Even the Devils Believe

The Church of England has voted to proceed toward the ordination of women bishops, though there is some kind of plan for a “national code” to allow for those who dissent from WO. Not quite clear to me what that means.
As Jane notes, this is a theological matter — a matter of what is true [...]

Tobias Haller has a very perceptive entry up picking apart some language in the Anglican Covenant process:
I was reflecting on a line from the Windsor Report which has always troubled me in this regard: it is one of those statements that sounds true but doesn’t stand up to very close examination; an example of what [...]

I’ve been concerned lately with some of the language I’ve heard about Muslims in public and semi-public discourse. There is a growing pettiness and triumphalism about such comments — an attempt, seemingly, to relish every difficulty experienced by Muslim groups and to “put them in their place”, frequently in the name of Christianity.
Perhaps not [...]

Last week, USA Today treated us again to the “demographic theory” of mainline Protestantism’s decline. The Lead took up the refrain on Saturday.
But sociologists led by Michael Hout, at the University of California-Berkeley, have found that the problem for the mainliners is not that people are souring on their theology and ideology and defecting to [...]

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, [...]

Thinking Anglicans is reporting that nearly half of the women clergy in England have signed a forceful statement of support for the consecration of women bishops — provided further “flying bishop” hedges not be attached:
We believe that it should be possible for women to be consecrated as bishops, but not at any price. The price [...]

LutherPunk offers some thoughts on the announcement of full communion between the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America:
Here’s the thing: I don’t see the point. Unless we are re-incorporating ourselves into another a new structure that actually does away with the distinctions of Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, whatever, then there is still [...]

I was trying to think how I might respond to this disheartening NYT article about the discrimination faced by atheist soldiers in the American military:
When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.
But minutes into the [...]

The New York Times is running a long article detailing the campaign against non-Orthodox churches throughout Russia. Things have been difficult for Protestants and Catholics in Russia for some time, but recently they’ve gotten much, much worse:
Here in Stary Oskol, 300 miles south of Moscow, the police evicted a Seventh-day Adventist congregation from its [...]

Jane Redmont and Deirdre Good have written a moving farewell piece to their mentor, Swedish Lutheran bishop and Harvard Div School dean emeritus Krister Stendahl. I won’t even excerpt it — you should read the whole thing.
As I’ve been reading some of Stendahl’s work in the week since he died, prompted by Jane’s posts on [...]