Hello to all,
Just passing through, I have my own forums. Thought I'd drop off some juicy morsels from the religious right to help liven things up a bit around here!!!
First Episcopal Openly Gay Minister Checked into Rehab:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...op-rehab_x.htm
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/ar...or_alcoholism/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...8FPA5K00.shtml
In a letter to clergy, Robinson said he formerly considered his alcoholism "as a failure of will or discipline on my part.
Old news. So an openly gay alchoholic was ordained to the Episcopalian ministry.
http://theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/32Ang/Epis/Crisis.htm
Here's a nice little clip byTucker Carlson -- one of the TV hosts for the "Crossfire" CNN debate show. Quite telling on the Episcopal Divintiy School, where theologians are educated in revisionism:
the new EDS curriculum, includes courses like "Critical Issues in Feminist Liberation Theology" and its subsection, "Reading in Queer Theology"
The Episcopal Church used to be impressive. It isn't any more. Membership has dropped steep]y, from a historic high of almost 3.5 million in l966 to fewer than 2.4 million today, and falling. (There are by contrast 15 million Southern Baptists and close to 9 million Methodists.)
Well, it's a dieing church. Wonder why?
The result has been that, in many parts of the church, Christianity has ceased being a means to transcend the temporal world and become instead a method used to counsel people in distress; a vehicle for personal growth: Christianity as therapy session.
Preaching is being replaced with pastoral counseling in the doctrine of humanism.
Consider the career of IsabeI Carter Hayward, a self-described socialist, feminist, lesbian, "womanist" theologian, whose life and work mirror recent trends in the Episcopal Church. A former debutante from North Carolina who was one of the first female Episcopal priests, Hayward is now a professor of theology at the Episcopal Divinity School and perhaps the best known member of the church's growing feminist- liberation theology movement.
Yep, from Adam's rib to women's lib -- really helping out those membership numbers!!! Go MW!!!
Hayward is noted for her outbursts of melodramatic indignation, which are usually aimed at the church. Several years ago, for instance, she declared she would no longer capitalize the name of her own religion. "Using the lowercase 'c' with reference to 'christian,"
Gee, I'm feeling more spiritual already. And I have to agree with her, christianity doesn't deserve a capital "C" anymore with the likes of her around.
The Trinity, which is the central article of the faith in which she was ordained a priest, is dismissed in one of her books as a homophilial/homoerotic image of relations between male (father/son)."Heyward rejects the divinity of Christ out of hand. Instead, she says, "I have been led to Sophia/wisdom, to Christa/community, to Hagar the slave woman, to Jephthah's daughter," all post Christian goddesses now popular among certain feminist theologians.
Now, that one sends me to divinity school, I'm packing my bags right now for Sophia the mother of wisdom. Name that trinity -- how about Larry, Moe, and Curley?
She's also a "survivor," "someone in recovery," a woman embarked on "psychospiritual passages" out of anorexia, bulimia, alcoholism, masochistic fantasies, cigarette smoking, and childhood sexual abuse. This last trauma came to light when Heyward experienced in a dream a "recovered memory" of having been "orally sodomized by Jeff, the yardman" 40 years before. In the mid l980s, Heyward took her many troubles to a psychiatrist, a fellow lesbian, with whom she promptly fell in love. Rebuffed, Heyward stalked the poor woman for months, writing her reams of creepy poetry ("How can I speak to you of love/my therapist") and demanding a meeting.
Now why does it seem gays are alchoholics too? I mean this just keeps coming up. It seems as it were, her gay counselor couldn't even stomach this wretched individual that's educating the ministers.
The moral, of course, is that there is a huge market among Episcopalians for trendy packaged as religion. In the mailroom at the Episcopal Divinity School, the most liberal of the church's 11 seminaries, the "Support Groups/Counselling bulletin board is crammed with notices advertising every conceivable variety of navel-gazing: a weekend retreat for lesbian couples, tarot-card instruction, yoga classes, a ceremony led by a local "artist, mask maker, ritualist and performer" to celebrate "rhythms in nature," as well as the by-now familiar classes in "stress management and wellness." An ad for one workshop, placed next to a "Planned Parenthood Needs Volunteers" flyer, offers advice for "coping, managing and thriving when a spouse has Adult Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Adult Attention Deficiency Hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)." For those who pay attention too carefully, there are also "Anger Management Groups" designed to help participants "get a handle on temper and other feelings."
The Lord must be doing a pretty good job of managing His anger too.
The average Episcopal seminarian these days is close to mid-life, with the majority entering divinity school past the age of 35. For many, going to seminary is merely another form of self- discovery, often undertaken after a divorce.
OK, so straight didn't work -- might as well try gay.
