Progress via a Muslim Spong?

July 8, 2005 By

Driving back from the North Carolina mountains tonight, I heard an amazing commentary on NPR that fits into our discussion of the MSM’s heated search for a “moderate” version of Islam that it can hold up as some kind of majority viewpoint. This is part of the whole template that there are “fundamentalists” in all faiths who are equally dangerous in their often violent quest for the illusion of certainty and moral absolutes and then there are “moderates” who, if they all had their way, would all get along as they search for the Eternal Other.

Here is the NPR link for those who want to hear the commentary and the brief summary:

July 8, 2005 — Commentator Irshad Manji, who is a practicing Muslim, would like Muslims around the world to publicly reject some of the violent messages that she says are inherent in the Koran.

There’s a lot of valid content in this piece, and let me stress that I am not suggesting, for a moment, that moderate Islamic voices are unimportant or that they should be marginalized. No way. I am saying that the press, at the moment, needs to be covering the who, what, when, where, why and how of how most Muslims are responding to the events in London.

Manji is, in a way, calling for the same thing. In particular she urges mainstream Muslims to take a tough look at the actual contents of the Koran and, in particular, how it is being parsed and preached by those who approve of violence against Jews, Christians, moderate Muslims, etc.

So far, so good. Then she suggests it is time for all religious leaders to be equally honest in dealing with their own scriptures and histories. So far, so good. Then she holds up, as the model for these exchanges, the work of retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark. This is where the train comes off the tracks.

The last thing in the world we need right now is for Western leaders — religious or political — to find and promote the views of some Islamic version of Spong, someone who is no longer even a theist. You want a clash of civilizations? Let the mainstream Muslim world see America praising the work of those who do to Islam what Spong does to Christian faith. Heaven forbid. Here, for example, is a link to Spong’s 12 Theses for the new reformation of Christianity. Here’s the first half of the list.

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

Come to think of it, mainstream Muslims have a higher view of Christianity than Spong.

I realize this was a commentary, not an NPR news piece. But I still think its contents reflect the worldview of many in the MSM. Check it out.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Islam, Journalism

Another victory for Anglican nuance

June 23, 2005 By

Gene Robinson, the bishop of the Episcopal Church’s Diocese of New Hampshire, said at his consecration that the church could not buy the sort of publicity that his election and approval had attracted.

One could say the same of how Jill Lawless of The Associated Press summed up one decision of the Anglican Counsultative Council, which met this week in Nottingham, England:

The Anglican Communion rejected Wednesday an attempt by traditionalists to punish the Canadian and U.S. wings of the church for their stand on homosexuality, watering down a resolution that called for the North Americans to be suspended from all church bodies.

Clergy including Archbishop Peter Akinola, head of the 17.5-million-member Church of Nigeria, submitted a resolution to the influential Anglican Consultative Council requesting “that the Episcopal Church (U.S.A.) and the Anglican Church of Canada withdraw their members from all other official entities of the Communion” for three years.

The resolution was adopted by a vote of 30-28, with a key change — “all other official entities of the Communion” was replaced with a reference to the council’s “standing committee and the inter-Anglican finance and administration committee.”

The Episcopal Church’s own Episcopal News Service did not place such an optimistic interpretation on the ACC’s vote. Likewise, Solange De Santis of Anglican Journal — the national newspaper of the Anglican Church of Canada — described the ACC as narrowly supporting censure of the Episcopal Church (U.S.A.) and the Canadian church.

It’s also worth comparing the AP article with coverage by Ruth Gledhill of the Times, this BBC story and this interview on BBC Radio.

As with any other meeting of Anglicans — from the Lambeth Conference to the regular meetings of Anglican primates — there is enough ambiguity in the ACC’s votes that both sides can claim victory and go home. It’s a rare thing, though, for an AP reporter to claim victory for one side in such strong language.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Godbeat

“You have wasted your saliva”

June 17, 2005 By

The Times of London’s Ruth Gledhill is ecstatic at the appointment of John Sentamu, the Uganda-born Bishop of Birmingham, as the next Archbishop of York:

So the Holy Spirit is at work in the Church of England after all. No other conclusion can be drawn from the inspired appointment of Dr John Sentamu to be Archbishop of York.

The last few years have been witness to an inexorable decline in both the strength and reputation of the Anglican church in the West, a decline hastened by shameful squabbles over sexuality. It has seemed that nothing could lift the church out of the quagmire of internal dispute.

But through this one appointment, the Church already has a whole new feel. A new direction seems possible, and a recovered sense of mission.

Gledhill speaks for many, and certainly for religion writers who have seen Sentamu in action. I’ve seen him on two occasions: at a mid-decade review of Anglicans’ progress on the Decade of Evangelism (1995), while he was still a priest, and at the Lambeth Conference of 1998, after he had become a bishop.

