It is not a church, strictly speaking, but an aggregation of 44 national or regional churches claiming 80 million believers in all. In theory, its leaders have dealt with conflict by trying to follow the via media, the middle way between extremes. In practice, this means that extremes coexist, jostling each other. Sunday service can feature brilliantined choirboys, or an organist, or dancing women in kente cloth. C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot were Anglicans; so are George and Barbara Bush. The Episcopal Church has a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, as its presiding bishop, while the Church of England has no women bishops at all. If this church cannot find a way forward on homosexuality, then none can—and the clash between gays and Christians over marriage and the like may go on for much of the millennium.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Velvet Reformation
The Atlantic Monthly looks at the Anglican Communion and Rowan Williams in the March issue. You can read the cover story online here. I'm curious to know what you think.
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A quiet day here. So I don't feel bad about posting one of my usual off-topic comments.
Today, the Los Angeles Times had a story giving more background about the gay student in Ventura killed by a classmate a year ago -- Details in gay student's slaying are revealed in prosecution brief.
The story says in part:
***
Lawrence "Larry" King wasn't sexually harassing fellow eighth-grade student Brandon McInerney in the weeks leading up to King's shooting death, prosecutors contend in court documents.
McInerney was the aggressor, teasing the effeminate King for weeks and vowing to "get a gun and shoot" him, according to a prosecution brief. Multiple students provided accounts of a growing hostility between the two boys, the document shows.
Their dispute ended in tragedy a year ago today when McInerney allegedly armed himself with a .22-caliber revolver and shot King in the back of the head twice in an Oxnard classroom as the school day was beginning.
"In the days before the shooting, the defendant tried to enlist others to administer a beating to Larry," Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox wrote in a "statement of facts" filed with the brief. "When that failed for lack of interest, he decided to kill Larry."
...
Witnesses said King was usually not the aggressor. But after months of teasing by McInerney and other male students who called him "faggot," he had began to retort, according to prosecutors.
The day before the shooting, the two boys were bickering during seventh period. When King left, a student witness said that McInerney commented, "I'm going to shoot him."
Just after that class, another student heard King say "I love you" to McInerney as they passed in a hallway. The same student then heard McInerney say he was "going to get a gun and shoot" King, according to prosecutors.
A few minutes later, prosecutors allege, McInerney told one of King's friends: "Say goodbye to your friend Larry because you're never going to see him again."
The prosecution brief also reveals for the first time that McInerney was familiar with firearms, and that he had used that particular weapon in the past during target shooting with his family.
Investigators found a training video in his possession titled "Shooting in Realistic Environments," as well as skinhead and neo-Nazi books and similar writings from the Internet, prosecutors wrote.
***
If the prosecutor is right, this wasn't remotely a crime of passion based on someone supposedly losing his mind because someone made a same-sex pass at him. This was cold-blooded, premediated murder.
Oh, yes, Primrose, I read that. Yes, this is premeditated murder. But as Mike Huckabee says, GLBTs don't rise to the "vicitim" status of real civil rights causes.
Right.
On-topic (and cross-posted to The Daily Episcopalian/The Lead):
Rowan Cantuar: The ordination of Gene Robinson had effects that were extremely divisive because people elsewhere felt it committed them to a position they had not arrived at themselves.
What is the ABC's responsibility to disabuse "people elsewhere" of this irrational feeling? Especially when it is the feeling, NOT the fact of +Gene's consecration in New Hampshire, which is divisive?
I'm really sick and tired of the "feelings" of a few men-in-purple halfway across the globe, interfering w/ my rights/rites as Episcopalian, right where I live.
If the ABC is to continue as "first among equals", world-wide, I don't think it's too much to ask, that he be a presence for COMMON SENSE (not a delusion-enabler!) among his equals.
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