On Pilgrimage

I will be on Pilgrimage in Ireland for the next week or so, and will not have Internet access. I'll post when I return.

David+

Gaffe-Con Results

I've not been doing a lot of commentary on things in the Anglican Communion lately, knowing that there are people out there who are much better at such things (and have more time), but there are several ramifications in the GAFCON final statement that I want to write about, therefore clarifying my thoughts around the issues.

The first is the nature of authority in the Anglican Communion. The statement is made that "we do not accept that Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury." I would ask what basis there is for this. In every definition I've ever seen of the Anglican Communion, communion with the See of Canterbury is part of it. While it is certainly possible to be a protestant church descended from the Anglican Church (as are Baptists and Methodists), being Anglican necessarily entails communion with Canterbury. If Canterbury were ever to break communion with the Episcopal Church, we would still be Episcopal, but we would no longer be Anglican. Instead, the GAFCON group wants to set up a primates' council of six unelected bishops who get to determine who is an "orthodox" Anglican (and therefore a REAL one) and who is not. This is dangerous, as it removes all pretense of catholicity from the church. It also leads to the next point - the concept of "Confessing" Anglicans.

A "Confessing Anglican" is sea change in the idea of Anglicanism. It has often been said that Anglicans are Creedal, not Confessional. This means that our unity is around the historic creeds, not around a confession like the Lutheran Ausburg Confession or the Roman Catholic Catechism. The idea seems to be to re-define Anglicanism around the 39 Articles and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a centralized confession. The problem is, neither of these documents have been a major part of Episcopal Church history, and the same is true of many other Anglican provinces. In fact, the Lambeth Conference of 1968 suggested that the 39 Articles be removed from Prayer Books:

"The Ministry - The Thirty-Nine Articles

"The Conference accepts the main conclusion of the Report of the Archbishops' Commission on Christian Doctrine entitled "Subscription and Assent to the Thirty-nine Articles" (1968) and in furtherance of its recommendation:

(a) suggests that each Church of our Communion consider whether the Articles need be bound up with its Prayer Book;

(b) suggests to the Churches of the Anglican Communion that assent to the Thirty-nine Articles be no longer required of ordinands;

(c) suggests that, when subscription is required to the Articles or other elements in the Anglican tradition, it should be required, and given, only in the context of a statement which gives the full range of our inheritance of faith and sets the Articles in their historical context."

One of the Episcopal Church's greatest high-churchmen, WIlliam Reed Huntington, wrote in 1907:

"The Confessions have their day and cease to be; the Creeds live on—all the days are theirs. The Creeds are like Stonehenge and the Pyramids;—to go at them with hammer and chisel, under a pretext of reparation, were little short of sacrilege. The Thirty-nine Articles are a sixteenth century Episcopal residence of many rooms, some of them much out of repair."

What I see happening here is the formation of a new denomination - one that has many of the trappings of Anglicanism, but is indeed rooted singularly in the experience of those areas evangelized by the Church Missionary Society. It will be characterized by its' strict confessionalism and extreme evangelical character. It will eschew catholic tradition by disregarding traditional ties to the Archbishop of Canterbury. And it will fly in the face of all that has been accomplished since 2003 by attempting an end-run around the Windsor Report. I cannot understand why any self-respecting Anglo-Catholic would be interested, but some seem to be.

Even NT Wright, who is very evangelical and sympathetic to their position, seems concerned.

I'll quote from a post by Michael Russell from San Diego:

There is no occasion since the fully public inception of this movement of them actually getting anything they wanted. Neither TEC nor the C of Canada have been sanctioned or side streamed, and the reasserters have not been proclaimed as the true Anglican presence by anyone with any actual authority to do that.

The promises made to parishioners that they would soon be the acknowledged by the Archbishop of Canterbury as the true presence has not and will not happen.

The Jerusalem Declaration has pinned its future to an arcane formulation of "authorities" that most Anglican provinces worldwide are not going to endorse: specifically the 39 Articles and the 1662 BCP as standards of the faith.

Nor will most of the Anglican provinces endorse their peculiar formulations and doctrine of Scripture as found in the Document.

So after a dozen years of planning and six years of bullying and threats, this movement has a smaller affiliation circle and less influence than five years ago.

I agree.

David+

anglican, Anglican Communion, christianity, ecclesiology, episcopal, NT Wright, politics, religion, theology, Windsor Report

NT Wright and Cookie Monster on the Colbert Report

Talk about a dream duo! Bishop NT Wright of Durham

and even better, COOKIE MONSTER on the Colbert Report.

