Values

“My Eros is crucified.”

Still now, forty-five years later, I remember how startled I was when I first read that use of “Eros” in Ignatius of Antioch’s early Second Century letters. I was just beginning seminary and was searching hard for something to replace the Atonement-by-Vicarious-Suffering-Evangelicalism that I’d grown up with. Would Ignatius’s use of THAT word “Eros” for a loving God point to another way of understanding Jesus’ cross and resurrection? Read more about Passion, Eros, and Resurrection

I’m thinking our annual year-end collision of Thanksgiving and Advent’s apocalyptic, last judgment readings just might be a happy or blessed accident. Reflecting on our experience of beginnings and endings, praying to find God present in both, we can’t escape the territory of personal and human crisis, fearful and hopeful imagination, and our faithful practice when we see that things we’ve counted on will certainly pass away. Read more about The Three Trees and the End of the World

Through the run-up to the 1960 election our evangelical church pastor warned us repeatedly that if America elected a Roman Catholic president he would be taking orders from the Vatican. Catholics, he said, had to obey the Pope, so they weren’t like us Christians who acknowledged no authority but the Bible. He explained all this repeatedly to adult groups, to our youth group, and to the whole congregation gathered for Wednesday evening potluck (after we’d sung The Doxology but before he said grace over the meal). Whenever he’d say this, he’d also point out that he wasn’t saying it from the pulpit, which, he said, would have been bringing religion into politics the way Martin Luther King did; and no, we didn’t do that. Read more about Stories #1: Who gets to say who we sit with?

My Uncle Ted was a Presbyterian lay missionary in Cameroon. He wasn’t actually my uncle. He’d been married to my great aunt and she died in Cameroon. He was one of those “uncles” who redefine family, an old, old friend of my living grandmother and the grandfather I never knew, an avuncular teacher and inspiration to all of us. I was proud to claim him for a relative. Read more about Stories #2: Who calls us to the table?

I’ll begin this concluding essay by saying where I meant the meandering path of the two previous essays to lead. I’m thinking of our church’s divorce story, our independence from Rome, as family story. And I’m seeing something in it that I’d never noticed, in a small event in 1532, that leads me to wonder whether Episcopal Church’s 2012 reorganization should include eliminating any separate “House of Bishops” Read more about Stories #3: Surprise gift from our Anglican divorce story

If what we’re up to when we gather to do church matters to humanity and the world we live in, we should be able to tell people what we’re doing and make sense to them without coercing their agreement (or silence) by us invoking our belief system and grand theological language that even we can’t explain without using more grand theological language. Read more about Just What is Church For?

Hearing the terrible story from Endicott City, Maryland - a homeless man killing a priest and parish administrator and then shooting himself, I felt again how suddenly and completely guns change things. Read more about Guns

The Spring 2012 Anglican Theological Review (Volume 94 - Number 2) has several articles which are of interest for preparation for the General Convention. Particularly the three articles by Ruth Meyers, Donald Schell and Thomas Breidenthal, which share reflections based on three presentations made at a special forum on the open table (or open communion) at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Dublin, Ohio, on October 29, 2011. This program is part of the work of the Faith in Life Commission of the Diocese of Southern Ohio, intended to foster theological and ethical reflection among Episcopalians and their ecumenical and interfaith partners. Read more about Spring Edition of the Anglican Theological Review Available