A Sound of Sheer Silence

On Sunday, I had a visit with a man that I got to know during my time with the Dominicans.  He was enormously supportive of me during that time; in fact, he was the most supportive member of the Dominicans, all told.  I will always be very grateful to him for his kindness and support in my early 20s.  He was a couple of years ahead of me in formation, but he entered the Order older (after a complex and convoluted process), so he is a good 15 or so years older than I am.  He is, at his heart, a good man who cares deeply for the people around him.  He is also someone who takes great joy in being a priest, and he truly puts his whole self into that role. And yet, every time I see him, I come away very sad, and this time was no exception.  While he loves being a priest, he has not found the support among his fellow Dominicans that he hoped for, a fact that he admitted to me on Sunday.  This is to some degree a function of the fact that (as he also acknowle...

"So, what do you think about the bishops wanting to deny Biden Communion?" I've gotten that question a lot. There are a number of ways to approach this issue that I think are interesting on their own merits, but not ultimately the heart of the conversation.  For example, the lawyer in me is fascinated by the applicability of Canon 1405 p.1 , which states that "[i]n the cases mentioned in Canon 1401 [which includes ecclesiastical penalties such as denying Communion], the Roman Pontiff alone has the right to judge . . . Heads of State."  That seems pretty black and white to me--the U.S. Bishops' Conference has no jurisdiction over Biden so long as he is the President.  And, if you think through the "legislative history" of this Canon, it was surely written to prevent local bishops from mucking around with the Pope's broader diplomatic and spiritual initiatives.  In other words, exactly the kind of scenario we have right now.   Along those lines, ...

This Sunday, the Washington National Cathedral, which is technically the cathedral of the Diocese of Washington of the Episcopal Church, invited Max Lucado to preach.  Lucado is an evangelical author and speaker, known (at least in my sense of things) as one of those guys who writes those novels that fill up the massive shelf space in the "Christian Living" section of Barnes & Noble.  But, he's written other stuff, too.  And you will not, I suspect, be particularly surprised to learned that he is against gay marriage and gay relationships.  In reading through the quotes attributed to him, they seem to be pretty standard anti-gay conservative talking points--the Bible says no, if we let gays get married bestiality is next, etc., etc., etc.  So, it's bad, but it is bad in the usual way.  He's One of Those. I want to talk about this, and why I think the decision of the Washington National Cathedral to invite him to preach is incomprehensibly stupid.  ...

First off, I want to thank everyone who has written to me in the last couple of weeks and months, wanting to know if everything is OK and wondering if I will be writing again.  When I started this blog six or so years ago, I did so with the expectation that no one would read it, and the fact that people did, and do, read it has been a wonderful surprise.  I am deeply grateful to everyone who has taken the time to read what I have written and engage with it. My reduced output on these pages has been a product of a couple of things, but mostly the fact that in the last six months or so I haven't felt like I have much to say.  I don't want to be flogging the same horses over and over, and so when I don't feel moved to write something in particular, I just don't.  I would not be surprised if the pendulum swings back in the near future, but as long as I don't really feel like I have particular ideas to put out, it is probably going to continue to be quiet. In fact, I...

I'm a little late to the party, but in the last week, there has been a robust discussion of the numbers published by the Episcopal Church regarding membership, church attendance, etc.  Like many valuable conversations, it was kicked off by Ben Crosby, who pointed out that these numbers are, um, not good.  This lead to many conversations regarding the causes of, and solutions to, the reality of numeric decline. I cannot begin to summarize all of these conversations, and there is no single answer or solution.  Instead, I'd like to take a small thread of the bigger tapestry and hopefully provide a contribution.  And I would like to start here: If we don’t act like the theological, ethical, and contemplative claims of Christianity are of *utmost* importance and ought to shape every part of people’s lives, we won’t retain kids and we won’t inspire their families. How much do we do or not do out of fear of being Baptists? — K.D. Joyce (@MtrKDJoyce) September 2, 201...

1.  The Spark:   On Saturday afternoon, I got home to find this on my Twitter feed. I suppose that’s why religion in the US is such a mess right now... — Carol Howard Merritt (@CarolHoward) August 10, 2019 Prior to seeing this tweet, I had no idea who Carol Howard Merritt was.  As it turns out, she is a Presbyterian minister and author, but I didn't know that until later.  All I knew from reading this is, according to her (1) everyone who believes that one must affirm the (her terminology) "literal bodily resurrection" are fundamentalists; and (2) those same folks are responsible for what is wrong in American religion. In context, it should also be said that Rev. Howard Merritt certainly seemed to be subtweeting Ben Crosby, an Episcopalian divinity student who has taken the position online that if one doesn't or can't affirm the Nicene Creed, then one should not be ordained, or allowed to be ordained.  Crosby, and others, pushed back. In the inter...

I mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially. — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 7, 2019 Episcopalianism is to Christianity what Rice Krispies are to rice. It may have once been the later, but now it's just a hollowed out puff prone to snapping, crackling, and popping. — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 8, 2019 Right-wing political commentator and self-professed evangelical Christian Erick Erickson decided to talk shit about my faith and my religious tradition over the last few days, and as such I feel entitled to respond. One can approach this response from a number of directions.  One obvious direction, and one that I saw commonly in the Twitter response to Erickson, is to interrogate this notion of "the roots of Christianity," which the Episcop...

I mentioned in a previous post about the increasingly obvious generational divide in the Episcopal Church, which was on display at General Convention.  I can't really speak to the attitudes coming from the Baby Boomer crew toward the younger generations, but the critique coming from the younger folks toward their elders can be boiled down to "your theology/theological praxis is bad."  For the younger folks of a more conservative bent with regard to the fundamentals of the faith (as distinguished from the sex/gender issues that are almost inevitably the fault lines in Roman Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism), this is usually expressed as the criticism that the Baby Boomers have watered down or sold out core Christian doctrines and distinctives.  But even among the younger folks who have a more progressive theological orientation you can find frustration with the Baby Boomers, leading me to believe that "they don't take the Creeds seriously enough" is...