabbalism apart from Torah-observance is playacting; Sufism disconnected from Shariah is vague theosophy; and Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming.”

Most religious believers will never be great mystics, of course, and the American way of faith is kinder than many earlier eras to those of us who won’t. But maybe it’s become too kind, and too accommodating. Even ordinary belief — the kind that seeks epiphanies between deadlines, and struggles even with the meager self-discipline required to get through Lent — depends on extraordinary examples, whether they’re embedded in our communities or cloistered in the great silence of a monastery. Without them, faith can become just another form of worldliness, therapeutic rather than transcendent, and shorn of any claim to stand in judgment over our everyday choices and concerns.

Without them, too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Anglicans & the Pope(s)

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:09:24 -0500

St John FisherHere's a very helpful address from William Cardinal Levada on ecumenical initiatives from Rome to Anglicans:

The recent Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, establishing—I don’t need to translate this, I suppose, it won’t come out so well in translation: “groups of Anglicans”—establishing personal ordinariates for groups of Anglicans seeking full communion with the Catholic Church, was not created in a vacuum. For many Anglicans, the possibility opened by this initiative has seemed to be a logical development of the official dialogues between the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church during the 45 year period since the end of the Second Vatican Council. Any discussion of Pope Benedict’s initiatives regarding Anglicans might therefore begin with a glance at this important history...

Here's the whole thing.

True Places

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:49:30 -0500

Lauren Winner reviewsTrue Places: a Lowcountry Preacher, His Church, and His People by photographer Stanley Lanzano:

Herewith a white photographer's journey into the churches of African Americans in the South Carolina low-country. The project was born when photographer Stanley F. Lanzano was vacationing at a posh inn on Pawley's Island. The inn made for a lovely getaway: each room was well-appointed; cocktails were served on the porch each evening. But what "intrigued" Lanzano was the "silent black staff. They moved slowly, their eyes kept low … . [W]earing starched white uniforms, they did their jobs in a quiet, efficient, and accommodating way. I wondered about their lives and dreams, their homes and families." So began Lanzano's journey into the African American communities—and especially churches—in and around Georgetown, South Carolina.

Read it all.

Innocence Is Bliss!

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:50:27 -0500

Church of the Holy Communion parishioner Frank Royster's latest record, Innocence Is Bliss, is out and available for purchase! And I think I recognize our newest boat boy on the cover. The album may be downloaded from Digstation, here, and from iTunes by the end of this week. It's also available from local music retail outlets. And Frank can hook you up after Mass. Frank's website is here.

About the album:

A look at the cover of Frank Royster's newest solo album, you'll see the image of his 5-year old son standing, lifting up a giant blue sphere.

"He almost looks like a little Atlas," said Royster, "A little guy with the weight of the world on his shoulders."

The Facebook photo of his son McCartney was the perfect symbol for Royster's strong sophomore effort, "Innocence is Bliss." A cascade of catchy, fun Power Pop tunes following Royster's chase for happiness as he bears the weight of his own personal ups and downs.

"Yeah, I am always looking for bliss, longing for bliss," said Royster, "We are all longing for bliss."

Royster's well-known fondness for the Beatles, the Byrds and Elvis Costello continues here as his new music boasts the influence of well-known power pop producer Jamie Hoover, member of the Spongetones. It's the first time Royster handed over full control of his music. The result is a tighter, polished turn following Royster's 2007 self-produced debut album, "Thru the Years."

"This record is not as ‘garage-y’ as the first record," he said, "It sonically sounds better."

Hints of harmonica, hand claps, piano bouncing and even a slide guitar gave Royster the sound he wanted. Think of a grown-up version of "That Thing You Do!" Better yet, an album full of Brian Wilson and Beatle harmonies, with the sounds of Lenny Kravitz-- even a country twang thrown in. Royster credits Hoover for challenging the material.

"It was sometimes hard work, to give someone complete control to make changes, he said." To hear (Hoover) say, "No, I don't like this, we are doing it this way."

In the end, Royster said the experience proved liberating.

For more than two decades, Royster's musical journey has had him perform at almost every venue in the Charleston area. It started in his James Island living room, at the age of 5, swapping out Tonka trucks for the Honky Tonk records of Buck Owens. At age 13, he owned his first guitar, by college age, his first band The Uncertain-T's.

His love for pop pushed him futher as rythym guitarist for the jam-stylings of the Eddie Bush Group in the 1990s, and then for a tour or two or three as guitarist for the popular Charleston bar band, The Fire Apes. The result was the formation of Royster's own band in the 2000s, The Hed Shop Boys that now weekly brings in the "whiskey drinkers" to local watering holes across South Carolina to smile at their pop favorites from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They often dance to Royster originals they think were created 30 years ago.

But in between his love of music on the stage and his knack for teaching guitar in his studio, Royster has found a greater love, that of his son McCartney, giving no doubt to Royster's preference for his favorite Beatle. In the final track of "Innoncence is Bliss," Royster gives his son the opportunity he never had at the age of five, the chance to sing and record his very first song, "Longing for Twinkle" is a re-creation of a familiar children's song, with the booming sounds of McCartney at the drums.

"He knows some of the words, he sings it," he said. "He calls it 'twinkley'!"

Indeed, innocence is bliss.

-Patrick Villegas

Ending the Reformation?

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:36:54 -0500

Charlotte Hays in the Wall Street Journal:

On a recent evening, about 60 people—ex-Episcopalians, curious Catholics and a smattering of earnest Episcopal priests in clerical collars—gathered downtown for an unusual liturgy: It was Evensong and Benediction, sung according to the Book of Divine Worship, an Anglican Use liturgical book still being prepared in Rome.

Beautiful evensongs are a signature of Protestant Episcopal worship. Benediction, which consists of hymns, canticles or litanies before the consecrated host on the altar, is a Catholic devotion. We were getting a blend of both at St. Mary Mother of God Church, lent for the occasion.

One former Episcopalian present confessed to having to choke back tears as the first plainsong strains of "Humbly I Adore Thee," the Anglican version of a hymn by St. Thomas Aquinas, floated down from the organ in the balcony. A convert to Catholicism, she could not believe she was sitting in a Catholic Church, hearing the words of her Anglican girlhood—and as part of an authorized, Roman Catholic liturgy.

Here's the whole thing.

Jews & Christians, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:53:28 -0500

Here's an interesting essay advancing the thesis that the Christian imagination lends itself to fantasy (i.e., Tolkien & Lewis) and the Jewish imaginaiton to Science Fiction (i.e., Asimov & Silverberg):

C. S. Lewis was always clear that he did not set out to write The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe as a didactic project. It began, he said, with an image in his head of an umbrella-toting faun standing in the snow. Nonetheless, when he wrote the Narnia books, Lewis drew deeply from his Christian beliefs. In this, he and the many Christian fantasy writers have an advantage over not only the few, largely assimilated Jewish fantasy writers, but even over a deeply knowledgeable and religiously committed Jewish writer who might seek to create a work of fantasy dramatizing Judaism in the way that the various Narnia books dramatize Christianity. The Jewish difficulty with fantasy is not only historical and sociological. It is theological as well, and this has to do with the degree to which Judaism has banished the magical and mythological elements necessary for fantasy.