I had hoped that Cookie Monster would show back up DURING Wright's interview, but no such luck.
ME LOVE THEOLOGY! SO TASTY!
David+

anglican, christianity, colbert, cookie monster, episcopal, humor, NT Wright, religion, television

Fear of Girls 2

Having exposed my gaming group to the YouTube video "Fear of Girls," they discovered that "Fear of Girls 2" was out. It's a hilarious exploration of some of those Girl Gamer stereotypes that I mentioned two posts ago.
David+

D&D, gaming, humor, rpg, women, youtube

Mythopoeic Awards Finalists

PRESS RELEASE: June 6, 2008

2008 Mythopoeic Award Finalists

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature

Goss, Theodora, In the Forest of Forgetting (Prime Books)

Hopkinson, Nalo, The New Moon’s Arms (Grand Central Publishing)

Kay, Guy Gavriel, Ysabel (Roc)

Valente, Catherynne M., Orphan’s Tales, consisting of In the Night Garden (Spectra) and In the Cities of Coin and Spice (Spectra)

Wright, John C., Chronicles of Chaos, consisting of Orphans of Chaos (Tor); Fugitives of Chaos (Tor); and Titans of Chaos (Tor)

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature

Black, Holly, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale (Simon & Schuster); Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie (Simon & Schuster); and Ironside: A Modern Faery’s Tale (Margaret K. McElderry)

Landy, Derek, Skulduggery Pleasant (HarperCollins)

Rowling, J.K., The Harry Potter series, consisting of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s [Sorcerer’s] Stone (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Bloomsbury); and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Bloomsbury)

Springer, Nancy, Dusssie (Walker Books for Young Readers)

Thompson, Kate, The New Policeman (HarperTeen)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies

Burns, Marjorie, Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien's Middle-earth (University of Toronto Press, 2005)

Flieger, Verlyn, Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology (Kent State University Press, 2005)

Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Glyer, Diana Pavlac; appendix by David Bratman, The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent State University Press, 2007)

Rateliff, John D., The History of the Hobbit, Part One, Mr Baggins; Part Two, Return to Bag-End (HarperCollins, 2007)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies

Butler, Charles, Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (Children's Literature Association & Scarecrow Press, 2006)

O’Donoghue, Heather, From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths (I.B. Tauris, 2007)

Shippey, T.A., editor, The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005)

Tuerk, Richard Carl, Oz in Perspective: The Magic and Myth of the L. Frank Baum Books (McFarland & Co., 2007)

Williamson, Milly, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy (Wallflower, 2006)

The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature is given to the fantasy novel, multi-volume, or single-author story collection for adults published during 2007 that best exemplifies the spirit of the Inklings. Books are eligible for two years after publication if not selected as a finalist during the first year of eligibility. Books from a series are eligible if they stand on their own; otherwise, the series becomes eligible the year its final volume appears. The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature honors books for younger readers (from Young Adults to picture books for beginning readers), in the tradition of The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia. Rules for eligibility are otherwise the same as for the Adult Literature award. The question of which award a borderline book is best suited for will be decided by consensus of the committees.

The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies is given to books on Tolkien, Lewis, and/or Williams that make significant contributions to Inklings scholarship. For this award, books first published during the last three years (2005–2007) are eligible, including finalists for previous years. The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies is given to scholarly books on other specific authors in the Inklings tradition, or to more general works on the genres of myth and fantasy. The period of eligibility is three years, as for the Inklings Studies award.

The winners of this year's awards will be announced during Mythcon XXXIX, to be held from August 15-18, 2008, in New Britain, Connecticut. A complete list of Mythopoeic Award winners is available on the Society web site:

http://www.mythsoc.org/awards/

The finalists for the literature awards, text of recent acceptance speeches, and selected book reviews are also listed in this on-line section.

For more information about the Mythopoeic Awards, please contact the Awards Administrator:

David D. Oberhelman, awards@mythsoc.org.

------------------

I serve on the Inklings Studies awards committee, so I have some good reading ahead.

David+

cs lewis, inklings, mythopoeic, tolkien, fiction, fantasy

Myths about Girl Gamers

A list that the girl gamer in my group passed along....

Girl gamers. Evidently, we’re difficult to figure out. Lucky for you, I’ve compiled this nifty little handbook to give you some hints.

1.We want to control the entire game... and you.

You think we want control of such a rag-tag group of guys? I’d rather go bobbing for apples in a deep fryer. If I wanted to control you, I’d show up at the game with a chair and a whip. Sit and ponder that, friend.

2.We’re there because you’re there.

A girl gamer, a REAL girl gamer, is there because she wants to be. Let me ask you this: Do you think you’re charming enough to make a girl unwillingly spend an entire evening with a bunch of people who get that excited about rolling dice? I thought not.

