Hopeful steps toward recognition of LGBT rights occurred this year in many otherwise homophobic countries, even as brutal anti-LGBT crackdowns were under way elsewhere. Below are thumbnail descriptions of encouraging developments in 11 nations, regions, and international organizations. (For the grimmer side of 2017, watch for an upcoming article.) INDIA Protest against India’s anti-gay Section…
Scene from “Love Is Love” video. A group of Nigerian, Kenyan and Ugandan human rights activists has come together to record a powerful and non-apologetic song championing LGBT equality in Africa. Scene from “Love Is Love” video The song, titled “Love is Love,” was released on Dec. 25 on YouTube as a video filled with…
The Christmas season is a time for family gatherings, which often means a season of sadness for LGBT people who have been expelled by their families because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The holiday sadness of a gay man By Erin Royal Brokovitch I have always understood Christmas to be a time to…
via A lonely and painful Christmas for excluded LGBT people —
While wondering what to write about for the birthday of Desiderius Erasmus, I happened upon a book by Naoko Saito entitled The Gleam of Light: Moral perfectionism and education in Emerson and Dewey. As Saito expounds it, the notion of perfection as a practical moral aim, and its relation to growth and human flourishing, is both akin to, and different from, the human perfection that Erasmus advocated — and that Quakers preached and suffered for in Puritan England.
Saito’s reflections are rooted in a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. As Saito shows, Emerson saw this “gleam of light” as a powerful and precious resource for renewal and authentic creativity. This “gleam of light” is “transcendent,” in that…
View original post 1,791 more words
One of the most striking things I noticed about mainline denominations when I started exploring them is how opposed they are to proselytizing. Religion often seems to be an almost tribal reality for many of them. Wanting other people to be a part of your faith is okay, but actually going out there and asking others to be part of your denomination? Distasteful.
This attitude has crippled many a Church in the secular age we now live in. Not least the Episcopal Church. I sometimes feel like I’m jumping onto a sinking ship with captain and crew not sure whether to jump ship, fix the damage, or proceed as if nothing is wrong.
But I dream of the day when the Holy Spirit will fill our hearts with fire, and we’ll gladly join him in harvesting in the fields of hurting humanity. I long for the day that the best of who we are as the Episcopal Church will become known.
Right now, I would like to see, in my lifetime, the Episcopal Church become 1 percent of the population in the territory covered by every one of it’s diocese. Now this might not seem like an ambitious dream. After all, that’s only 4.6 million members out of a population of roughly 460 million in the territories covered by the Episcopal Church. But the Episcopal Church today is only 2 million members total. Only 1.8 million and shrinking in the US.
Staunching the flow of souls out of the Episcopal Church and energizing it in the next 25 years to double in size everywhere seems to be an almost impossible task. But it is not a hopeless one, it’s not even an unfamiliar one.
When the Episcopal Church was founded in 1789, it was seen by some as a pipe dream. The end of British rule seemed to mean and end to Anglican religion in the nascent US. Throughout its history, Anglicanism in the 13 colonies had been living on life support, with no bishops, a paucity of well trained clergy, and inherited hostility from people who were previously or currently being persecuted by the Church of England.
The years before and during the Revolution also brought with them great cultural change, notably the evangelical Great awakening which drew many nominal Anglicans into Methodist and Baptist churches and a moralist and skepticism that echoes the attitudes of our current age.
Into this maelstrom comes our Church, already considered to be dying and discredited by most who observed it. But as more and more Episcopalians committed themselves to evangelism in the ensuing decades, the Episcopal Church grew. By 1839, most would have been shocked by how close they had come to not existing.
In light of this history, I know that what seems impossible to mankind is never impossible to God. So I’m going to keep on dreaming big dreams for the Episcopal Church. And with his help, they’ll come true.
–Eternal God, giver of love and power, your Son Jesus Christ has sent us into all the world to preach the gospel of his kingdom: confirm us in this mission, and help us to live the good news we proclaim; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
livingchurch.org/covenant/2017/10/17/the-gospel-according-to-rite-i/
I love Sufjan Stevens! He really helps me to deal with frustration and disappointment, a feeling that I find both constant and paralyzing. I think that in many of his songs, the melodies are generally sad but tbe choruses are loud and defiant, sometimes even triumphant. This seems to the listener as if he’s physically expelling through his music the feelings of melancholy that seems to swamp them. This is most self evident in his Christmas music.
One of the most amazing facts about living the Christian life is the assurance of bodily resurrection. Our world is not a stranger to new birth, but for most religions that touch on the subject, the one reborn can barely recognize itself, if it can at all!
But in Christ, we who look forward to resurrection know that when we are raised up it will be as transformed yet self-knowing people. We’ll be fully aware of what’s been done for us and who did it! Thank God for his love for us.
One of the most frustrating projects I’m working on is developing a theology that is grounded firmly in an explicitly Anglican tradition and Orthodox perspective. I find myself reading people like Ephraim Radner and Bishop George Sumner, people who see folk like myself as a direct threat to themselves and Christianity itself. I’m reading them because I think their effort to reorient the Episcopal/Anglican tradition in a faithful and Biblical way are essential to reform and renewal and ultimately the survival of this tradition. But when you see their utter disdain, contempt, and despair at the very thought of LGBT people being grafted into the people of God and having their lives fully included, it makes if hard to give the rest of their theological musings a fair hearing. Why have these people let the issue of sexuality become the seat and center of their theological resistance? Why not the abandonment of the Creeds or the neglect of the Thirty-nine Articles, or the devaluation of proselytization? Perhaps this is how freed slaves felt reading theology in the immediate aftermath of Emancipation. So frustrating.
franiel32 