Released today from our testers in the 0-7 age range.
Of the contenders the winner and still most requested venue for high liturgy is (drum-roll please…)
St Paul’s K-Street!
Mt Calvary receives an honorable mention in the coffee-hour category.
Of course, we also haven’t hit All Souls or Ascension & St Agnes yet…
I finally sent off what I hope will be the text of my defense draft of my dissertation.
Of course, I still need to fix some footnotes, recheck the bibliography, clean up the ModE of the sermons, etc. but the text proper is done. Unless he doesn’t like my corrections…
For those like me whose heart yearns towards a monastery but whose vocation is found in wife and family, Br. Stephen’s observations on his first year as a Cistercian novice are a fascinating set of insights into a life that we’ll only ever know from the outside.
AKMA points to a brief yet very interesting post on the future of Higher Ed given the realities of communication in the Internet Age.
My response is: well…no.
Learning is more than either the note-taking process or the data accumulation process especially when it comes to the formation of informed and effective clergy. I’d suggest that it has more to do with being grounded in foundational habits and absorbing an ethos and the book-learning is only a small part of that process.
I’ve come to identify as the most important parts of my seminary education the people I met, experiences I shared, and on-going connections I’ve maintained. A distance learning program doesn’t do well at facilitating any of these—there’s a fundamental embodied, incarnational component that’s missing…
(I’m still “away” but I couldn’t let this go unremarked…)
From the Independent by way of TOD, bls and Dean Knisely:
Thousand of protesters took to the streets, waving the orange flags of the opposition. Before long, looting began. Buildings were set on fire. But the turning point came when a crowd moved from the main square towards the presidential palace. Amid the confusion, someone panicked and gave the order to the troops guarding the palace to open fire. Scores died. The leaders of the army decided they’d had enough and stormed the palace, causing the president to flee.
A typical African coup d’état? Not quite. Certainly there were allegations of corruption in high places. The president had bought a private jet – from a member of the Disney family – for his own personal use. He was accused of unnecessary extravagance, of mismanaging public funds and confusing the interests of the state with his own. But something else had whipped up the protesters in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, earlier this year, when the government of Marc Ravalomanana was overthrown in the former French colony.
The urban poor were angry at the price of food, which had been high since the massive rise in global prices of wheat and rice the year before. Food-price rises hit the poor worse than the rest of us because they spend up to two-thirds of their income on food. But what whipped them into action was news of a deal the government had recently signed with a giant Korean multinational, Daewoo, leasing 1.3 million hectares of farmland – an area almost half the size of Belgium and about half of all arable land on the island – to the foreign company for 99 years. Daewoo had announced plans to grow maize and palm oil there – and send all the harvests back to South Korea.
Wow—why didn’t we see this coming? Oh wait, we did…
You might believe internet propoganda and think that that 45% of the population (9 million and change at last estimate) are Christian; about half of those Roman Catholic, we have some 120,000 Anglicans in the area. Americans, however, are better informed and know that Madagascar is populated entirely by animated animals who make popular movies, so it’s all good.
I’m glad the Anglican Communion isn’t being distracted by little things like this and is hard at work on restructuring around genital issues.
(And lest you have any qualms, have no fear; this item is entirely unrelated to the whole neo-colonialism thing. No relation in any way.)
I’m only formalizing here what’s already happened… I’m not going to be around much for the next few weeks. I’m making the last big push to finish up the dissertation (!!), have a large conference presentation in October that I haven’t begun an adequate start on yet, and have some pressing matters on the homefront to deal with.
Carry on, all. Don’t let the people in purple do anything truly dumb…
(And say a prayer for the soul of Marion Hatchett when next you’re praying for souls. I can’t say I agree with him on everything, but he was a learned and gifted man who did much for Episcopal liturgy.)
My new piece is up at the Cafe and I need to thank Caelius, M, and Lee for their help and inspiration on it, even if it was unintentional or unintended.
I just can’t work up the interest to look at many church politics items, recently. I think it may be a periodic numbness from exposure to its unhealthy radition. I won’t say church politics isn’t imporant for church folks—we have a responsibility to keep an eye on what’s going on—but not all the time…
We went on a mini-vaction to Washington DC over the weekened and, looking at the two churches we really wanted to visit, the one closest to a metro stop was St Paul’s K Street. We arrived late due to work on the blue-orange lines, but enjoyed a pleasant Rite I Sung Mass by Fr. Nathan Humphrey; apparently if we’d gone to the Solemn High Mass later, we would have run into Fr. Cramer too. We had to run back to check out of our hotel so ducked out with just a hasty word to Fr. Humphrey and the music director who recognized us from our mutual time at Smokey Mary’s. On the subway, M asked Lil’ G how she had liked the service. She responded, “It was really nice to go to real church again.” Her favorite part was the chanted Lord’s Prayer.
There’s just something to be said for beauty, especially in the addition of music.
Ah well.
More later, perhaps…
While doing lectio this morning, I ran across one of the passages in Scripture that most clearly spells out the Biblical Approach to “the naughty bits”—you know, that dangling portion of the human anatomy that gets the church and Christians into so much trouble. So, without further ado…:
5So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! 6And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. 7For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, 8but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
Almost makes you think the Cistercians are on to something…
Had St James known about blogging, fingers would probably have received a mention as well.
Two interesting things:
Former Episcopalians often have quite a lot to say about Episcopal and Anglican dealings. Their words are often voluminous, often colorful, and not often “edifying”. It’s in light of these realities that I was interested to read a more measured take on the actions of General Convention from a Former Episcopalian now Roman Catholic, our favorite online Cistercian, Br. Stephen. While I don’t agree with everything he says there, of course, I did find his perspective and analysis quite interesting.
On the other hand, I do believe we’ve just been identified as the Antichrist by noted anglo-paplist Fr. Hunwicke:
The essence of the concept of the Antichrist is that he, the ultimate manifestation of evil, is skilfully dressed up so as plausibly to appear the genuine article. It occurs to me that the movement known as Affirming Catholicism is exactly this. The enthusiasm and the technical mastery with which they deploy their props – the lace, the monstrances, the music, the incense, the 39 buttons down their soutanes – are simply deceptions of the Evil One, designed to draw away the faithful from their Redeemer.
I mustn’t let my rhetoric run away with me. Some of them are decent and well-meaning, but misguided, people. I am not their judge; I shall stand before the same tribunal as they do. But there are some of them who have a virulent hatred of us. They do not say “These people who reject women priests are decent and good Catholics with whom I would wish to collaborate in every possible way because – except in this one issue – we share the same faith; and I wish them well because – although they’re just making this one mistake – they can share with us our mission to spread the Catholic Faith within the Church of England”. They want to see us persecuted, they want to see us denied a place within the Provinces of Canterbury and York. Their hatred of us seems visceral.
Now that’s where the devil really is.
Actually, I believe that I do and have said “These people who reject women priests are decent and good Catholics with whom I would wish to collaborate in every possible way because we share the same faith…” so I guess that makes me a well-meaning but misguided soul.
(Personally, I take real issue with the notion that “catholicity” is identical with the Neoscholasticism of the past hundred-and-change years, but now’s not the time for that particular discussion.)
Fr. Hunwicke is, of course, correct: the devil is in visceral hatred of other humans—especially fellow Christians no matter what their “party”. It’s unfortunate how often that point gets missed, and how often the opposite gets pushed on blogs.