CONGRATS²

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015 | Uncategorized | 12 Comments

To the Kansas City Royals for winning the World Series.  If you have to win a world championship on the road, there’s no better place to do it than New York City. Rivalry?  Not from my end; half of my family’s from KC.

And let’s face it.  As good as his record has been so far (playoffs or World Series every single year since he’s been manager), until Cardinal manager Mike Matheny learns how to close one out, the Royals are far and away the best baseball team in this state.

No question about it.

Congratulations also to New Zealand for it’s recent Rugby World Cup win over Australia, NZ’s second straight Cup win.  I thought the Wallabies were going to make a game of it but the All-Blacks had too much for them.  And I got to see it live which was really cool.

HOW TO TELL WHEN YOU’RE OLD

Saturday, October 31st, 2015 | Uncategorized | 108 Comments

I hit the Big Six-Oh yesterday.  Unlike 30, 40 or even 50 years old, this was the first time that an age barrier actually meant something to me.  Because once you cross that line, you officially become an old man.  Five more years to Social Security (maybe less in my case), any idea of another job is out of the question and you start thinking about the D word a lot more often.

How’d you spend the day, hoss?

Nothing special.  I heard from my brother and sister.  We texted, actually; yeah, I do that now.  I mostly suck at it but this smart phone Jen gave me last Christmas has this speech-to-text feature that works really well.  Most of the time.  Bro loves retirement and his kids are doing great.  But I got some bad news from Jennifer.

Seems that her second husband left her almost a year ago.  Jen was hit hard by it but she’s tougher than anyone else in my family and she seems be coming through it okay.  Funny thing is that I heard about the end of her first marriage when she called me on my birthday about five or six years ago.

My family’s never been much for talking and stuff.

After that, I walked over to the store for my birthday bottle of Gentleman Jack and a few other things.  Then I went home to watch television and listen to the acorns fall on my roof from this big-ass oak tree nearby.

How was your Friday?

Thing is, I’ve probably been old for a very long time but didn’t realize it.  So to help someone in similar circumstances, I’ve prepared this handy, but by no means exhaustive, guide to help you assess your dinosaur status:

(A)  Three years ago, you considered yourself “tech-savvy.”  Last Christmas, your sister gave you a smart phone for Christmas and it took you a week to learn how to call someone with that thing and another month to learn how to text them.  You still don’t completely know how to use the damned thing.

(B) You not only know what this is, you may have actually seen one.  In a related note, you can recall a time when television stations didn’t stay on all night selling crap to insomniacs but had “broadcast days” and you know how those broadcast days ended.

(C) When you watch some entertainment news program, you have absolutely no idea who those people are talking about.

(D) You can remember a simpler time when “body wash” was referred to as “soap.”

(E) Your very first car, which you still have fond feelings for all these years later even though it was a piece or crap, was “used” rather than “pre-owned.”

If you’ve got more, add them to the comments.  The best ones will go up here.

KATE?

Thursday, October 29th, 2015 | Uncategorized | 31 Comments

I knew Frank Griswold.  I fisked Frank Griswold.  Kate, you are no Frank Griswold:

The Episcopal Church has come a long way in the last 10 years.  We are no longer consumed by internal conflict over various social issues.

Since we’ve fired or run off the Neanderthals.  Canons?  We don’t need no stinking canons because we had the votes.  That’s why we won, bitches.  Boo-yah.

We are clearer about who we are – a multinational church, with congregations in 17 nations, worshipping in countless different languages, thriving in international, immigrant, and multicultural contexts everywhere, and discovering the abundant life that comes in turning outward to love the neighbors nearby and far away.  We are far more conscious about our vocation as partners in the mission of God

Apparently the God Who created the heavens and the Earth, desperately needs “partners.”  What He needs them for is completely beyond me.

to reconcile and heal the world, particularly shaped by the Five Anglican Marks of Mission. 

Seems God’s an Anglican.  Who knew?

We are holding our identity as Episcopal Christians a bit more confidently, even in the midst of our diversity.  We are also more willing to hold that identity lightly and gracefully in engaging other Christians and people of other religious traditions,

Since they’re all pretty much the same thing.

searching for what we dream of in common – shalom, the Reign of God, a more just and peaceful world, with abundant life for all creation.

Whatever.  Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Presiding Bishop.

How would I grade her presidency?  Depends.  If you’re grading her on finally bringing home the complete leftist agenda, you’d have to give her an A.  Whatever remained of Episcopal traditionalism is dead, thanks largely to her efforts, legal and illegal.  The Episcopal Organization has spent tens of millions of dollars suing conservative Christians out of their meeting houses.

