Preaching bands, marriage, and grad school
Posted by Chris T. on Thursday, May 15th, 2008
I just got back from a great lunch with the Rev. Scott Wells, of Boy in the Bands fame. Getting to meet so many bloggers and others folks I've known online for years is one of my favorite parts of traveling, and this summer in DC should be unusually good in that regard. (Lee, we've still got to go out for a beer. 
)
In other news from around the Internet, NYT and everyone else is reporting that California's Supreme Court has overturned a ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional. California has been particularly odd because no one branch of government seemed to want to take ownership of this issue. Justice Marvin Baxter, writing for the dissenting faction of the court, said that the court should have deferred to the legislature, but in vetoing a previous measure that would have made same-sex marriage legal, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the legislature should defer to the courts! Thankfully, only four short years after San Francisco began granting marriage licenses against the law, this ban is gone.
Finally, I wanted to share that as of this morning, I've applied to graduate school. A few months ago, a Roman Catholic blog I read shared news of this master's program in ecumenical theology at the Ukrainian Catholic University. It's a distance program and includes some real heavyweights of Faith and Order ecumenism. One former general secretary of the World Council of Churches is among the faculty, and Lubomyr Cardinal Husar and Archbishop ANTONY of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the US are backing the effort.
So please keep me in your prayers on that front. I should know in a month or so whether I've been accepted, and I look forward to the opportunity to do some theologizing with other students from Roman, Eastern Orthodox, Eastern Catholic, and Protestant backgrounds.
Filed in Ecumenism, LGBTs, Personal |
6 Responses to “Preaching bands, marriage, and grad school”
Good luck!
Sounds great! Sometimes I feel like I’d really like to go to graduate school, but then I remember what a bad, bad student I am and realize it’s better that I’m not.
Good luck and I will definitely keep you in my prayers.
Thanks, both of you!
bls –
It’s funny, formal university study is a very different animal from most other endeavors. I fancy myself something of a writer, and I don’t usually have much trouble thinking up stuff to blog about and filling quite a few paragraphs in short order.
But the minute I had to sit down and write essays on a topic of someone else’s choosing, it immediately got harder to write.
So that is something I’ll have to contend with. Apparently writing papers will be about as hard as it always was. 
Looks like a good masters program. I looked over the program at the website you provided and it seems reasonably priced, and a solid program. Best of luck!
On the first issue I’ve not blogged anything (yet?) because you and others know my view. Seeing the furore in the blogs - Chicken Little ‘O tempora!‘ rants from the right, ‘Ha! We won!’ ones from the left - reminds me the culture wars are a deliberate vote-getting distraction from real issues. Better to stay with the boring old First Amendment with freedom for all, Catholic or not, and keep the state out of it!
The programme sounds marvellous. Yes, Faith and Order ecumenism.
According to the Catholic faith corporate reunion is only possible among churches that claim the historic episcopate. (As the Anglicans say in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, which they now disregard as the Episcopalians are in communion with the United Methodist Church.)
The only reunions (by which I don’t mean one communion being swallowed up by another) I can see happening are, soon, between the Orthodox and the Lesser Eastern Churches, specifically the Oriental churches. (The Assyrians AFAIK are so unique I don’t know how likely union is. Because like Anglicans they practise open Communion I wonder if they see the need for it.) Off in the distance, between Rome and the Eastern churches but I’m more pessimistic about that. Because of the rival claims on how the infallible church works I agree with the Orthodox that for union to happen one side would have to stop being what it is now: either the Pope gives in and says his is a man-made rank of the episcopate or the Orthodox all become Greek Catholics.
Those and I can see shrinking liberal Protestantism merging rather like the free churches in Canada and Australia have done. But that seems to have slowed down compared to expectations 40 years ago.
Sorry but the Catholic view of ecumenism, because we believe in an infallible one true church, is teaching the Protestants/clearing up misunderstandings in order to bring them fully into the church. ‘You come in’-ism. (Which doesn’t mean having to believe Protestants are hellbound. IMO no-one can presume that.)
Anyway with Charley Wingate I agree that, other than Orthodox-Oriental and possibly mainline Protestantism, corporate-reunion ecumenism is dead. (Not least because, sorry, mainline Protestantism is nowhere near as important as it used to be.) What we’re seeing today and will in future is much more modest: Christians in most Western countries talking to each other to clear up misunderstandings about each other so no more bitter fights among most churches.
Like blogging ecumenism.
Even if most of the Protestants stay put, not bad at all.
Good luck on the grad school thing. And we will definitely get our beer on - email me when you have a chance and we’ll set something up.