A Sound of Sheer Silence

My first memory of church was my grandmother's parish, Church of the Precious Blood in Monmouth Beach, New Jersey.  It was pure white on the outside with red doors (kind of like an Episcopal Church, ironically), but the inside was small and dark--big dark wood beams bracing the ceiling, lots of 50s-style "Catholic kitsch" statutes.  I remember going with grandma mostly, but we didn't go much otherwise without grandma, especially after the pastor, Earl Gannon (who has been there since the 60s, back to when mom was a kid), publicly called out my mother in the middle of Good Friday service for not keeping her young boys from making more noise than he felt acceptable.  Monsignor Gannon's successor was a child molester, who, based on the timeline set forth in this article, was shuffled off to Precious Blood to get away from the "mess" he created at Incarnation Catholic Church in Ewing .  His  successor never bothered to visit my grandmother--a parishoner of ...

This summer, the Episcopal Church will be having its triennial General Convention, in Austin, Texas (a strange choice in my book, as Texas in July might as well be the surface of the sun).  Among the topics to be voted on is the initiation of the process to rewrite or revise the Book of Common Prayer, last done so in 1979.  Revisions to the Book of Common Prayer are truly a "third rail" and an inevitable source of controversy.  In fact, the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music, the group that would be in charge of the mechanics of a revision, seems to be less than completely enthusiastic about the project, offering an alternative that would delay a revision for a least a decade .  And my sense, based on reading stuff on the Interwebs, is that it is likely that folks will take the out and kick the can down the road. The rector of my parish, who will be heading to Austin as a delegate, is resolutely against opening up the Prayer Book to wholesale revisions.  ...

In the US and UK alone, over 45 million people watched Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (a Northwestern alum, I am obligated to mention) get married on Saturday.  And the star of the show, or at least the person that seems to be the one most people are talking about, is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry .  He preached the sermon at the wedding, and he did what Bishop Curry almost unfailingly does, which is give a stem-winder that is heavily influenced by the rich and deep African-American Christian preaching tradition.  If you have not read it ( or, better, watched it ), I urge you to do so. If you want to distill Bishop Curry's message down to three core points, I would say they are (1) the foundation of the message of Jesus Christ is love, (2) the love we experience, including the romantic love on display at this or any wedding, ultimately has its source is Christ, and (3) love can change the world, and change ourselves.    If you w...

One of the core claims advanced by advocates of the Theology of the Body is that our biology, by which they mean our sexual biology, discloses God's moral and ethical vision for sexual activity.  In doing so, they are working out an application of "natural law"--facts about the natural world reflect the plan of God.  The job, on this reading, is to interpret facts about the natural world in order to discern God's purposes encoded in the design of the natural world and extrapolate that into our concrete circumstances. There are a number of directions from which one might object to this from a methodological point of view, and I understand and agree with those objections .  But, I think there is something valuable to be learned from the design of our sexual biology which can provide clues as to the proper way to think about developing norms and rules for our sexual activity.  My objections to the conclusions drawn from the Theology of the Body not just about method b...

1. Let's talk about family. I am the oldest of four children.  Both of my parents are alive and still married to each other.  In terms of the nuclear, biological family, I have as close to the ideal as can reasonably be imagined.  My parents love us, and us children love them back.  We are, by most standards, very close.  I saw my sister this weekend in New York City, and I will see her, my other sister, and her husband and children in a couple of weeks. It is customary to describe one's-self as "fortunate" with regard to having a happy family, and there is a way in which that is true.  No individual has control over who the other people are that inhabit your family of origin, and so there is an important sense in which the nature and state of one's original family is outside of your individual control.  But some people describe themselves as "fortunate" to have a happy family in a way which suggests that the state of any family is wholly outside...