Since 2003, tens of thousands of Episcopalians have decided, “Screw it,” converted to various forms of Christianity and moved on; the Episcopalian decline has picked up speed.  So the Episcopal Organization, a niche “church” now, is finally free to introduce “theological” reasons for sanctified three-ways or whatever else the secular culture orders them to think next.

Fiskability?  D+ at best.  Kate had her moments; that “individual salvation is heresy” thing along with her “Paul and the demonically-possessed slave girl” riff.  But otherwise, she was just the usual Episcopalian sub-par intellect.

KATHY SHAIDLE MOURNS

Wednesday, October 21st, 2015 | Uncategorized | 51 Comments

Why?

Because last night, Canada kicked Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper out of office after almost ten years of “tumbling debt, falling taxes, low crime, [and] secure borders,” and elected Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, alias “The Dauphin,” alias the “ridiculous ballerina,” alias “Zoolander.”

In other words, Canada just elected its own Barack Obama. So much for the whole Canadian superiority thing.

As our own Gavin McInnes tweeted last night after I shudder to think how many drinks (and before a few more, I imagine):

 WTF? Justin Trudeau is the Prime Minister of Canada!? He has Down Syndrome. What the f___ have you idiots done!?!?!!?

Although that comparison might be unfair.  To Obama.

Justin Trudeau is often compared to Barack Obama, but, particularly in terms of both achievement and testosterone levels, Justin Trudeau makes Barack Obama look like Teddy Roosevelt.

No gloating from this part of North America (we still have 2008 to atone for).  I just pray that things don’t go too badly for you guys up North.

Related.  Another Canadian explains what happened.

GUESS WHO’S NOT GOING TO BE THE NEXT SPEAKER OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES?

Tuesday, October 20th, 2015 | Uncategorized | 27 Comments

Hint: his initials are PR.

VOX POPULI VOX DEI

Friday, October 16th, 2015 | Uncategorized | 74 Comments

Be honest.  How many of you were genuinely shocked by the following?

Some ordained ministers are throwing their support behind abortion providers. Last week, for example, clergy for Episcopal and Methodist churches were among religious leaders who gathered in Cleveland to bless an abortion clinic.

“I’m here today standing alongside my fellow clergymen and clergywomen to say: thank God for abortion providers,” said Rev. Harry Knox, president and CEO of Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) which supports abortion rights and what it refers to as “abortion care.”

And this should surprise no one at all.

The Very [Lesbian] Rev. Tracey Lind, dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, blessed the abortion clinic, saying, “Bless this building. May its walls stand strong against the onslaught of shame thrown at it. May it be a beacon of hope for those who need its services.”

It’s what they do, people.  Or as the Apostle Paul would have put it in Romans 12:2 if only he’d been intelligent enough.

And be conformed to this world: but be ye not transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Big ups to JB.

WORST-CASE SCENARIO

Monday, October 12th, 2015 | Uncategorized | 233 Comments

The following are the thoughts of Michael Brendan Dougherty (the guy might be Irish, I don’t know, you’d have to ask him).  Mr. Dale Price of Detroit, Michigan largely agrees with Dougherty’s views which is why I give them added weight:

In the next three weeks, I fully expect the leadership of my own One Holy and Apostolic Catholic Church to fall into apostasy, at the conclusion of the Synod on the Family that begins today in Rome. This is the outcome Pope Francis has shaped over the entirety of his pontificate, and particularly with his recent appointments. An event like this —heresy promulgated by the Pope and his bishops — is believed by most Catholics to be impossible. But they should be prepared for it anyway. This is not an ordinary religious conference, but one to be dreaded.

My prediction is that, after much fixing and machinations by its leaders, the Synod on the Family will declare that the Holy Spirit led them to a new understanding of the truth. The Synod’s leaders will adopt the position that those living in second marriages, irrespective of the status of their first marriage, should be admitted to Holy Communion. This is commonly called the “Kasper proposal” after its author, the German Cardinal Walter Kasper. The Synod will likely leave the details of a “penitential period of reflection” for these souls up to local bishops and parish priests The leading bishops will assure critics that in fact no doctrine has been changed, only a discipline — even if these will make no sense when considered together.

Certain theologians will cheer this as a radical break. They will declare this change of discipline to be what the critics alleged all along: a rupture within the tradition of the church, a change in doctrine. They will say that this glorious event proves the church is capable not only of developing its doctrines, but also of evolving them into something new, even something that contradicts the old. Those who had made themselves enemies of papal authority for decades will become a new kind of ultramontanist. The papacy that had been the final guardian of the faith will now become an ongoing oracle, dispensing new gospel teachings that our Lord and the Apostles missed.