At the former, Sentamu poked fun at the Church of England’s stuffiness and played exhilarating music with a small rock band from Uganda. At the latter, he rebuked another bishop, who was moderating a plenary session, for shutting down an African bishop’s remarks in mid-sentence. (The bishop’s allotted time had run out.)

As a few different profiles make clear, Sentamu speaks his mind sharply.

From Alex Kirby of BBC News:

During his six years as bishop of Stepney in east London he was stopped and searched eight times by the police.

What upset him most was the sudden change in the officers’ behaviour when they realised his identity.

He said: “When they discovered who I was, the way I was then treated was very different. They should treat everybody with respect, with dignity.”

Another time, he recalls, four young white men spat at him and said: “Nigger, go back.”

He replied: “You have wasted your saliva.”

From Vicar Robbie Low of the conservative New Directions magazine, introducing a Q&A in 1996:

John Sentamu and I first met twenty years ago in the Rank Room of Wesley Hall, Cambridge. He was in his final year at Ridley and I had just started at Westcott. The “induction” course of co-counselling and psycho-babble was in its second day. The pair of social inadequates contracted as “enablers” were already well into the kind of brainwashing and manipulative techniques that only twelve months previously I had been investigating and exposing in major cults, and I was beginning to wonder if this could possibly be the church of God.

“Take a partner and sit staring into each other’s eyes. Now stop pretending you like each other and acknowledge the deep anger and hatred you feel for each other” etc, etc.

. . . Suddenly from the other side of the hall came a loud and outraged African voice:

“How dare you tell me I hate my brother . . . lies . . . dishonesty . . . manipulation etc.”

Sentamu hit them all round the boundary. During the awkward silence that followed I crossed the hall, shook his hand, introduced myself and said I was glad there was at least one other sane man in the building.

We left the room together as the dominant partner in the enabling team wrestled with the ultimate liberal nightmare . . . how to tell an angry black man that he is wrong.

“We’re glad you felt you could share that with us. . . .” So was I.

And from Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi of Uganda comes clear rejoicing that the Church of England’s hierarchy has made an important appointment that honors the testimony of Global South Anglicans:

We are jubilant at the news of our fellow countryman’s appointment as the next Archbishop of York, and are grateful to the Queen, the Prime Minister, and the Church of England for recognizing the emerging force of the Christian Church in the Global South.

John Sentamu, a fellow Ugandan, was originally a judge in the High Court of Uganda. In 1974 when he refused to bow to pressure to deliver a ‘not guilty’ verdict to one of Idi Amin’s cousins, he was forced to go into exile. Like the Biblical Patriarch Joseph, what was meant for evil, God has now used for good.

One thing is certain: This Archbishop of York will not be boring.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, People

A media-friendly media spanking

June 16, 2005 By

williams portrait.jpgRuth Gledhill of the Times of London has done a fine job of condensing the Archbishop of Canterbury’s 4,500-word lecture on journalists into a news story of one-ninth that length. As journalists often do — and I make no claim to escaping this habit — Gledhill focused on the most pointed language in the archbishop’s text, in which he said this about web-based journalism:

Unwelcome truth and necessary and prompt rebuttal are characteristic of the web-based media. So are paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry. The atmosphere is close to that of unpoliced conversation — which tends to suggest that the very idea of an appropriate professionalism for journalists begins to dissolve.

The bulk of Rowan Williams’ critique focused on classical media, and he began on the playful note of citing Evelyn Waugh’s journalism satire, Scoop: “Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it.”

Williams spends considerable time on the idea that withholding information is not inherently malicious and may indeed be necessary:

[As] some recent studies have emphasised (I’m thinking especially of John Lloyd’s What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics), there is a difference between exposing deceptions that sustain injustice and attacking confidentialities or privacies that in some sense protect the vulnerable. If we begin by assuming that the question to ask almost anyone — not just politicians — is the immortal ‘Why is this bastard lying to me?’ the effect is to treat every kind of reticence as malign, designed to deny other people some sort of power.

Williams surely has felt this tension as the primates of the Anglican Communion have twice met privately to discuss ethical and moral tensions between the largely conservative Global South and the more liberal churches of North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Williams was one of the more media-friendly bishops at the Lambeth Conference of 1998, which was one of the most media-hostile environments I’ve ever worked in. The media handlers at that global conference of Anglican bishops instructed the bishops not to grant any interviews that had not been arranged through the conference’s media office, and gave special warnings about reporters wearing pink badges. (The media handlers, and those who worked for the conference’s house organ, wore gold badges.)

Although many bishops were willing to grant interviews without the approval of the media center, Williams was one of the few bishops who made himself available for impromptu interviews at the media center. He thus worked within the system and challenged its control needs.