To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly. Judaism’s divine drama is connected with a specific people in a specific place within a specific history. Its halakhic core is not, I think, convincingly represented in fantasy allegory. In its rabbinic elaboration, even the messianic idea is shorn of its mythic and apocalyptic potential. Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition. Let us take two central examples: the magical world and the idea of evil.

Christianity has a much more vivid memory and even appreciation of the pagan worlds which preceded it than does Judaism. Neither Canaanite nor Egyptian civilizations exercise much fascination for the Jewish imagination, and certainly not as a place of enchantment or escape. In contrast, the Christian imagination found in Lewis and Tolkien often moves, like Beowulf or Sir Gawain, through an older pagan world in which spirits of place and mythical beings are still potent. Nor is this limited to fauns and elves. This anterior world can be dark and frighteningly alien, as Tolkien has Gandalf indicate in The Two Towers. “Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves,” the wizard says, “the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not.” Lewis sounds the same note in Perelandra when, far below the surface of the planet Venus, his protagonist catches an unsettling glimpse of alien creatures, and wonders if there might be “some way to renew the old Pagan practice of propitiating the local gods of unknown places in such fashion that it was no offence to God Himself but only a prudent and courteous apology for trespass.”

Here's the whole thing.

Via First Thoughts.

Clarity and/or Fidelity?

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:27:31 -0500

From the Rector's Desk:

Many of you will have read that we hosted the national gathering of the Anglo-Catholic Rectors Conference here a few weeks ago. It was a very helpful, encouraging and rewarding experience. It was good to meet new friends, and to reconnect with acquaintances of long standing. And of course, one of the best things about such gatherings is the opportunity to hear and share stories. Fr. Reid, the Rector of St. Clement's, Philadelphia, for example, is a regular raconteur, and he kept me in stitches the entire time. He shared with us regarding his parish, We are the "highest" Church in the World. We use the Roman Missal (in Latin) and pray for Benedict our Pontiff and Charles our Bishop, neither of which is actuallytrue! On hearing that, I was reminded of an old quip I once heard from the rector of Ascension and St. Agnes Church in Washington. He said something along these lines, We Anglo-Catholics have the highest regard for episcopacy...it's the bishops themselves we can't stand! Of course, that rather tongue-in-cheek comment was received as outrageously funny... Funny in the way that certain macabre jokes make us laugh. And we laugh because it would be ever so easy to cry.

The truth of the matter is that Anglo-Catholicism- even with its very real, incarnate flesh and blood, Gospel preaching, mass saying, soul saving, the hungry feeding parishes and ministries– must nonetheless content itself with living somewhat in the realm of the theoretical or hypothetical... We believe in Episcopacy per se... but the Bishops... That's another story!

And that, of course, is because all too often, the rector of the one, "tolerated" Anglo-Catholic parish stuck in the corner of the diocese somewhere often had to fight, claw, bleed (and sometimes go to jail) in order to preserve the faith that he and his people held most dear. Even in my own day, I well remember Fr. Fleming sneaking up behind Bishop Temple to toss on the red cope moments before the procession began, to which invariably the response from the good bishop was, Sam, must I wear these papist rags? In that particular case, the disagreements all passed with the twinkle of an eye and honest affection and good will. Oh, that we could have a little of that good will today! I bet you are just as tired as I am of a world that is so terribly polarized. Red States and Blue States. Liberals and Conservatives. Fox people and MSNBC people. And far from witnessing to the world, the Church has adopted the world's strategy. We have everything divided up neatly into little categories and camps. And every person, every motive, every relationship seems to be run through the filter of which ever "camp" we happen to belong to. In short, we are high on suspicion and short on trust., I don't mean among our own parishioners, of course. Nor even particularly among our own Diocese (as different and multi-faceted as we are). But clearly, the Episcopal Church itself is in a state of extreme dysfunction and decline...It is simply not possibly for a rational person to look at the plain facts and draw any other conclusion. And the conflicts we experience in the United States have been successfully exported to every nook and cranny of the Anglican Communion. Such a gift!

It would be easy, with the Church in such a state, for us to lose heart, to become discouraged and distracted from our ministries. We all want clarity. We all want a healthy thriving Church. But we must remember... Anglo-Catholicism knows all too well that we must sometimes "make do" when the theoretical is all that we can get our hands on. But isn't it interesting to you that we think that "clarity" and "peace" are somehow normative? And that, at least tacitly, we imply that we are deserving of such a blissful state?

When the great orthodox bishop Athanasius was banished in the Second Century from his See by the Heretical majority, when indeed, it was Athanasius Contra Mundum, where was peace? Where was clarity?

During the crisis of the Fourteenth Century, when there was a Pope in Rome and one in Avignon (and ultimately a third contender before it was all settled), where was peace? Where was clarity?

When the Communist revolution came to China, cutting off the small Catholic community there from all contact and interaction with the Vatican, where was peace and clarity? (Amazingly, when things "thawed" some fifty years later, a little vestige of that community was discovered, still worshipping in Latin, keeping all the old traditions, unaware of the changes brought by Vatican II).

And so you see my friends, as much as we might long for them, and much as we might desire them, peace and clarity are not always a part of the bargain! Do you marvel, as I do, when you read passages in the Acts of the Apostles that tell us...and they rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer on behalf of Christ. We have been through many experiences as Episcopalians in these last decades, but may I gently suggest to you that suffering isn't actually among them! Maybe, just maybe, this is our time to stand in solidarity with all those Saints in ages past. We may want clarity. God wants Fidelity. I know which of the two is more immediately within my ability to accomplish, don't you!?

May God bless each of us with Faithful and Steadfast hearts in this Lenten Season.

With prayers and love,

Fr. Sanderson

Of Facebook and Friendship

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:32:55 -0500

The website "Frontporch Republic," is having a symposium on friendship, including this contribution from Susan McWilliams on "Facebook and Friendship." An excerpt:

What I’d like to stress is that, whatever else you make of Facebook friendship, it underscores the great and significant discrepancy between: 1) the scale of contemporary life, and 2) the scale of friendship.

The scale of contemporary life is so vast that it is hard to fathom. For most of us, completing even the most homebound tasks – using the bathroom, eating a meal – involves us massive networks of pipe and road, transportation and production, people and powers. For most of us, going to work means traveling a fair amount of horizontal distance – and then logging on to connect ourselves to even more far-flung places, to cover an even greater span of space. Ours is an era in which the grand forces are all centrifugal, as William Leach has written, and in which the injunction is to “extend your reach.” We are told to minimize the time we spend doing things – to seek efficiency – in order to extend ourselves further. Services like Facebook are inevitable in this context, since they both allow and encourage the extension of our reach across great, seemingly limitless distances.

