Even the Devils Believe

Our jurisdiction is gathering in the countryside of Pennsylvania later today for our first annual retreat. We’ll be sharing fellowship together for the weekend, worshiping together, and ordaining two of our seminarians as porters and one of them as an acolyte. Please keep us in your prayers!
For this Friday, here are some photos [...]

I try to hide this secret, but I really kind of want to become Barbara Brown Taylor when I grow up. I would much rather just have her preaching voice pop into my head than do all the hard work myself — she gets me with every sermon I read or hear or watch. [...]

Episcopal Cafe links in this post to an article by the Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, President of the Chicago Theological Seminary (a seminary of the United Church of Christ — incidentally, Dr. Brooks Thistlethwaite is a Dukie as well). She talks about the recent Pew report on religion in America, drawing the conclusion [...]

A little cute overload for your Monday morning, to make up for the fact that I couldn’t get my camera to talk to my laptop to make Friday cat blogging happen last week:

I’ll admit I was nearly this obsessed with Star Wars when I was her age.

In response to the news that Seabury-Western Theological Seminary is suspending its residential M.Div., and taking into account general trends in the mainline, Christopher Evans has a long post up from before the weekend about the breakdown of old models of “doing church”. Being in some ways a human enterprise, the Church is always [...]

Today is the Feast of the Chair of St Peter — the fact is somewhat obscured by the name used in the latest liturgical books, but it is not traditionally the feast of St Peter’s see in Rome, but rather the Chair of St Peter at Antioch. The traditional feast for the Chair at [...]

Jeffrey Tucker over at NLM has mentioned a new choral work that has been released under the Free Art License and offers a great argument for why church musicians among others should release their work under less restrictive licenses than the standard American copyright. I’ve written about this before and agree wholeheartedly.
Copyright is, frankly, a [...]

There’s a really useful post here looking at the work of Kathryn Tanner in relation to Rowan Williams. The post and comments are an interesting discussion.
The central concern here is that Tanner espouses a theology of giving “from abundance”, whereas Williams suggests giving necessarily entails painful sacrifice and self-limiting. The crux of the [...]

Fr Tobias Haller, BSG’s comment on the situation in the Anglican Communion is a reminder to me of the power of tradition to combat a whole range of evils in the Church. (Of course tradition can be turned to ill — but this is an instance where it is extremely helpful.) The particular [...]

Jill from Feministe has a must-read post on Muslim women and the hijab, which is relevant to our discussions earlier this week and last week about Rowan Williams and Jeffrey Stout and their visions of the public square.
One of the major insights of feminist theology in the last century has been its work making the [...]