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Looking for God In All the Wrong Places
10. Our individual pursuit of the divine leads us away from community. The Great Western Heresy When the Rt. Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori addressed the General Convention of The Episcopal Church in 2009, she spoke to a church on the front lines of our next reformation. A church which was still in conflict over its ecclesiology…
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Ash Wednesday 2016
If you are in Terre Haute on Wednesday, I invite to join St. Stephen’s in inviting the community into the observance of a holy Lent. In the morning, we’ll impose ashes upon the foreheads of those rushing to class and work. We’ll move inside and give the same invitation to students at the volunteer fair…
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It May Have Happened Sort of Like This
Trying to Explain the Nature of the Anglican Communion to Someone Who Should Know Better As most of you already know, the primates of the Anglican Communion met last week in Canterbury. Now, it was kind of a — What’s a primate? It is the bishop chosen to represent the Anglican Church of a given…
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Some Further Thoughts on Politics, Primates, and Problems
Everybody thinks it is complicated. On Sunday when I announced that we would cover some of the recent primates’ meeting in our Basic Anglicanism class, one of our parishioners leaned over and said: There’s nothing basic about that. That’s Advanced Anglicanism. I couldn’t agree more! The problem is that it is splashed all over the papers…
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Unchristlike – how retaliation stains the Anglican Communion
Word has come tonight of sanctions on the Episcopal Church. This week, primates are gathered for a highly irregular meeting. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby is trying to hold together a divided church. He is failing. And before it began, many knew it was already lost. Lost, not because it is actually over. It isn’t. Far from…
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The World’s Most Secret Theology
So what do we actually believe? Most Christians are taught specific things to believe. We find them in our prayers and creeds. We find them preached on Sunday and revealed in Bible studies on Wednesdays. And when we try to fit into a group, we want to find out what they believe. All that stuff is…
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A Postscript on Starting to Deconstruct Church
My favorite part of exploring ideas is seeing how ideas affect other people. The other day I shared an article suggesting that instead of tinkering with Daylight Savings Time or opting out of it, what if we adopted it all year round? It is not as novel a concept as one would think and has far…
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Confession
“We don’t do confession.” I remember the conversations I used to have as a child about church. And it was usually how we do things differently or what is an E-piss-co-palian? Which always was accompanied with laughter. This childhood was in Alpena, a small city in the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan. Alpena was largely Polish, then;…