In 1995, Ellen Cooke, the denomination's chief treasurer, was indicted after it was discovered that she had stolen $2.2 million from the national church, using most of the money to buy jewelry and a new summer house. Before her trial, Cooke consulted a female priest for counseling. The priest, Cooke explained in a statement, "has helped me acknowledge the pain, abuse, and powerlessness I have felt during the years I worked as a lay woman on a senior level in the Church headquarters." In other words, sexism made her do it.
Oh that poor dear, gimme a hanky. sniffle sniffle.
Even a jury could see through an excuse like that, and Cooke is now doing five years in a federal prison in West Virginia. Episcopalians, on the other hand remain easy marks for the abuse excuse. Earlier this year, the Rev. Chester LaRue, rector of St. John's in Brooklyn, was arrested and charged with selling cocaine out of his church. When police arrived at St John's,
LaRue was seated at his desk, writing a sermon and smoking crack.
It's cracking me up too. Nothing like some good 'ole bible dope to bring out the dummy in the congregation.
LaRue was at least the second rector of St. John's to have met an unseemly end, having replaced the former rector, George Hoch who was murdered by his gay lover in Atlantic City in the l980s.
Just a little domestic lover's quarrel that's all -- before anger management training was offered, you know!
At about the same time LeRue was arrested, two other Episcopal priests in Brooklyn were also brought up on charges, one for tax fraud, the other, by the church, for sexual misconduct. Coming as they did on the heals of Marilyn Monroe impersonator William Lloyd Andries, these scandals raised questions about the church's oversight of its priests in Brooklyn. Before long, the man in charge of overseeing those priests, Bishop Orris G. Walker Jr, came forward to explain that, contrary to appearances, he had not been negligent in his duties. Just the opposite, in fact. "One of my sins is I'm a workaholic," Walker said. "I need to take some time for me." Fellow priests were impressed. " It's the most courageous thing he could have done," the Rev Sara Louis Krantz told Newsday.
Was he ever there to start with?
The main idea behind pastoral theology is that priests should help their parishioners feel good about themselves. This is fine, except that much of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, is specifically designed to make people feel bad about themselves - to wake them from their self-satisfied languor and stir them into behaving differently, better. God is quoted at length in the Bible making difficult, even frightening, demands. Supporters of pastoral theology have a strategy for maintaining wellness in the face of these less-than-affirming passages: Just ignore them.
How about everyone ignoring what they have to say.
This spring, newsletter produced by the National Episcopal AIDS Coalition, a group funded by the church, described a troubling incident that took place in the Episcopal Diocese of California. According to the newsletter, brochures distributed by the Marin AIDS Interfaith Network had been defaced, made "corrupt" by a mysterious group of "hate-mongers'. What had the hat-mongers done to the brochures? Nothing less than altered them "to include Old Testament Scripture condemning the gay and lesbian community." Imagine that, huffed the Episcopalians: quoting the Bible. Talk about hateful.
Oh, I'm just embarrassed to tears about the hatefulness of those OT bible verses.
Although the issue has not yet officially been resolved by the church's governing body, virtually every Episcopal diocese in the country has openly non celibate homosexuals service as priests. It is the second question - gay marriage - that now bitterly divides the church.
epis-co-PAL, ok I see it now.
Otis Charles, the former Episcopal bishop of Utah and one of the most visible and politically active gays in the church, can speak forever about homosexuality as a civil rights issue. Ask him if gay marriages should be monogamous and he stumbles. "We need to develop an ethical sensibility that comes out of the gay sensibility," he says. In other words: probably not monogamous, no.
What about that "one man with one man" model of monogamous love everybody keeps touting?
After a while it's hard not to conclude that the push for gay marriage in the Episcopal Church is more a political quest than a religious one. Louie Crews, founder of the Episcopal gay group Integrity, doesn't disagree. Getting the church to recognize homosexual marriages, he says, is just the first step on the long road to sexual emancipation. The next civil right to be established in the Episcopal Church, he predicts, will be the right to be married to more than one person simultaneously. "Threesomes and foursomes will have to push for their own agenda," Crew says, sounding tired. "That's not my battle. You can't do all of it at once."
ok, even
I saw that one coming.
According to a study by journalist robert England, the Diocese of Newark, N.J., has seen its churches empty since the arrival of celebrated Episcopal heretic Bishop Shelby Spong almost 20 years ago. (Spong has argued that St Paul, author of unequivocally anti-homosexuality statements in the New Testament, was himself secretly gay.) Under Spong's leadership, the diocese has lost close to 40 percent of its membership, twice the attrition rate of the church nationally, and has been forced to close 17 churches.
Kind of a hard sell -- getting people to church while trashing the bible. duh!
As Roger Boltz, administrative director of the American Anglican Council, a theologically orthodox group working to reform the Episcopal Church, points out: 'There are more Anglicans in church on Sunday in Nigeria than there are in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and England combined."
Well the Nigerian Episcopalian church is fundamental, what should we expect?