3.We make an effort to date every gamer in the group.

You got us there. We actually keep lists of the gamers we haven’t dated yet, and we check them off as we go. I got extra Girl Gamer Points (GGPs) because I dated all the eligible guys in our group and then managed to cause a major schism, causing half the people to quit talking to the other half. I traded my GGPs in for some rulebooks and a new dice bag and now I’m on the lookout for new victims… Get real.

4.We should be in charge of dinner and/or cleanup.

The next time you think about saddling the girl gamer with dinner preparations, consider her character first. If she’s playing a bitter extraterrestrial terrorist who hates everyone without provocation and dabbles in torture on the side because it’s fun, it’s probably not a good idea to ask. If her character is primarily engaged in kissing up and crocheting, go ahead. Ask.

5.We’re only interested in playing sex kittens or innocent ingénue-types.

Hello, Pot. I’m Kettle. You’re black.

Sure, girl gamers have schticks. So do you, Mr. Lone Wolf… and you, Mr. Combat Monster. And, while we’re at it, let me ask you a question… How many of your characters wear black trenchcoats? Whose brilliant idea was it to give all the bad-asses black trenches?

6.We are utterly incapable of understanding the rules.

Once, I heard a gamer comment, “Hey, man, she’s a girl. Girls don’t get the rules; it’s like a math thing or something.” Buddy, I’ll out-math you any time… and then I’ll tear you into tiny little pieces and eat you for breakfast. We are quite capable of understanding the rules, if you’d explain them in something that approximates English, or loosen your death-hold on the rulebook and just let us read them for ourselves.

7.We flutter our eyelashes at GMs to get our way.

I did that once. The GM very politely gave me what I wanted and, then, I realized I didn’t want it after all (because, as we all know, a good GM gives you what you want and then makes you regret having ever asked). The end result was that I had to extract my foot from my mouth. If you let girl gamers walk all over you as a player or a GM, more fool you. You need to get out and date more, friend.

8.We hate other girl gamers.

Well, sure! Why not? After all, other girl gamers might hog all the GGPs and then we’d be out some valuable prizes. We have to protect our territory, after all. Get real. If a true girl gamer can’t stand another girl in your group, it’s either a personal thing or maybe that girl is one of those fake-scheming-break-up-the-group types we’ve been discussing.

9.We don’t appreciate a good combat.

Correction: We do appreciate a good combat. What we don’t do is a) get sexually aroused over it or b) spend hours upon hours memorizing the caliber and number of shots for a revolver that was last used with regularity in the 1950s. We’ve got better things to do than memorize gun statistics. Like planning out how to spend out GGPs, for instance.

10.Because we are girls, you cannot hope to understand anything about us, including our roleplaying.

Well… maybe there’s a bit of truth in that one, after all.

D&D, games, gaming, humor, rpg, women

Rachel Ray the Terrorist?

OK,

Has America gone off the frickin' deep end? Rachel Ray was in a commercial for Dunkin Doughnuts iced coffee. See image below.

The ad has been yanked following what has been called the "keffiyeh kerfuffle" when right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin claimed that her wardrobe choice made her appear sympathetic to Islamic Jihadists. Huh? Looks like a fringed, paisley scarf to me, and no doubt did to Ray as well when the wardrobe person brought it to her.

And what if it was a keffiyeh? Yes, Khaddafi wears a keffiyeh, and so did Arafat, but so does almost every other arab male. Does wearing a traditional arab headpiece make you a terrorist? Evidently in some people's eyes it does.

It has become fashionable for those in solidarity with the palestinian cause to wear a black and white keffiyeh draped over the shoulders and back, but that does that mean that EVERY black and white scarf now has political connotations? And is everyone in sympathy with the Palestinian cause a terrorist? Evidently so. I would appear to know several Jews who are actually secret Islamic Terrorists....

What scares me the most is to think how this must appear to an American Muslim. If a beloved, white celebrity like Rachel Ray can get castigated for wearing something that looks kind of like a keffiyeh, what does that say about what could happen to someone of arab complexion wearing a Hijab? It points out how xenophobic we still are as a culture and that the message that all Muslims are terrorists is still a pervasive meme in our society.

Fear controls us still.

"Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." - Matt. 10:28

"All fears other than reverent fear that are offered to us, although they come under the pretense of holiness, yet are not as true" - Julian of Norwich

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” - Yoda

David+

politics, religion, rachel ray, islam

News Article on the Order of Julian

Waukesha monastery seeks update

Order of Julian of Norwich will ask to expand living quarters

By DARRYL ENRIQUEZ

denriquez@journalsentinel.com

Posted: May 14, 2008

Waukesha - A monastery of monks and nuns with ties to a 14th-century saint will ask the Plan Commission tonight for permission to update and expand its main living quarters on the west side of Waukesha.