By contrast, the scale of friendship is necessarily limited. Friendship is a bounded relationship, one that thrives on intimacy and depth rather than extension and breadth. Friendship thrives, as C.S. Lewis wrote, by withdrawing people from networks of collective “togetherness” into smaller and more partial spheres. Even if, as Lewis says, friendship is the least jealous of loves, it is always to some degree exclusive. Friendship flourishes when given lots of time and little distraction: conditions which you cannot extend to more than a very few people. In the end, the scale of friendship is limited because each of our lives is limited. Our time is limited, and friendship requires time. (It is telling how silly the dominant values expressed in our language sound when they are applied to friendship; no one has ever complemented someone else by calling her an “efficient” friend.)

Put in starker terms, we might say that Facebook friendship is part and parcel of a culture that values a way of living that – while on certain terms quite interesting and rewarding – is inhospitable to the cultivation of real friendship.

Again, here's the whole thing.

McWilliams links to several good essays on the Facebook "friending" phenomenon, but here's one of my favorites: "Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism," by Christine Rosen.

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:42:32 -0500

The Morgan Library & Museum up in New York City (apparently it's an urban center of note somewhere north of Raleigh) is exhibiting a 15th Century Book of Hours commissioned by Catherine of Cleves, and has provided a fascinating online exhibition as well.

There's a bit about Catherine and her Prayer Book in the Wall Street Journal, here:

Catherine's manuscript was so rich that, in the 19th century, an unscrupulous dealer divided and recombined the pages as two separate volumes. The Morgan Library, which owns both parts, has had the books disbound prior to reassembly in their original order (minus 11 missing miniatures). A superb selection of pages from this spectacular manuscript book is on view through May 2 at the Morgan in "Demons and Devotion: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves."

Presented roughly according to their original sequence, the selected miniatures include familiar scenes from the life of the Virgin and of Christ. But because Catherine commissioned a remarkably large number of illuminations, there are surprising additional images and variations on traditional iconographic schemes. A sequence recounting the complicated history of the wood from which Christ's crucifix was made, for example, starting with the tree that sprouted from Adam's grave, is a cycle not often included in books of hours. Similarly, an expansion of the story of Christ's childhood, illuminating one of the Hours of the Virgin, shows Mary nursing her infant in a nicely appointed Netherlandish kitchen, while Joseph spoons up soup. A related scene presents Joseph at work in his carpentry shop, while Mary weaves and a toddler Christ Child navigates the room in a walker on wheels.

Thou hast set eternity in their hearts...

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:59:47 -0500

From Newsweek, via "First Thoughts":

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed...

Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city...

Seems more obvious than bold to me. Here's the whole thing.

How Evangelism Happens

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:48:23 -0500

I'm a big fan of singer-songwriter Patty Griffin, whose new album Downtown Church (as the title suggests) has a heavy gospel influence. In reading about the genesis of the new record on her website, I came across the following, a good object lesson in how evangelism happens - through hospitality and inclusion (that much abused & besmirched word):

“I wanted to do it in a church,” Patty says, the wonder still in her voice nearly a year later. “I didn’t expect Buddy to find such a church. I was thinking, nice little church out in the country, one of those buildings they rent out for music videos. And Buddy got this place. Wow! What a church.”

The supporting musicians Buddy assembled were well acquainted both with the repertoire and with each other. The rhythm section – bassist Dennis Crouch, drummer Jay Bellerose – as well as fiddler Stuart Duncan played play with Buddy in the Alison Krauss/Robert Plant touring band. Doug Lancio added guitars, augmented by John Deaderick’s piano, John Catchings’ cello, Bryan Owings’ percussion flourishes, and Russ Pahl’s steel guitar...

And the voices surrounding her! Emmylou Harris, Raul Malo, Jim Lauderdale, Shawn Colvin, Mike Farris, Buddy and Julie Miller. And Regina and Ann McCrary, whose father was one of the founding members of the Fairfield Four, gospel royalty.

“Having Regina there was pretty heavy for me,” Patty says. “She knew that, and immediately took my hand and said, ‘it’s going to be all right, you’re going to be great.’ Said a little prayer for me. And I was really, really touched by that, to be taken into that world. The same thing happened on the Mavis [Staples - PSA+] session. I mean, I’m a lapsed Catholic and the producer and Mavis and I all held hands and said a prayer. I felt like they were letting me into their world. And it becomes your world.”

Here's the whole thing.

Lent Last Year

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:20:04 -0500

Audio from our 2009 Lenten Lectures, including Fr. Tobin's talks from the parish retreat (go ahead and register for this year's edition here) is available on this page.

Music for Ash Wednesday

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:09:15 -0500

An English tranlation:

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

To thee, Redeemer, on thy throne of glory:
lift we our weeping eyes in holy pleadings:
listen, O Jesu, to our supplications.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

O thou chief cornerstone, right hand of the Father:
way of salvation, gate of life celestial:
cleanse thou our sinful souls from all defilement.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

God, we implore thee, in thy glory seated:
bow down and hearken to thy weeping children:
pity and pardon all our grievous trespasses.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Sins oft committed, now we lay before thee:
with true contrition, now no more we veil them:
grant us, Redeemer, loving absolution.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Innocent captive, taken unresisting:
falsely accused, and for us sinners sentenced,
save us, we pray thee, Jesu, our Redeemer.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Episcopal News

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:33:48 -0500

From the Institute On Religion & Democracy, an update on recent Anglican happenings, including our own South Carolina drama:

A blizzard of winter weather on the Eastern seaboard was matched this past week by a flurry of activity from the Episcopal Church Center. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori traveled to Britain in order to lobby Church of England (CoE) leaders against a motion favorable to conservative rivals in North America. At the same time, South Carolina Bishop Mark Lawrence revealed that the Presiding Bishop's office had retained an attorney in South Carolina who was apparently laying the groundwork for a challenge to the diocesan leadership.

If the latter turns out to be correct, it marks the first time that the denomination has taken action against a diocese that has not announced plans to separate from the church.

Jefferts Schori's trip to London coincided with a meeting of the CoE's Synod, which was considering a motion introduced by an evangelical lay leader. Lorna Ashworth's motion stated that "this Synod express the desire that the Church of England be in communion with the Anglican Church in North America."

Click here to read the whole thing.

Shrove Tuesday!

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:21:15 -0500

Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper, tonight (2/16), 5.00 till 6.30. And yes, Virginia, there will be compote.

Love & Commitment.

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:59:27 -0500

From the Wall Street Journal:

Family Life & Lent

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:36:32 -0500

Courtesy of the Dominican Province of St. Joseph...

Family Life and Lent
by Fr. Michael Monshau, O.P.