The church’s teachings on contraception, homosexuality, and pre-marital sex must all be subjected to this evolution, in light of what we know about how people actually live. How they ought to live is a moot question.

Is all this going to happen? I hope and fervently pray that it doesn’t.  But if even some of it does, I also hope and fervently pray that any serious Catholics reading this know the service times of any local or within driving-distance Orthodox churches.

Because Episcopalianization is a journey, not a destination.

KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON

Sunday, October 11th, 2015 | Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Andy Brown thinks that homosexual bishops won’t hurt the Church of England:

Last week I was talking to a man who has some influence over the choice of bishops in the Church of England, and he said confidently that Dr Jeffrey John, the gay dean of St Albans, could never be a bishop because he could not function as a focus of unity in the diocese. In every part of the country, there are noisy and assertive evangelical groups who would make a production of marching out of the Church of England if he were appointed a bishop.

Do tell.  Andy writes for The Guardian so he’s almost always good for a larf.  But in the following paragraph, Andy manages a STUNNINGLY comedic, positively Griswoldian, howler which is as impressive as hell.  See if you can spot it.

It may be true that some will react like that. What’s wrong with this argument is not that it’s cowardly, so much as that it is stupid. It mistakes visibility for significance. The implicit assumption is that clergy who leave the church (and it is almost always clergy) on points of theological principle, and who announce that they are doing so, are somehow more real than all the more numerous laity who just quietly disappear without saying anything. None of the endlessly trumpeted schisms in the Church of England, over sexuality or gender, or anything else, have resulted in the loss of anything like a third of the church – yet that is what the completely orthodox boredom of the bench of bishops has managed over the last 30 years.

“Yet that is what the completely orthodox boredom of the bench of bishops has managed over the last 30 years.”  Right.  For the last five, six, seven, hell, let’s just go ahead and say fifty, decades, the Church of England’s house of bishops has consisted entirely of Anglican versions of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  And their Christian traditionalism is what finally drove away the English laity.

Took ‘em 500 years but they got it done.

I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news here, Andy, but for most of its history, the pointy hats of the Church of England have venerated one thing and only one.  The Church of England.  And Erastian “churches” tend to lose their appeal after a while.

Because if there’s no spiritual meat on those bones, what’s the point?

Then there’s the opposite side of Andy’s “argument.”  The Episcopal Organization is about as gay-friendly and culture-friendly a pseudo-Christian organization as it is possible to be.  But ever since Robbie got his pointy hat and hooked stick in 2003, TEO’s sharp decline has inexplicably picked up speed.

How do you explain that, Andy?

HEEBEE-JEEBEES

Wednesday, October 7th, 2015 | Uncategorized | 58 Comments

That shiver that went up your spine just now has an explanation.  The Episcopal Organization is thinking of completely revising its “prayer book.”  Tomorrow, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific is going to have a forum on this topic:

The 2015 General Convention called for a plan for revision of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer that will “utilize the riches of our Church’s liturgical, cultural, racial, generational, linguistic, gender

Be sure to stick around for the symposium entitled “Male Pronouns: Signs Of The Antichrist?”

and ethnic diversity in order to share common worship.” Join us to explore the possibilities and challenges for Prayer Book revision. What should change?

We should suck out the last Christian marrow from the bones of this carcass?

What should be added?

Readings from the Koran?

What should we keep?

Nothing?

We’ll consider how a new prayer book can enable the Episcopal Church to gather and form faithful disciples in the 21st century, and how our common worship can express and shape our participation in the mission of God.

Sigh.  Here’s a few comments from Episcopal Café that indicate how this thing’s probably going to go.

I yearn for gender inclusive language, using feminine images from Scripture. I love Creationist imagery, oddly enough, it opens my heart to our Creator. And if it opens an awareness of creation and our stewardship of it, all the better.

I would want to keep the elements of the Mass, like the epiklesis!!! I would like the Mass to be recognizable, just with more inclusive imagery.

Of course you do.  What have you got, Annie?

I think Prayer Book revision is happening from the ground up this time. The arc of the service remains – Praise; Readings and exposition; statement of belief; prayers, petitions, confession and absolution; Eucharist and prayers of thanksgiving; blessing and dismissal. But the contents of each section can be created from a wide variety of resources – rather than a new BCP – we need clergy and lay leaders trained in liturgy and why we do what we do and have done. The church I attend is full of people who are serious about their faith and want liturgies that ground them and speak to their world. Male centric and hierarchical language is fading away. The key though, is how to treasure and value what is good and nurturing at the same time.

