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I am Mike Noakes.
That is was my pipe.
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"Before the beautiful-no, not really before but within the beautiful-the whole person quivers. He not only 'finds' the beautiful moving; rather, he experiences himself as being moved and possessed by it."
- Hans Urs von Balthasar

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
- Flannery o'Connor

"Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds, stewards of the new day that is dawning."
- NT Wright

"When we think our brother or sister has sinned against us, such an affront is not just against us but against the whole community. A community established as peaceful cannot afford to let us relish our sense of being wronged without exposing that wrong in the hopes of reconciliation."
- Stan Hauerwas

"Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments."
- Thomas Merton

"All the believers were of one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possesions was their own, but they shared everything that they had."
- Acts of the Apostles

"For evil men account those things alone evil which do not make men evil; neither do they blush to praise good things, and yet to remain evil among the good things they praise. It grieves them more to own a bad house than a bad life, as if it were man's greatest good to have everything good but himself."
- St. Augustine

(reading)

The Eucharist of the Early Christians

The Collected Short Stories, Flannery o'Connor

The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy

(have read)

Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II

God is Near Us, Pope Benedict XVI

Heretics/Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton

Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barret Browning

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Sunday, May 13, 2007

Williams is meeting with our US Bishops

Archbishop Rowan Williams will, in fact, be meeting with the leaders of the Episcopal Church in the US this September to discuss issues that are dividing the Communion and looking to grasp a better understanding of what the US church is trying to get across. There have been opinions that Williams would not be attending the meeting in New Orleans but he has come out saying, "never been any suggestion" that he would not be there.

He still maintains that these issues cannot be overlook but also that they are not the focal point of our faith. According to the Christian Century, Williams is, "strongly and consistently opposed to anything which suggests that gay and lesbian Christians are less than human, less than fully baptized, good-faith members of the church."

We are in desperate need of a "third-way" but that seems to not be coming about anytime soon. These things need to be sorted out with the question Williams proposed to the Canadian church,
"What is for the health of the body of Christ, both locally and globally?" This seems to be in line with his Anglo-Catholic theology that the Communion ought to be listening to and living in rather than vilifying tactics employed by both the "developed" liberal West as well as the poor traditionalist Global South.

When speaking to the Canadian Anglican Journal, William said, It is not, "just about nice people who want to include gay and lesbian Christians and nasty people who don't. It is a question on which there is real principled disagreement. What are the forms of behavior the church has the freedom to bless, and be faithful to Scripture, tradition and reason? That is the question that is tearing us apart at the moment because there are real differences of conviction."

Hopefully, true progress will result from this meeting. We are in the need to submit to our Catholic faith (that is, not endorse things which threaten the unity of our Communion) yet also maintain our rights as a church in a federation of churches that are theologically, culturally, and sociologically diverse. I pray that our Bishops will be given wisdom in handling the situation and that this issue may find a resolution, however long and hard it may be.

Amen.

posted by -mike- at 2:42 PM

 

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