Do you need Lent this year or are you planning on doing without it, or don't you think about such things ahead of time at all? God has called you to holiness, which is another way of saying that He has invited you into intimate friendship with Him. Lent is a good time to invest more deeply into that friendship. How will you be investing yourself more radically into that friendship this Lent? Will your experience of Lent be a rather personal and private affair, or can it be a family project in your home? Will friends be included? Will Lenten activities at your parish figure into your plans? What will Lent be like for you this year?

Click here to read the whole thing.

Haiti: How to Help II

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:49:43 -0500

From Headline Bistro:

Haiti: And a Little Child Will Lead Them

by Rachel Campos-Duffy

So often, when natural disasters and human tragedy hit on the scale we are currently witnessing in Haiti, we feel helpless. How could this happen to people who are already suffering so much?

As the images first hit my television screen, a deep sense of sadness came over me. Though I prayed, the sadness and helplessness did not go away. I wanted to do something more than sit in my warm kitchen and write a check. But what can I do? I have five young children, no medical skills to offer and I'm more than six months pregnant to boot. At this moment in my life, I couldn't be more unqualified to be an international aid worker.

All I can do is pray. And I have. Especially when I happen to remember one of the hundreds of little comforts I take for granted on a daily basis (a warm cup of coffee, a shower, the luxury of knowing I can make my kids breakfast today).

But it is my conversations and prayers with my children that have helped most. As it would happen, they know a bit about Haiti because our family donates to a charitable organization that has always had a special focus on this desperately poor country. The letters and brochures sent by "Food for the Poor" often depict the squalor that is everyday life for more than 80% of this country's population. Over the years, these pictures have had a profound impact on my kids and periodically, they pool their allowance and gift money to make a joint donation for which my husband and I agree to match the funds. This past summer, they ran a lemonade stand at the end of our driveway for "the poor chil'ren" (as my five-year-old calls them) and used the money to purchase chickens, one of the many livestock and projects offered in the charity's brochure.

Last year, my then first grade son chose Haiti as his country project for school, and we all worked together on gathering the research and making the poster. So when I told the kids about the terrible earthquake that shook Haiti to its core this week, they felt a special connection to their Haitians brothers and sisters.

I have been touched by the genuine concern they have expressed for a country they have never seen and a poverty they have never experienced. Their certainty that their piggy bank money can and will make a difference has brought me hope for the prospects of my own humble donation. Their complete trust that their prayers for the children and the injured are making a difference has reinforced my faith in my own prayers.

I still feel very small in the face of human suffering on this scale. However, I am grateful for my children, who are comforting, teaching and ministering to their mom in profound ways.

And a little child will lead them ... Isaiah 11:6.

Food for the Poor
Catholic Relief Services

Haiti: How to Help

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:43:12 -0500

Click image for more photographsFrom the Diocesan website:

Diocese Responds to Earthquake on Haiti

January 13, 2009

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

"You will be enriched in every way for great generosity, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God; for the rendering of this service not only supplies the wants of the saints but also overflows in many thanksgivings to God." 2 Corinthians 9:11-12

As you know the recent earthquake in Haiti has been devastating for many Haitians. Many of our parishes have made mission trips and established ongoing relationships with the Diocese of Haiti, with Bishop Duracin and with congregations and ministries there. This past year several of our parishes have made trips there and our Diocesan ECW sent 100% of its outreach funds in 2009 to CHAP (Christian Haitian American Partnership) nutrition program to feed the hungry in this already poverty riddled country. This morning we have heard from Sue Brunson, our Diocesan ECW President that our ECW ministry partners there are physically unharmed but, because homes surrounding theirs suffered extensive damage, they are afraid to enter their home.

I have also received an email from The Reverend Rob Dewey that he and Coastal Crisis Chaplaincy
will be mobilized to assist in the recovery work. Likewise another ministry located within our diocese, and with important relationships with our parishes, is Water Missions International. They also have a team on the ground in Haiti to help restore clean drinking water.

Because of such ongoing relationships and ministries I hope many of our members will want to assist in this current crisis. May I suggest that there are a variety of ways to help at this time: Of course one way, and perhaps the best, is through Episcopal Relief and Development. They will work directly through Bishop Duracin, the Diocese of Haiti, and with the various parishes and ministries there--some of which your congregations may have partnered with in the past. Another is through Water Missions International or even Coastal Crisis Chaplaincy.

Of course some of you or your parishioners may have direct contact with ministry partners in Haiti and have already made appropriate contacts and assistance. Please include such concerns in your prayers and appeals on this Second Sunday of Epiphany--this very season the Church has often chosen to highlight the mission of Christ, the Gospel and the Church to the desperate needs of the world.

Yours in Christ Jesus our Savior and Lord,
The Rt. Reverend Mark J. Lawrence

Updates on Haiti

A Message from the Rev. Kesner Ajax, Partnership Program Coordinator for the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti, received January 13, 2010

Dear Friends in Christ:

We have devastating news to share with you from Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake yesterday. According to reports I have received here in Les Cayes, the damage in Port au Prince and areas around it is terrible. There is no Cathedral. The entire Holy Trinity complex is gone. The convent for the Sisters of St. Margaret is gone. The Bishop's house is gone. College St. Pierre is gone. The apartment for College St. Pierre is still standing. Bishop no longer has a house in which to live. In Trouin, four people were killed during a service.In Grand Colline, the church is gone. In St. Etienne Buteau the church, the rectory and the school are gone.

In Les Cayes, BTI is OK, but some people were injured trying to get out of the buildings during the quake. The rectory in Les Cayes is in very bad condition.

The Rev. Kesner Ajax
Executive Director, Bishop Tharp Institute (BTI)
8 Rue du Quai, Cayes
Or
Partnership Program Coordinator
Episcopal Diocese of Haiti
C/o Lynx Air
P.O. Box 407139
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33340

A Message from Harmon Person our Diocesan Representative for Episcopal Relief and Development

On January 12, shortly before 5:00 pm, a devastating 7.0 earthquake hit near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Episcopal Relief and Development has instituted a "Haiti Fund" to help some of the people hurt by this disaster. Casualties and damages are catastrophic. Working with the Diocese of Haiti, ERD will initially provide food, water, and medicine, but very importantly, it will continue to provide long-term recovery and rehabilitation aid. Since our diocese has a "Companionship Relationship" with the Diocese of Haiti, it behooves us to be especially generous at this time of extreme need. Churches and individuals are encouraged to help by sending contributions to ERD, PO Box 7058, Merrifield, VA 22116-7058.

A bit of background: Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where the vast majority of people live on less than $2 per day. Port-au-Prince has a population estimated at 2,000,000. There are over 9,000,000 people in the country. It is estimated that one third of those people were affected by the earthquake in some way. Over 90% of the residents are Black. They have just one doctor for every 10,000 residents. 80% of the country is Roman Catholic, while Protestants account for 16%. The principal language spoken is French. The Episcopal Diocese of Haiti, with approximately 180,000 parishioners in 98 congregations, missions, and preaching stations, is the largest diocese in the Episcopal Church. It is led by Bishop Jean Zache Duracin. Given the extreme poverty, lack of infrastructure, and low level of education in the country, it will be many years before Haiti can really recover.