There’s no I in Jesus, Annie.

To straightjacket a church into a consistent liturgy in every place is not consistent with the nature of God or our relationship to Him (or Her). You have to allow the Holy Spirit room to move, and pastors the flexibility to respond to the needs of their flock as they occur. Our church utilizes a published booklet for Sunday Sung Mass which allows us to derive our liturgy and music from a wide variety of sources, Roman, Anglican, Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist and others. We are a place open to the Holy Spirit to respond to the pastoral needs of our people.

Seems to me that the Holy Spirit can do all of that any time He wants to, Dave.

IRRELEVANCE

Saturday, October 3rd, 2015 | Uncategorized | 48 Comments

Welcome to my world:

A record 94,610,000 Americans were not in the American labor force last month — an increase of 579,000 from August — and the labor force participation rate reached its lowest point in 38 years, with 62.4 percent of the U.S. population either holding a job or actively seeking one.

Yeah, I’ve pretty much given up.  And pace John,  I don’t blame this on Obama.  At the end of this month, I’m going to be 60 so I don’t like my chances of finding something new any time soon.

So I’m working my way through what the old man left me when he died.  All it has to do is last me another two years.  Then I can officially go into “semi-retirement” and we’ll see what we’ll see.

DEAR CHRISTIANS

Friday, October 2nd, 2015 | Uncategorized | 74 Comments

Get used to it and be ready.  Take the hit if you have to (there are way worse ways to die).  Because this is going to happen more and more often:

A gunman singled out Christians, telling them they would see God in “one second,” during a rampage at an Oregon college Thursday that left at least nine innocent people dead and several more wounded, survivors and authorities said.

“[He started] asking people one by one what their religion was. ‘Are you a Christian?’ he would ask them, and if you’re a Christian, stand up. And they would stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you are going to see God in just about one second.’ And then he shot and killed them,” Stacy Boylen, whose daughter was wounded at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., told CNN.

RELEVANCE-FEST, 2016

Wednesday, September 30th, 2015 | Uncategorized | 22 Comments

So far, Justin Welby’s desperate and, well, kind of pathetic attempt to remain an Important World Religious Figure^TM seems to be on track:

REMEMBER THOSE GLORIOUS DAYS WHEN THE TEA PARTY WAS DEAD?

Saturday, September 26th, 2015 | Uncategorized | 116 Comments

Me neither:

Speaker John A. Boehner, an Ohio barkeeper’s son who rode a conservative wave to one of the highest positions in government, said Friday he would relinquish his gavel and resign from Congress, undone by the very Republicans who swept him into power.

Fond of saying “I’m a regular guy with a big job,” Mr. Boehner struggled almost from the moment he became speaker in 2011 to manage the challenges of divided government while holding together his fractious and increasingly conservative Republican members.

The tension has spilled over into the race for the Republican presidential nomination, in which several candidates have openly derided Republican leaders in Congress like Mr. Boehner. The loud and potent voices in the House largely reflect the steady shift of power in the Republican Party base from places like Mr. Boehner’s suburban Cincinnati district to areas that are largely Southern, rural and white.

There you go.

In recent weeks, there have been stories all over the Internet about how Boehner’s Speakership was under threat from conservative Republicans.  So I’m guessing that the threat was real.

It was repeatedly pointed out that even if this threat had been pushed through, Boehner could have attracted enough Republican votes along with enough Democratic votes to keep the Big Gavel.  But what would he have gained?

A Speakership in which Republicans detested him while Democrats basically controlled him?  It’s not too tough to see why Boehner decided to call it a day.

PANDORA’S BOX

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015 | Uncategorized | 72 Comments

Who or what killed the Anglican Communion?  James Pike?  Women’s ordination?  John Shelby Spong?  Gene Robinson?  Same-sex “marriage?”  Rowan Williams?  All of the above?  Giles Fraser suggests an interesting new candidate.  The Internet:

In the end, it was probably Tim Berners-Lee that did for the Anglican communion. And yet he may also be exactly the right person to show the church how to put itself back together again. But more of that in a moment. The archbishop of Canterbury has just announced a final throw of the dice to keep the family together. He plans a looser structure – not quite a divorce, but “sleeping in separate bedrooms”. It’s the right way forward. But it doesn’t go far enough.

How did the Internet do that?  Essentially, it killed the Anglican spin machine.

