A Sound of Sheer Silence

1.  The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I spent a week in Tallahassee, Florida at an event called Boys' State.  It was put on by the American Legion (an association of foreign war veterans), and it was a government/civics-oriented thing.  The highlight, at least for me, was that you could get yourself "elected" to various positions in a faux state government, and then form up and go through the motions of being legislators and other politicians.  I got "elected" to the State Senate, and we deliberated in the actual Florida State Senate chambers, voted on proposed legislation, and all the rest.  I "served" the State Senate with my (still to this day) close friend Justin (now Father Justin, the Russian Orthodox priest), and we had a grand old time. In addition to the legislative stuff, there was a great deal of, well, political content, for lack of a better term.  The biggest part of this was that we all had to prepare "Am...

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church--where have you been all my life?  For someone who is into both politics and religion, it was squarely in my wheelhouse, and I found it fascinating and compelling on basically every level.  I was able to follow the progress of things primarily on Twitter, but also via periodically checking into the livestreams and following along with the materials from the Convention that were available to the public online (which were excellent, by the way). Having watched from afar, I have some observations on the event that is (as of this writing) wrapping up. 1.  Democracy.   Throughout the course of the Convention, you would from time to time see people complaining on Twitter about a lack of access, or marginalization of this or that group, or how pervasive clericalism was in the Episcopal Church.  I want to avoid as much as possible discounting people's experiences along those lines, but as someone who recently came over ...

In a previous post, I mentioned that inclusive (or rather, in what is apparently the preferred form, "expansive") language was in the hopper at the Episcopal Church's General Convention, as part of the proposal for beginning the process of revising the Book of Common Prayer.  The proposal to revise the BCP, with explicit instructions to include expansive language, passed the House of Delegates, and was awaiting consideration by the House of Bishops.  This has provoked great discussion online, much of it good and some of it less so. To that end, a memorial was offered , with an impressive number of signatories.  I agree with most of what is stated in the memorial.  But I stop short at this paragraph, which is likely seen by the authors as the lynchpin of the whole project: We affirm that the Trinitarian language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not simply metaphorical but is an important part of the inheritance of the catholic faith grounded in the revelation o...

A quick sort-of digression, and then to my main point.  I am part of the formation of a new religious community within the Episcopal Church, known as the Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer (CMMR).  It will be officially founded in September, and I will be saying much more about it in these electronic pages in the coming months.  There are numerous reasons why I am excited about this project, but one of them is how clear the theological vision behind the community is.  If you could summarize the charism for this community down to one sentence, it would be that "a fundamental component of the Christian message is opposition to Empire in all of its forms, and our mission is to equip and form disciples in resistance to Empire." Which of course raises the question--"what do you mean by 'Empire'?"  At the risk of defining something in relation to some other complex concept, I would say that "Empire" is a synonym for Rene Girard's concept of ...