Harmon Person
Diocese of South Carolina's Representative for ERD

This Time & That Time.

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:56:32 -0500

Fr. James Schall explains the calendar(s):

We Catholics live, as it were, in a double time zone. We live in cosmic time. The ages of the universe, Sun, and planet are behind us but still go on. We also live in creation-redemption time. The Liturgical Year keeps our attention on this second time, the time that really counts. For those who live only in cosmic time, their lives mean relatively little or nothing. Even if they suspect that their lives have some purpose, they have little light on what it might be. They are but one of the hundreds of billions of our kind who have gone before. Is that it?

The Liturgical Year is divided into two great events, the birth and resurrection of Christ. The Liturgical Year begins with Advent...

Click here to read the whole thing.

Magi and Bishop and Food - Oh My!

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:23:55 -0500

Dear Friends -

Just a reminder that this Wednesday (6 January) is the Feast of the Epiphany, and that this coming Sunday Bishop Lawrence will make his annual visitation to the Church of the Holy Communion. So,

The Feast of the Epiphany:
Wednesday, 5.00pm
Solemn High Mass
A light supper to follow
Regular Wednesday programs will resume next week

Sunday (The Baptism of Our Lord):
Bishop Lawrence will preach at both Masses
Baptism & Confirmation at the 10.30 Mass
Special adult forum with Bp. Lawrence during Sunday School (beginning 9.20)
Covered-dish supper following the 10.30 Mass

Please make every effort to lend your prayers and presence to the celebrations!

Blessings,
Fr. Patrick

P.S. Also, please remember that the annual parish meeting is Sunday, 17 January, and that our dear friend Bishop Keith Ackerman will be with us on Sunday, 7 February.

2010 Homilies

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:52:32 -0500

Please note that with the new year begins a new page for sermon audio & text links:

2010 Homilies

Dating Christmas

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 10:54:33 -0500

An article in Biblical Archeology Review examines the foundations of the traditiona date of our Lord's Nativity, December 25 (and it doesn't have anything to do with pagan festivals):

The earliest mention of December 25 as Jesus' birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century Roman almanac that lists the death dates of various Christian bishops and martyrs. The first date listed, December 25, is marked: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae: "Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea." In about 400 C.E., Augustine of Hippo mentions a local dissident Christian group, the Donatists, who apparently kept Christmas festivals on December 25, but refused to celebrate the Epiphany on January 6, regarding it as an innovation. Since the Donatist group only emerged during the persecution under Diocletian in 312 C.E. and then remained stubbornly attached to the practices of that moment in time, they seem to represent an older North African Christian tradition.
In the East, January 6 was at first not associated with the magi alone, but with the Christmas story as a whole.

So, almost 300 years after Jesus was born, we finally find people observing his birth in midwinter. But how had they settled on the dates December 25 and January 6?

There are two theories today: one extremely popular, the other less often heard outside scholarly circles (though far more ancient).

Keep reading...

The End of Advent

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:51:42 -0500

First Things editor Jody Bottum ponders the meaning (or meaninglessness) of Chrsitmas without Advent:

Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it's injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.

More Christmas trees. More Christmas lights. More tinsel, more tassels, more glitter, more glee—until the glut of candies and carols, ornaments and trimmings, has left almost nothing for Christmas Day. For much of America, Christmas itself arrives nearly as an afterthought: not the fulfillment, but only the end, of the long Yule season that has burned without stop since the stores began their Christmas sales...

...What Advent is, really, is a discipline: a way of forming anticipation and channeling it toward its goal. There's a flicker of rose on the third Sunday—Gaudete!, that day's Mass begins: Rejoice!—but then it's back to the dark purple that is the mark of the season in liturgical churches. And what those somber vestments symbolize is the deeply penitential design of Advent. Nothing we can do earns us the gift of Christmas, any more than Lent earns us Easter. But a season of contrition and sacrifice prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.

More than any other holiday, Christmas seems to need its setting in the church year, for without it we have a diminishment of language, a diminishment of culture, and a diminishment of imagination. The Jesse trees and the Advent calendars, St. Martin's Fast and St. Nicholas' Feast, Gaudete Sunday, the childless crèches, the candle wreaths, the vigil of Christmas Eve: They give a shape to the anticipation of the season. They discipline the ideas and emotions that otherwise would shake themselves to pieces, like a flywheel wobbling wilder and wilder till it finally snaps off its axle...

Click here to read the entire essay.

Metropolitan Jonah - Audio

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:26:16 -0500

Click here to download or stream audio Metropolitan Jonah's talk at the Chuch of the Holy Communion (11/23/2009), "The Cross of Christ: an Orthodox Perspective." Metropolitan Jonah is the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America.

Take the Mass out of Xmas

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:00:47 -0500

Philosopher Ralph McInerny reflects on, and responds to, our consumerist culture's subversion of Christ's Mass:

Morose delectation is more often a temporary grace than a settled view of life, but longevity brings the feeling that one has outlived his time, that there are events it would have been better not to see, that human folly is a bottomless resource. Now when the secular Advent begins more or less on Labor Day, the familiar lament that Christmas is being trivialized, commercialized, and secularized is once more heard in the land, even though the mourner’s bench has becomes less crowded.

Christ’s Mass, the annual commemoration of the Word becoming flesh, the liturgical dwelling on the early chapters of Luke, the hymns that lifted the heart – all that is lost among the tinsel. Philip Roth, in one of his not infrequent anti-gentile passages, chuckles over the way Irving Berlin turned Christmas and Easter into a snowy landscape and a fashion parade, respectively. We all knew what dreaming of a white Christmas meant, but now little is left but the white.

Click here to read the rest.

Metropolitan Jonah

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:41:59 -0500

Monday 23 November 2009

Metropolitan Jonah, Primate of the Orthodox Church in America

will offer a meditation on

THE CROSS OF CHRIST: An Orthodox Perspective

11:30 AM CHURCH OF THE HOLY COMMUNION

At 12:15 the NOONDAY OFFICE will be sung

At 12:30 PM SOUP AND SANDWICH LUNCH with the opportunity to continue the conversation with the Metropolitan

Please telephone 722.2024 if interested in lunch.

Bp. Lawrence's Convention Address

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:52:26 -0400

Click here to read/print the text. Video courtesy of Anglican TV.

Molly on the D.R.

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:04:47 -0400

Join us for our first Wednesday night program of the Fall. Our own Molly Walker will show photographs and report on her summer-long mission trip to the Dominican Republic and invite us to consider enlarging that mission with a group from Holy Communion next summer.