But when the soldiers finally withdrew from the empire and the colonial civil service shrank back to Westminster, so local Anglican churches began to develop in their own independent ways, each adopting local custom and absorbing the values of the surrounding culture. Over the decades, as congregations swelled, few people noticed that the Anglican family was drifting further apart. Until, that is, the C of E nearly appointed a gay bishop in 2003. And then all hell broke loose – with English conservatives, fearing they were about to lose the gay argument back home, cleverly re-inventing the C of E as part of the worldwide communion in which they form a natural majority.

But it was the world wide web that finally did for global ecclesiastical solidarity. Through the web, different churches could finally experience each other’s theology first hand. We could read their sermons and church pronouncements. And they could read ours. And we didn’t like what we saw. Western liberals saw anti-gay bigotry. African conservatives saw an abandonment of the traditional gospel. We had become strangers to each other. No, worse than that: we realised we were fighting on very different sides. And, however hard they tried (and Rowan Williams really did) the men in mitres could not put Humpty together again.

I agree with Fraser here; in fact, I’ve believed this for over a decade.  Anglicans used to be able to explain away guys like Pike or Spong or innovations like women’s ordination.

That’s just Pike or Spong.  Individual weirdo bishops with no influence on the national church.  Hell, most of us Episcopal bishops think Jim and Jack are whack jobs.  As far as women’s ordination is concerned, that involves no change whatsoever in our fundamental doctrine, we’re still just as Christian as you are.

Trust us.

Along comes the Internet and instantly Anglicans all over the world know that they’re being lied to.  Anglican web sites like Stand Firm started springing up all over the place.  Other sites, like this one, began covering the Anglican controversy full-time.  Then there was Binky’s original site, the greatest Anglican news aggregator of all time, where all these sites came together, shared links and learned from one another.

And, in both posts and comments, they started asking questions that Lambeth Palace, Church House or Church Center couldn’t answer without giving the game away.  And eventually, the cherry on the banana split, if you like, they revealed two things that Big Anglicanism desperately needed to keep secret.

Western liberal Anglican scorn and contempt for the Third World.  And, no matter their insistent comments about “local context,” the crystal-clear and unshakeable resolve that the Western liberal view would eventually have to prevail.

Which is why none of the following is ever going to happen.

But just as Berners-Lee’s great invention opened the church up to its own divisions, so it can provide a model for a more robust ecclesiology. For the great breakthrough that Berners-Lee made at Cern in 1989 was the creation of hypertext, connections that share information horizontally, between users, without having to pass through some central command and control. It was the ultimate Reformation, not just (as it were) the abolition of the pope – but the abolition of the whole need for a hierarchical and centralised authority. This is how the church should develop – locally based, and with a crisscrossing network of national and international connections where solidarity is helpful and required. Yes, a bit like the letters of St Paul, but not so bossy.

I’m a bit of a Trotskyist when it comes to the Reformation: I believe in continual revolution. But the hypertext church – connected horizontally, not vertically – is not some future possibility. It is a present reality. Most of us in parishes just get on with our work, forming alliances, independent of the rows going on up in Lambeth Palace. In truth, they don’t impinge on us all that much. The problem is not with the church on the ground. The problem is with the long, fictional notion of authority by which we are all supposed to be connected. And the archbishop himself knows it too: it’s not our links to him that make us a family, it’s our partnership in the gospel.

Forget it.  You and I don’t speak the same language any more.  Terms like “God,” “Jesus Christ” and “Holy Spirit” don’t mean the same thing to you that they mean to me.  Since 2003, the Internet’s made that abundantly clear.

Humpty-Dumpty and all that, G.

DEAREST MUSLIMS

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015 | Uncategorized | 22 Comments

This is the reason (well, one of them) why we don’t like you:

Dear City council of Munich,

I am writing this letter to bring to your attention something that I and many Muslims believe is unfair and requires attention.

I would like to inform you that the Oktoberfest is an Intolerant and Anti-Islamic event. We tried to ignore the event, but there too many Un-Islamic acts done at the Oktoberfest. Such as alcohol consumption, public nudity etc.

We understand that the Oktoberfest is a yearly German tradition, but we, Muslims, can not tolerate this Un-Islamic event, because it offends us and all Muslims on the earth.

We are requesting the immediate cancellation of the upcoming Oktoberfest event.

We also believe that the Oktoberfest might also offend all the Muslim refugees coming from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. The cancellation of the Oktoberfest event will help refugees not to forget their Islamic history. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Morad Almuradi