Finally, Williams offers this helpful take on why, to cite the subtitle of our weblog, some reporters fail to get religion:

We learn significant things in varieties of overlapping communities; and we learn them at different paces. Some things can be mastered quickly, almost instantaneously, some take significant time. And I suspect that the difficulty most of the modern media finds in handling religion is not simply some sort of hostile bias to belief as such, but the extreme difficulty of representing in an ‘urgent’ medium experience or awareness that is apprehended in common practice over time. Which is why, incidentally, the recent BBC series, ‘The Monastery’, succeeded in such a remarkable way; it was about what can be known only by taking time, in company. Perhaps observers of religious broadcasting should concentrate not on the time or space given to simple and static representations of religious views and activities but on how this method of following the ‘real time’ of religious knowing and experiencing can be fostered.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Journalism

Anglican West to Anglican South: Drop dead

June 8, 2005 By

Don’t be deceived by the so-what-else-is-new headline on our friend Julia Duin’s report in The Washington Times. “African bishops reject aid,” as the Times’ headline puts it, has been a story since the latter months of 2003, when many African bishops announced their intentions to protest the Episcopal Church’s decision to consecrate Gene Robinson as an openly gay bishop.

What sets Duin’s story apart is how much she reveals about the horrible cost being paid by these bishops’ people as conservative Episcopalians fail to make up for what the bishops have rejected.

Here are some of the distressing facts Duin reports:

Africa, which has 12 Anglican provinces each containing numerous dioceses, is the fastest-growing portion of the 70-million-member Anglican Communion, which includes the U.S. Episcopal Church. The 2003 election of New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, who is divorced and living in a homosexual relationship, split the Anglican Communion.

Since then, the archbishops of Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda, overseeing 30.5 million Anglicans, announced they will not accept grants from the Episcopal Church. Some Rwandan and Tanzanian bishops are following suit.

Edwina Thomas, national director of Sharing of Ministries Abroad, a Virginia-based international Anglican group, said African prelates debated the matter in Nigeria last year.

“The archbishop of Congo stood in front of the bishops and said, ‘My people are starving. They are having as little as one meal every other day,’” she said. “I remember the archbishop of Nigeria saying, ‘We need to help you.’”

So do more Americans, [the Rev. Canon Bill] Atwood [general secretary of the conservative Ekklesia Society] said.

“Say there are 1,000 conservative Episcopal churches that spend $1,000 a month for air-conditioning,” he said. “That’s $12 million a year. The amount of money they are spending on air-conditioning each year is what is being sent to run all the Anglican provinces in Africa.”

I think I’ll remember those details the next time I read about fellow conservative Episcopalians calling themselves persecuted and oppressed.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism

A most ecumenical parting of ways

May 30, 2005 By

In writing a brief profile of newly approved federal judge Priscilla Owen, David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times touched on her experience at St. Barnabas the Encourager Evangelical Covenant Church:

In more recent years, Ms. Owen also became much more religious, her sister said. Republicans have lauded her role as a founding member of St. Barnabas Church, a theologically conservative congregation in Austin where she still teaches Sunday school. “On any given Sunday, you can find Justice Owen hopping on one leg, reading stories,” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas said last week.

Democrats have criticized an allusion to religion in an opinion she wrote arguing against exempting a teenager seeking an abortion from the state’s parental notification law. The law’s requirement of an “informed” decision, Ms. Owen argued, included an understanding “that some women have experienced severe remorse and regret” and consideration “that there are philosophic, social, moral and religious arguments” about abortion, as well.

Ms. Owen’s defenders argue that she was interpreting an ambiguous law in a way consistent with its legislative history and that courts later cleared up its meaning. And her pastor, the Rev. Jeff Black, said she would never impose her religious views in a court. “If it was a believer who came to her and said, ‘What should I do?’ then she would say, ‘Here is what the Scripture says,’” Mr. Black said. “But in a court of law, she would never do that.”

Hold the phone: St. Barnabas the Encourager Evangelical Covenant Church? As the name suggests, this congregation did not begin its life within the Evangelical Covenant fold.

St. Barnabas is a religion writer’s dream of a feature story with eclectic details. Black built the congregation — as a mission of the Episcopal Church — through meetings of the Alpha Course. But then along came the General Convention of 2003, which took the Episcopal Church in a decidedly more liberal direction on homosexuality, and St. Barnabas became one of several congregations to break from its diocese and the denomination.

As Eileen Flynn wrote in the Austin American-Statesman in late March, St. Barnabas is now a former Episcopal parish and a new member of an evangelical Protestant denomination meeting in the activity center of St. William’s Roman Catholic Church:

Black and St. William’s pastor, the Rev. Joel McNeil, found that they shared the same biblical view of homosexuality.