5.00pm Mass
5.30pm Supper
6.00pm Molly

Bishop Lawrence's Address to the Clergy, 8.13.2009

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:16:08 -0400

Please click here to read Bishop Lawrence's address to the diocesan clergy regarding developments in the Episcopal Church and the response of the Diocese of South Carolina. (Printer-friendly .pdf link at bottom of page)

Documents referred to in the Address:

"Communion, Covenant, and Our Anglican Future", The Most Rev'd Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
"An Anglican Covenant - Ridley Cambridge Draft"

Audio Links Updated (5/21)

Wed, 13 May 2009 11:40:17 -0400

UPDATE (5/21): All links now updated. Sermons may streamed or downloaded from the homilies pages (2008, 2009), from the podcast page, from iTunes (see below), or you may subscribe to the RSS feed.
____________________

We are in the process of switching to a new host for our audio files. The audio links on the Homilies page for Jan. 4 through April 12 are not yet updated and no longer functional ("Text" links are still good).

To listen to those sermons, please go to our podcast page:

holycommunion.libsyn.com

Also, the iTunes podcast should continue to work (search "Holy Communion Homilies" in the iTunes store).

Please let me know if you have any questions -
Fr. Patrick

Wedding Homily

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:24:54 -0400

Audio of Fr. Sanderson's homiliy from the Clarke-Fleming wedding is available. Click here to download or listen.

Wedding Pictures!

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:20:20 -0400

Photos of Fr. Dan & Miss Lisa's wedding are up, with more coming soon - click here to see the album.

Lent Audio Posted

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:51:58 -0400

Audio from our first two Lenten lectures is now available, here. The rest, including Fr. Vincent Tobin's Kanuga talks and Annunciation Mass homily from Fr. Trip Cormeny, will be posted as they become available.

Bp. Lawrence @ Holy Communion

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:56:44 -0500

Join us Sunday, 4 January, as Bishop Lawrence makes his annual visit to celebrate, preach & confirm.

Listen to CHC Sermons Online

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:34:46 -0400

As of today, we have our first Church of the Holy Communion sermon available for audio download or online listening - not that any of you ever miss Mass, but because some of you just can't get enough good preachin'!

From the left hand menu of the CHC homepage, click on "Homilies" and then on "Homilies - audio". From that page you may listen to individual sermons as they become available, or download them to your computer, or even subscribe to an RSS feed to automatically sync with your computer or .mp3 player (a "Holy Communion Homilies" podcast will be available through iTunes in a few days).

You also have the option of reading most sermons (i.e., mine or Fr. Sanderson's - Fr. Clarke still scratches his out on non-digitalized parchment with a quill pen) online or downloading a printer-friendly .pdf from the "Homilies - text" page.

Let me know if you have questions.

Blessings,
Fr. Patrick

Lucy Grace Allen - Updated

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:02:05 -0400

Here are some pictues of mine & Ashley's little girl, Lucy - click on the picture to enlarge. We are grateful for all your prayers and many kindlnesses toward us. We'll add more pictures soon.

"Lo, children, and the fruit of the womb, * are an heritage and gift that cometh of the LORD." Ps 127.4

Blessings,

Fr. Patrick & Ashley

Bp. Lawrence re Depostion of Bp. Duncan

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:42:03 -0400

Dear Fellow Clergy and Members of the Diocese of South Carolina,

We met in Salt Lake City, Utah, to consider our experience at Lambeth and to carry out the business of the House, which in this instance was the deposition under Title IV.9 of The Rt. Reverend Robert Duncan, Bishop of Pittsburgh. I have known Bob for close to 20 years, as a fellow priest in the diocese of Pittsburgh, as my Bishop for a year or so in Pittsburgh, and then as a colleague in the struggles of The Episcopal Church. The discussion regarding Lambeth on Wednesday morning and afternoon included table conversation (with the mandatory newsprint) and discussion by the House collectively. It was uneventful and what one might expect.... It was suggested we communicate the spirit of this discussion to the various provinces of the Anglican Communion through the relationships we established in the Indaba groups and elsewhere at Lambeth.

After dinner on Wednesday evening we met in an informal session to hear and discuss the findings of the Review Committee on Property Disputes, and the subsequent charges against Bishop Duncan for Abandonment of Communion brought by the Presiding Bishop. The Presiding Bishop's Chancellor explained his reading of Title IV.9 and the evidence against Bishop Duncan. This meeting was primarily a hearing to consider the case and to ask pertinent questions thereto. Bishop Stacy Sauls of Lexington presented the reasoning behind the need to consider deposing Bishop Duncan at this time, rather than after Pittsburgh's Convention in October. As I remember, it centered on the intricacies of Pennsylvania Commonwealth Law, the establishment of a separate diocesan corporation by Bishop Duncan, and the connection to possible litigation over the ownership of property—that is to protect it for use by "loyal" Episcopalians in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, those who wish to remain in The Episcopal Church.

What Happened

The business session began Thursday morning with a committee of the whole, which means that we met with the whole House of Bishops to address the matter before us—not to take action yet, but rather to speak pro or con on the issue before us. Several bishops rose to speak on the virtue of postponing the vote until after the Pittsburgh Diocesan Convention. I also spoke during this session. What follows is a paraphrase of my words to the House. I offer it here because it remains my view to this day:

There are so many dubious dimensions to this current proceeding against Bishop Duncan that to continue on this path, trampling upon the plain reading and purpose of the Canon in the process, may well give pause to all and cause many of us to shudder. Consider:

• There is the torturous reading of the Canon in order to render moot the clear reference to the necessity of inhibition prior to deposition. The fact is that Bishop Duncan has not been inhibited. The fact is that the three Senior Bishops of this church have not consented.

• There is the disputed reading of that phrase in the Canon which reads "...a majority of the whole number of Bishops entitled to vote." The Constitution and Canons interpret that phrase in Article I:3, and in Canon IV itself, under section 15, which defines the very terminology used in the title! Under the ruling by the Presiding Bishop and her Chancellor, it is possible for a smaller number of Bishops to consent to the deposition of a Bishop than the number required to consent to the resignation of a Bishop. It is respectfully submitted that such an interpretation makes no sense, and turns the Canon on its head.

• There are real questions regarding the adequacy of due process in this case—a sacred principle of judicial practice in our society.

• There are significant questions in this matter that may suggest to some minds a conflict of interest.

• Along with these above concerns, there are the pervasive moral and pastoral dimensions which cannot be so easily dismissed as some would like us to believe. The statement last evening regarding the case of All Saints' Pawleys Island vs. Diocese of South Carolina may have been well intended, but the fact is that the lawsuit has brought financial cost (thereby diminishing the funds available for missions) and spiritual unrest within the Diocese of South Carolina. The suggestion that swift action averted discord and legal proceeding is just not accurate. The description last evening of the situation within the Diocese of San Joaquin, while it may be one person's recent experience, bears little resemblance to what was my experience serving in that diocese for the last ten years and living there for the first 30 plus years of my life.