The Order of Julian of Norwich is seeking approval of a 3,400-square-foot addition to the monastery at 2812 Summit Ave.

Doug Koehler, a city planner, said plans call for a new wing to connect two existing buildings - the main chapel and the living quarters, converted from an old farmhouse. The wing also will contain four dormitory rooms, he said.

City planning staff will recommend approval of the plans, he said.

Father Gregory Fruehwirth of the order said the wing will provide older members and visitors with accessible facilities for the handicapped, which are lacking in the 1850 farmhouse. The monastery opened in 1990.

"We need space where we can care for them appropriately," Fruehwirth said. "It's really a core value for us to care for older members and to keep them in the community for as long as possible."

Another plan calls for the possible installation of solar panels on the roof of one the buildings, he said, and grants are being sought for the project.

The order was founded in 1985 in Norwich, Conn., and it practices "contemplative and mystical spirituality in the Episcopal Church," according to its Web site.

The monastery takes in short- and medium-term guests for prayer, silence and contemplative meditation. It has six nuns and three monks who follow vows of poverty, chastity, obedience and prayer, the Web site says.

Julian, the patron saint of the order, lived in Norwich, England, in the 14th and early 15th century, spending much of her life as a hermit who lived in a small room attached to a parish church, the site says.

Little is known about her other than that she wrote the book "Revelations of Divine Love," which describes visions about God's unconditional love for humankind.

"In a medieval church which emphasized God's condemning wrath, Julian wrote, 'There is no wrath in God. . . . It is the most impossible thing that can be that God would be angry, for wrath and friendship are two opposites.' "

The order's Web site says, "Just as striking and as relevant to the 21st century is Julian's perception of the feminine element in God."

Although usually associated with the Roman Catholic Church, the monastic life is also a part of the Anglican tradition.

The OJN website is at: http://www.orderofjulian.org

anglican, christianity, episcopal, monastacism, order of julian, religion

Catholic Coke

Way too funny!

christianity, youtube, culture

The Virtue of Patience

My newsletter article for May....

Dear Beloved People of God,

Patience is a virtue the Simmons family has been trying to practice over the last few months. With the housing market being pretty slow, we’ve been waiting on our house in Kentucky to sell so we can purchase one here in Waukesha. In the meantime, we are living in a two-bedroom apartment which serves largely as a small set of walls to bounce off of for our two children. We trust that God will take care of us,and that all will happen in due time. We also remember that two-bedroom apartment is certainly better living space than what most of the world lives in. But still, we can’t help but ask, “When?” Brendan is even more persistent at asking this question. He wants to know when he will get back his bed and his toys and be able to jump around and play rough. We’ve all heard that patience is a virtue, but it is surely one of the hardest to develop, whether you are five or eighty-five.

But for Anglicans, patience is a cardinal virtue. We often talk about the Via Media (The Middle Way) as a pleasant theological construction describing the path between the protestant and catholic traditions that Anglicans took. For people like the poet and Anglican priest George Herbert (1593-1633), the middle way was an active choice that meant you stayed in communion with people who had wanted to burn you at the stake during the reign of the previous monarch. In a meditation about the floor-stones of his small country church, he wrote:

“MARK you the floore?
that square & speckled stone,
Which looks so firm and strong,
Is Patience:”

For Herbert and other Anglican poets and writers of his generation, patience was literally the basic building block of the church. Since then, the patience that slowed down religious persecution during the English Reformation has become the hallmark of Anglicanism. Sometimes, this has been detrimental, as in the reluctance to speak out against slavery. Martin Luther King, Jr., was especially exasperated with the Episcopal Church and our obsession with patience. In a speech in Montgomery, he said,

“For many years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.”

King’s critique showed us that sometimes patience can be negative if it is used to maintain an oppressive status quo. This realization has modified our thinking as American Episcopalians. Patience is still a virtue, but is tempered with the understanding that no group should be allowed to suffer indefinitely in order to allow us to procrastinate about a difficult decision. Because of our traditional Anglican value of patience, we feel decisions should be made deliberately and with sufficient time for debate and counsel, but our newer appreciation of justice often piques our conscience and asks us, “are we delaying just for the sake of delay?” These two polarities play themselves out at every level of church politics, from the congregational to communion-wide.

So patience IS a virtue, as is justice. I’m not sure justice enters into the equation about when our house sells in Murray, but we will continue to hone our patience until such a time as the market as the market cooperates and the Lord blesses.

Yours in Christ,

David+

anglican, christianity, episcopal, patience, religion, Untitled, via media