McNeil said when he heard about St. Barnabas last year, he was “impressed with the integrity of the pastor and the congregation” for determining they could not in good conscience remain in the Episcopal Church.

“There’s a lot of pressure, it seems, to make the church like the world rather than evangelizing the world,” McNeil said. “I admire that they have resisted those pressures and have decided to maintain the traditional Christian belief.”

Word of McNeil’s support traveled to Black via a St. William’s parishioner visiting St. Barnabas as a photo copier salesman.

The two priests started talking and discovered they could help each other.

Founded in 1997, St. Barnabas congregants had been worshipping in rented North Austin office space and wanted a permanent home. St. William’s was building a church near its present location on McNeil Road and needed to sell a 6½-acre parcel and parish center.

And it just so happened that Black’s mother was the librarian at McNeil’s junior high school in Rome, N.Y., in the early 1970s.

Meanwhile, the roughly 250 St. Barnabas members had decided they wanted to officially join the Chicago-based Evangelical Covenant Church, an ecumenical fellowship of churches founded by Swedish immigrants in 1885, after several months of an informal association.

The covenant offered to buy the St. William’s property and closed on the $1.7 million sale with the Catholic Diocese on Friday. Black said his congregation expects to invest $400,000 in improvements to the property, including an additional building for offices and classrooms.

The two congregations will share the parish center over the next year until St. William’s facility is complete.

The details are too intricate for a brief profile of Priscilla Owen, but they’re fascinating nonetheless — especially amid the now-standard accusation that any congregation breaking away from the Episcopal Church is guilty of Donatism and doomed to a lifetime of schism.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Evangelicals, Godbeat

What will Andrew Sullivan say to this?

May 29, 2005 By

That sound you just heard on the other side of the Atlantic was the million or so people who still sit in pews in the postmodern Church of England picking up a copy of the Sunday Times and shouting, in unison, “Say WHAT!?!?!”

This will be followed by a louder response to the same headline at altars in the more traditional Anglican Third World.

The headline on reporter Christopher Morgan’s exclusive says it all: “Church to let gay clergy ‘marry’ but they must stay celibate.” And here is the opening of this amazing story, which will almost certainly infuriate all kinds of people on both sides of the church aisle.

Homosexual priests in the Church of England will be allowed to “marry” their boyfriends under a proposal drawn up by senior bishops, led by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The decision ensures that gay and lesbian clergy who wish to register relationships under the new “civil partnerships” law — giving them many of the tax and inheritance advantages of married couples — will not lose their licences to be priests.

They will, however, have to give an assurance to their diocesan bishop that they will abstain from sex. The bishops are trying to uphold the church doctrine of forbidding clergy from sex except in a full marriage. They accept, however, that the new law leaves them little choice but to accept the right of gay clergy to have civil partners.

You have to hand it to Williams, that bookish Oxford don with the knack for splitting hairs — poetically. This compromise is really going to calm things down before that tense June 21 conclave that is supposed to sort out all of the loose ends about sacraments and sexuality (and major donations from the rich Episcopal Church in the United States). Things were tense enough in the Anglican Communion as it was.

“Married,” but with mandatory celibacy. I wonder who came up with that compromise? Try to figure out the theological logic of it, beginning on either the left or the right. In other words, Pope Benedict the XVI may want to check his voicemail for calls from England.

Which raises another question. Anyone want to predict what Andrew Sullivan will have to say about this? I asked him, a year or two ago, why he had not left Rome in order to join the C of E. He never answered back.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Social Issues

The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the liturgy

May 27, 2005 By

Last Sunday’s clown Eucharist at the Episcopal Church’s powerhouse congregation of Trinity Wall Street has miraculously eluded any coverage in The New York Times, though it picked up a squib in the Daily News. That paper’s headline made the inevitable reference to Judy Collins’ hit song: “Rev. sends in clowns to teach a lesson” (to which I feel compelled to add, “Don’t bother [maudlin pause] they’re here.”

Trinity Wall Street’s rector, the Rev. Dr. James Herbert Cooper, came prepared with theological reflections on living the clown life. “Clowns represent the underdog, the lowly, the remnant people. Their foolishness is a call to unpretentiousness,” Cooper said in the Daily News article. “As St. Paul said, ‘The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of the world.’”

The niche-market Downtown Express nabbed this remark by Cooper from Trinity Wall Street’s website: “In the clown, God has shot from his cannon for us a vivid symbol of divine foolishness.”

Hey, speak for yourself, brother.

If you’ve been eager to relive the days of Godspell, there’s a streaming video (requires Windows Media Player) of the clown Eucharist — every ostentatiously unpretentious minute of it — on Trinity’s website. (If you prefer the mime-only sermon, clown-walk here instead.)

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Humor