Replace phrases that resonate with meaning with politically correct twaddle.
For example, the Common English Bible (CEB) renders “Son of Man” “Human One” in the interests of removing exclusive language.
If that were not enough to recommend avoiding the CEB, the Anglican Church of Canada is considering adding it to its list of approved translations.
From here:
A Christian prayer by a city councillor at a City of Saskatoon volunteer appreciation dinner discriminated against non-Christians, says a volunteer who intends to complain to the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission.
Ashu Solo, a member of the city’s cultural diversity and race relations committee, was among the guests at the dinner Wednesday, where Coun. Randy Donauer said a blessing over the food in which he mentioned Jesus and ended with “amen.”
“It made me feel like a second-class citizen. It makes you feel excluded,” said Solo, who is an atheist.
What can one possibly say to an atheist who feels excluded by prayer? A number of things spring to mind, but I will confine myself to this: Good.
Chuck Colson’s book Born Again was among the first books I read as a new Christian in 1978 and Prison Fellowship was the inspiration for my church’s visits to a local youth prison.
Chuck Colson’s efforts to shore up the crumbling bulwarks of public Christianity that hold back the darkness and chaos threatening to engulf what is left of Western Civilisation are inestimable. He will be sorely missed.
From here:
LANSDOWNE, Va., April 21, 2012— Evangelical Christianity lost one of its most eloquent and influential voices today with the death of Charles W. “Chuck” Colson. The Prison Fellowship and Colson Center for Christian Worldview founder died at 3:12 p.m. on Saturday from complications resulting from a brain hemorrhage. Colson was 80.
A Watergate figure who emerged from the country’s worst political scandal, a vocal Christian leader and a champion for prison ministry, Colson spent the last years of his life in the dual role of leading Prison Fellowship, the world’s largest outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families, and the Colson Center, a teaching and training center focused on Christian worldview thought and application.
Colson was speaking at a Colson Center conference when he was overcome by dizziness. Quickly surrounded by friends and staff, Colson was sent to the Fairfax Inova Hospital in Fairfax, Virginia. On March 31, he underwent two hours of surgery to remove a pool of clotted blood on the surface of his brain. At times, Chuck showed encouraging indicators of a possible recovery, but his health took a decided turn, and he went to be with the Lord. His wife, Patty, and the family were with him in the last moments before he entered eternity.
Revered by his friends and supporters, Colson won the respect of those who disagreed with his religious and political views thanks to his tireless work on behalf of prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families. Colson maintained that the greatest joy in life for him was to see those “living monuments” to God’s grace: Prisoners transformed by the love of Jesus Christ. And thanks to the work of Colson and Prison Fellowship volunteers across the country, there are thousands of those living monuments among us today.
The argument is: “sex is a normal activity in a motel room and should be covered, because the woman was on a work trip”. No-one seems to be perturbed by the fact that taxpayers are not only paying for the woman to have a place to copulate but are also paying for the consequences of her going at it too vigorously.
None of this would have happened if she had been wearing a hard-hat.
From the CBC:
The court said the woman, whose name hasn’t been released, is entitled to compensation for facial and psychological injuries suffered when a light fixture fell off the wall in her motel room in November 2007, and landed on the bed she was occupying at the time with a male friend.
She suffered injuries to her nose, mouth and a tooth from the glass light hitting her face, the BBC reported. Her lawyer argued that sex is a normal activity in a motel room and should be covered, because the woman was on a work trip.
“If the applicant had been injured while playing a game of cards in her motel room, she would have been entitled to compensation,” Nicholas said.
An obvious choice for a sermon topic on Good Friday: I don’t know why no-one had thought of it before. It must be because the Anglican Church is not obsessed with homosexuality – no, really, it isn’t. If it were, it would have made the obvious connection that Jesus married the apostle John in a secret ceremony just before the last supper. And it hasn’t; not yet.
From here:
Preaching on Good Friday on the last words of Jesus as he was being executed makes great spiritual demands on the preacher. The Jesuits began this tradition. Many Anglican churches adopted it. Faced with this privilege in New Zealand’s capital city, Wellington, my second home, I was painfully aware of the context, a church deeply divided worldwide over issues of gender and sexuality. Suffering was my theme. I felt I could not escape the suffering of gay and lesbian people at the hands of the church, over many centuries.
Was that divisive issue a subject for Good Friday? For the first time in my ministry I felt it had to be. Those last words of Jesus would not let me escape. “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, ‘Woman behold your son!’ Then he said to the disciple. ‘Behold your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.”
That disciple was John whom Jesus, the gospels affirm, loved in a special way. All the other disciples had fled in fear. Three women but only one man had the courage to go with Jesus to his execution. That man clearly had a unique place in the affection of Jesus. In all classic depictions of the Last Supper, a favourite subject of Christian art, John is next to Jesus, very often his head resting on Jesus’s breast. Dying, Jesus asks John to look after his mother and asks his mother to accept John as her son. John takes Mary home. John becomes unmistakably part of Jesus’s family.
Jesus was a Hebrew rabbi. Unusually, he was unmarried. The idea that he had a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene is the stuff of fiction, based on no biblical evidence. The evidence, on the other hand, that he may have been what we today call gay is very strong. But even gay rights campaigners in the church have been reluctant to suggest it. A significant exception was Hugh Montefiore, bishop of Birmingham and a convert from a prominent Jewish family. He dared to suggest that possibility and was met with disdain, as though he were simply out to shock.
After much reflection and with certainly no wish to shock, I felt I was left with no option but to suggest, for the first time in half a century of my Anglican priesthood, that Jesus may well have been homosexual. Had he been devoid of sexuality, he would not have been truly human. To believe that would be heretical.
Heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual: Jesus could have been any of these. There can be no certainty which. The homosexual option simply seems the most likely. The intimate relationship with the beloved disciple points in that direction. It would be so interpreted in any person today. Although there is no rabbinic tradition of celibacy, Jesus could well have chosen to refrain from sexual activity, whether he was gay or not. Many Christians will wish to assume it, but I see no theological need to. The physical expression of faithful love is godly. To suggest otherwise is to buy into a kind of puritanism that has long tainted the churches.
All that, I felt deeply, had to be addressed on Good Friday. I saw it as an act of penitence for the suffering and persecution of homosexual people that still persists in many parts of the church.
“An agreement in principle” has been reached between the Diocese of Niagara and the three parishes that left the diocese in 2008. This article (my emphasis) chronicles the experiences of the Church of one of them, the Good Shepherd in St. Catharines.
Anglican Diocese of Niagara Archdeacon Michael Patterson said the situation has been difficult for all sides and he is looking forward to its conclusion. An agreement in principle has been reached between the two parties, and all that’s required are signatures.
The diocese has not determined what it will do with the church building on Granthoam, Former members of the Good Shepherd parish who disagreed with the split have moved to other congregations in the city, he said.
“They have been patient and waiting upon outcomes to determine what would happen, generations of people who were members of that community, (who) hope upon hope that we’ll be able to re-ignite the community.”
But Patterson said that given the climate of church closures, amalgamations and declining attendance, the diocese cannot commit to re-opening the church.
Archdeacon Michael Patterson admits that the diocese has no real use for the building in St. Catharines; the same would go for St. Hilda’s since there is no congregation eagerly awaiting the return of the diocese there either.
This is at odds with a letter sent to the congregation of St. Hilda’s by Bishops Michael Bird and Ralph Spence in 2008 where they declared their determination to keep the church doors open come what may:
The doors probably will remain open – for the real estate agents and their prospective buyers.
All a man has to do is declare himself a woman and, hey presto, he is one – in Ontario at least.
The worrying thing about this is that when there is a long queue for the ladies toilets, enterprising females can, by fiat, become temporary men and use the men’s toilets.
From here:
Genital surgery isn’t required for a man to be legally recognized as a woman, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal says.
Under current law, anyone who wants a change in sex designation on his or her birth certificate must first produce a certificate signed by two medical practitioners affirming that “transsexual surgery” was carried out.
In a decision issued on April 11, the human rights tribunal said the Ontario government must now drop that requirement.
The diocese has been busy selling churches in order to replenish its dwindling coffers.
St. John the Divine is now a Taoist temple and in place of the altar is a painted dome representing general Guan-Gong who was deified and is worshipped by those who attend the temple.
So nothing much has changed.
From here:
What was once the St. John the Divine Anglican Church at 3426 Smith Ave. in west Burnaby was a tired-looking, A-framed structure with glass blocks next to the main entrance.
After renovations by the Chinese Taoism Kuan-Kung Association in Canada, which purchased the property in the fall of 2010, the building has been transformed. It retains the original structure but the front wall has been replaced with large panes of glass, with a natural-coloured wooden archway flanking the new entrance.
The property had sat vacant for over a year and the ultra-modern design was chosen after the association spoke with neighbours about what they wanted to see, said project manager Kevin Chen. The association wanted to put its own stamp on the building while recognizing its past as a Christian church by not completely changing the look of the structure.
Inside, where the altar once stood, a full-height elliptical dome has been added and a mural painted on it.
Now known as the Tian-Jin Temple, it is the first Taoist temple in Canada to worship Guan-Gong, an ancient general.
Correction: as a commenter pointed out, the church was in the Diocese of New Westminster, not the Diocese of B.C.
According to the Anglican Journal, we haven’t been doing enough to look after the insect population – or, as I expect it will soon be called, the Insect Community.
Since there 900,000 varieties of insect representing 80 percent of the world’s species and around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual insects currently roaming the planet, it seems to me that they are managing quite well without our help.
In fact, there are too many insects by far; insectophobia be damned, it’s time stock up on Raid and indulge in a little insect cleansing.
The Anglican Communion’s fifth mark of mission urges us to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth and all its forms. This is an issue that greatly concerns Dr. Stephen Scharper, an associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Environment, department of the study of religion and department of anthropology.
In his promotion of planetary stewardship, the Connecticut-born expert in ecological theology often goes back to U.S. marine biologist Rachel Carson and her landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring. “This was a turning point in the environmental movement,” he says. Carson challenged the modern world’s domineering approach to nature and humankind’s need to control everything in it, especially insects, with increasingly potent chemicals.
‘This was a question of worldview as much as a question of science and data,” says Scharper. “What Carson helped people see was that this world view was at odds with the growing ecological understanding of integration and webs of relationships…” In other words, we must respect even with the creepers and crawlers of the earth.
[…]
Scharper, however, sees Carson’s wakeup call as an invitation to the Christian imagination and community to embrace this worldview of integration with creation and a refusal to adopt a view of control and capitalistic exploitation. “The invitation is to reflect on a larger Christian worldview that embraces creation in a radical relationship,” he says.
The headline blares: Women in chance sex encounters can receive the morning-after pill by courier.
Much as it find it revolting, at least I understand the concept of the convenience of having an abortifacient delivered to your door after filling out an online form. What mystifies me is the mechanics of a “chance sex encounter”. How does it work? With absolutely no volition on the part of the participants, does one accidentally bump into a person on the street, fall over and, by chance lose one’s underpants, insert one’s you-know-what into her you-know-what until there are fireworks and an offspring is conceived?
That must be it. I suppose it could happen to anyone.