• Having served in the Diocese of Pittsburgh and the Diocese of San Joaquin for almost all of my ordained ministry, I can tell you that the pastoral and theological matters that have precipitated the actions of their conventions will not be resolved by depositions or litigation, especially when the principles of due process and rule of law seem to be high-handedly ignored.

Many in this House have expressed concerns regarding the proposed Anglican Covenant—balking at what appears to them to be a "legalistic" solution to theological and pastoral problems. Yet isn't that precisely how we are presently choosing to deal with what is at heart a theological and pastoral concern? It suggests we are willing to deal with difficult and controversial matters in legislative ways when the majority have the vote but not when the same group may be in a minority position. Yet in such a climate we are being encouraged to act with expediency, not for the sake of justice, but in order to put The Episcopal Church in the best position in order to litigate for property—for buildings which, in all likelihood, will stand empty of parishioners who have been alienated by the very actions of this House. When the Presiding Bishop ruled my first election as Bishop of South Carolina null and void in March of 2007, some urged us to take precipitous action. We chose instead to take a longer and canonically faithful path. Now we in this house are rushing to precipitous action. I would suggest this is the wrong canon, the wrong action, and the wrong time to proceed with this deposition. We need a new moratorium on lawsuits with Episcopalians in litigation with Episcopalians. We need to give one another a wider space to live among these difficult issues. If we fail to do so words such as inclusivity and diversity used so freely in this church must surely ring hollow to those both within and outside the Anglican Communion.

Of course others also spoke on various dimensions of the question. We then broke for the Eucharist, followed by lunch, and returned for the afternoon session. There were more appeals one way or another, each respectfully presented. When there seemed to be no one rising to speak at a microphone the PB appropriately moved us into parliamentary session. Two bishops stood to petition for a roll call vote. Since Bishop Love of Albany had a list of nine bishops who had signed a document (I was one of the nine) the motion was received without further question from the chair. Bishop Michael Smith of North Dakota and I then rose to speak at different microphones. He was first to the mike and was recognized. He appealed from the ruling of the chair on Title IV.9's reference to the "inhibited bishop." The PB and her chancellor had read the reference to inhibition as an optional part of the canon. The appeal needed a two-thirds vote to overrule the chair. On a voice vote it didn't even come close. I then appealed the ruling of the chair on the reading of the canon as needing a "majority of the whole number of bishops entitled to vote." Here, too, the chair's reading was overwhelming supported by voice vote. With no one else rising to speak the House voiced its willingness to proceed to the vote. It was done by role call beginning with the most senior bishops according to their date of consecration. In the end there were 88 yes votes, 35 no and 4 abstaining. The Bishop of Pittsburgh, The Rt. Reverend Robert Duncan was deposed by the House of Bishops. There was somberness in the house. The Presiding Bishop urged us to take care how we communicate this to those within TEC, within the Anglican Communion and within the larger community of faith. Several rose to speak on the place of accountability to one another within the House of Bishops and how we have not always held one another accountable. After a break we returned for a final session before evening prayer. It was a difficult day for all.

What Does It Mean?

Once again within a few months the landscape of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion has changed—as if Gafcon and Lambeth were not enough. What does this deposition mean? Frankly, it is still unfolding, but I offer the following reflections:

The House of Bishops whether intentionally or not has enhanced the power of the Presiding Bishop. With consequences far beyond the deposition of The Rt. Reverend Robert Duncan, this vote by interpretation and application of Title IV.9, has established invasive reach for the PB. It is now possible for a sitting bishop of TEC to be deposed without prior inhibition or trial, rendering superfluous the role of the three Senior Bishops of the House. Beyond this is the quizzical ruling that it takes more votes from the House to receive the resignation of a retiring bishop then to depose a sitting one! Then there is the curious fact that it takes a two-thirds vote of the house to overturn a ruling of the chair, thus when combined with rendering moot the role of the senior bishops and the plain reference to a needed "majority of the whole house entitled to vote" in Title IV.9—there is enhanced power to the PB regardless of who may hold the chair, now or in the future. A development mercurial indeed, when one considers the PB and House of Bishops have repeatedly declined the authority to speak on behalf of The Episcopal Church when queried for commitments by the Communion's Instruments of Unity; deferring instead to the authority of General Convention.
I fear that however reasoned or temperately the members of the House of Bishops or the Presiding Bishop's Office explains this deposition it will further trouble the waters of discord. There are several reasons for this: While Title IV.9 mentions a bishop abandoning the communion by open renunciation of the Discipline of this church, (which is ostensibly the clearest rationale for why the presentment was brought against Bishop Duncan), it is also clear from the same canon that prior to mentioning renunciation of the Discipline of the Church there is the reference to the Doctrine of the Church. Many from within TEC itself, as well as those in the various provinces of the Anglican Communion, are not unaware that there have been more then a few bishops of this Church who have in public settings and in published writings, renounced or at least denied the Doctrine of TEC. Others have allowed rites of worship, which if not having actually crossed the authorized boundaries in their approval of pastoral liturgies for same-sex blessings, have all but done so—doing pirouettes on a knife's edge. Doesn't the House of Bishops look as if it is being selective in holding its theological "conservative" bishops and dioceses accountable in matters of the Church's discipline (i.e. the Constitution & Canons), while having no will to hold "liberal" bishops, retired and active, accountable on matters of doctrine and worship? And even in this matter of the Church's discipline we may look selective: For instance what does the Presiding Bishop and the HOB's intend to do with those bishops who contrary to the canons allow or even invite open communion of the unbaptized?
As you may already know Bishop Duncan has been received as a bishop in the Province of the Southern Cone. Rather then helping to mend the fabric of the Communion torn by TEC in 2003 by actions contrary to Lambeth 1.10, this recent action of the House of Bishops further tears the fabric of the communion. Even as I write this account voices of support for Bishop Duncan are being raised in various provinces of the Anglican Communion.
I fear that while repeatedly asking other Provinces of the Communion to understand the uniqueness of our Church's polity, and requesting a gracious patience towards the complexities of our local or provincial needs, we now appear to have limited capacity in offering this to one another within The Episcopal Church.
There will be louder, more urgent, and convincing calls (indeed they have already been heard in several quarters) for another Anglican Province in North America.

All of this leads me to believe that the challenges that lie before a predominately conservative diocese like South Carolina have now been enormously increased if only because of the perception of our parishioners and clergy—but, more pertinently from what I fear is a failure of the present House of Bishops to realize just how far from historic Christianity our church has drifted. To many of our minds this, far more than Pittsburgh's present challenge to TEC's discipline and polity, is what has led to this current crisis. Beyond this the checks and balances previously given to us in the Constitution & Canons seem profoundly weakened. Phrases long understood as clear apparently can be spoken of as ambiguous. If what appears to be the plain meaning of a canon can be dismissed with apparent ease and with no recourse; if the request from such a monumental gathering as Lambeth 2008 urging greater dialogue and forthright conversation within the body of Christ seems to count for so little here in the first action of the House—even after so many TEC bishops report being profoundly moved by the grace exhibited toward us from those provinces grieved and hindered by our prior actions; and when there seems to be so little recognition that it has been the very actions of our General Convention and HOB in recent years that has so alienated dioceses like San Joaquin, Pittsburgh and others that their laity and clergy vote in such large majorities to remove accession clauses—judicious governance and Christian unity will drain like water from an opened hand. One might have wished for a more generous spirit and greater patience toward our own aggrieved members. Indeed one has to wonder where such tone deafness and purblindness come from.

I hesitate to write such words because I have been treated with respect within the House of Bishop since my first meeting in March 2008, then again at Lambeth, and most recently at this last meeting. But since to hold my words on such a crucial matter will serve no one well, including my own diocese of South Carolina, I try to present these concerns respectfully and for the purpose of more forthright conversations within the House of Bishops and the Church at large.

The Rt. Reverend Mark J. Lawrence
Bishop of South Carolina

Picnic Photos!

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:37:19 -0400

Photographs from the annual parish picnic.

Homily, 9/21/2008

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:08:26 -0400

Pentecost IXX, Proper 20a
Jon 3.10-4.11; Mt 20.1-16
September 21, 2008
Fr. M. Dow Sanderson

+++

It has always been a part of the promised "American Dream" that people who work hard enough, regardless of how humble their circumstances, can achieve the loftiest of goals.

How often in American history have we celebrated the impressive From Log Cabin to White House sort of journey. And in this election year more than ever, we are seeing the long-time obstacles of race and gender being overcome.

We always seem to be touched and inspired by those who work hard and succeed... and yet never forget their roots. It is their authenticity and humility that we admire.

But I would suggest to you that far more often, people who scrape and dig their way from poverty and hardship would much sooner forget all the trappings of their upbringing.

When our manners and accents get a little polished up, we find a way to pretend that we have no idea why our country cousins talk so funny!

When we have managed to stumble our way into respectable middle age, we rail against "those teenagers" forgetting all about our own youthful indiscretions.

And if our portfolios achieve a certain level of success (Lehman Brothers stock options notwithstanding) we find that we can afford to build a lovely little world of houses and cars and the right kind of people to insulate us from whatever embarrassing details we would sooner forget. Little Jimmy Gatz slips seamlessly into the world of Jay Gatsby... erasing the skeletons of poverty, ethnicity, and disappointment.

And by affecting this new persona, we somehow manage to lose all sense of empathy... for whole groups of people... who are frighteningly like ourselves.

That, of course, is the point of this morning's Old Testament lesson. Jonah did not have a smidgeon of compassion for the Ninevites. The Lord offered him the opportunity to seek these lost souls so that they too could have a share in the redemption of Israel. But Jonah was not interested in saving souls. He was not interested in anything except his own comfort and welfare.

He had booked his cruise to another port, and had no intention of changing his mind.

But then came... shall we say... an intervention. The stormy sea. Man overboard! A man swallowed alive by a great fish whose "sense of direction" was remarkably attuned to that of the Almighty.

And so it was that Jonah, smelling of seaweed and fish breath, found himself roaming the coast of Nineveh, speaking his half-hearted message of repentance...and then stationing himself on a high hill, hoping against hope that God Almighty would send down fire from the sky, and wipe these pagan wretches off the face of the earth.

It never once occurred to Jonah that he and his people were just one degree of separation from the very people he now scorned. His people had been idolaters. His people had committed acts of great immorality. And beside all that, it didn't seem that Jonah was a particularly faithful man himself... if his propensity for disobedience is any indication.

Nonetheless, he felt immensely superior. And when God- true to form- proved himself to be merciful, Jonah was livid. After all the trouble you have put me through, and you are not even going to give me the satisfaction of seeing theses wretches killed? You can't help yourself, can you? This is just like you! I knew that you were merciful and forgiving and abounding in steadfast love! You make me mad enough to die!

Ah, Jonah. You just don't get it. You have more sympathy for an insipid shrub than you do for a whole country. But you don't even work for the plant the shades your bald head from the sun... and certainly you don't deserve it! So why do you begrudge my generosity? I will love whom I will love....

And, of course, we can find exactly the same point in our Gospel parable.

Jesus, the master story-teller, must have tired of all the questions from the well-connected religious folk...

Rabbi, why do you spend so much time with THOSE sorts of people! Dinners with tax collectors and sinners... Conversations with prostitutes... Don't you know what people are saying? Don't you care what they think?

I would also imagine that Our Lord had, on many occasions seen the big crowds in the unemployment line. As in all things, he was sympathetic to their plight... and more than a little amazed at the hardness of hearts of others, for whom the poor and needy were all but invisible.

And so he told his story. Those who bore the heat of the day... and those hired at only the last hour... got exactly the same wage.

And of course, this is not just a little exercise in economics. It is a big fat mirror held up in the faces of all who forget where they come from... and who forget that even the hair of their heads and the breath in their lungs is a gift given beyond their deserving.

Do not begrudge my generosity, says the Lord. I will love whom I will love...

Truth be told, this is the most important lesson for a Christian to know, and it is the single most transforming aspect of our spiritual development.

In order to know Christ's love, we must first be aware of how much he has saved us from. If we cannot sing ...that saved a wretch like me... I once was lost but now I'm found...then we haven't really "gotten it" yet.

But of course, all it takes is a little self-examination... And the willingness to be honest with ourselves. And when we are honest, our question is not, Rabbi, why do you eat with those sorts of people...rather it is, Lord why would you ever eat with me? Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof.... But speak the word only, and I shall be healed.

It is in the recognition that those sorts of people are "us" that we begin to live as Christ calls us to live. And when our eyes are thus opened, we will eagerly greet our Ninevite cousins...those lost in darkness who do not know their left hand from their right. We will not wish fire to be rained down on them... rather we will long with earnest and sincere hearts for them to know the joy and consolation that we have known.

And when the last little waif is brought to the front of the line... we will not grind our teeth in a jealous fit...rather we will wipe away tears of joy... because the family of God... OUR family... has just gotten a little bigger.

+++Amen

Dawn Eden Interview

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:04:16 -0400

Here's friend o' the parish Dawn Eden, interviewed by Culture11's Jillian Bandes:

Progressively Superstitious

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:28:24 -0400

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

	1/28: Meditation.pdf (File Size - 105K)
	2/11: Prayer.pdf (File Size - 90K)
	2/18: Fasting.pdf (File Size - 86K)
	2/25: Examination.pdf (File Size - 84K)
	3/11: Silence & Solitude.pdf (File Size - 93K)
	3/25: Simplicity.pdf (File Size - 99K)
	4/1: Service.pdf (File Size - 123K)
	4/8: Self-Denial.pdf (File Size - 115K)