Will be closed for Good Friday Earth Day.
The Anglican Journal Office
1
Rowan Williams wants compulsory virtue
What do Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot and Rowan Williams have in common? They all believed – or believe in Rowan’s case – that it is possible to “re-educate” the wealthy, by compelling them to perform menial tasks.
From here:
Bankers, politicians and newspaper editors should be legally required to spend a couple of hours every year working with the poor and needy to remind them of the purpose of their power and wealth, the archbishop of Canterbury has suggested.
He made the comments on Maundy Thursday, the day of the Last Supper when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and when the British monarch honours deserving subjects.
In his contribution to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day slot, Dr Rowan Williams asked: “What about having a new law that made all cabinet members and leaders of political parties, editors of national papers and the hundred most successful financiers in the UK spend a couple of hours every year serving dinners in a primary school on a council estate?
“Or cleaning bathrooms in a residential home? Walking around the streets of a busy town at night as a street pastor, ready to pick up and absorb something of the chaos and human mess you’ll find there, especially among young people?”
I am all for society’s privileged few freely choosing to help those less well-off than themselves – an ideal, I admit, which I find easier to discuss than practice. To remove, as Rowan suggests, the free choice component of the activity is to remove its virtue. You cannot compel goodness – it comes from within: the best the state can do is restrain evil.
When Jesus said radically upsetting things like “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” and “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment”, he did so because good and evil emanate from the human heart: being good produces good deeds, not vice-versa.
Baby Joseph Maraachli goes home
From here: 
Baby Joseph Maraachli was released from SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center and flew back to Canada with his family on Thursday morning.
The infant has a progressive neurological disease and received a tracheotomy on March 21 at the St. Louis hospital.
The tracheotomy, which creates an opening into Joseph’s windpipe through an incision in his neck, was a success, said Dr. Robert Wilmott, Chief of Pediatrics for SSM Cardinal Glennon and Saint Louis University School of Medicine.
“Joseph has been breathing on his own, without the aid of a mechanical ventilator, for more than a week,” Wilmott said. “By providing him with this common palliative procedure, we’ve given Joseph the chance to go home and be with his family after spending so much of his young life in the hospital.”
The London Health Sciences Centre had planned, against the parents wishes, to remove baby Joseph’s breathing tube on February 22nd; this would have caused him to choke to death.
The baby will probably still die of his disease, but he will die at home with parents who love him.
He has been given the gift of life – a short life perhaps, but life, nevertheless: just like the rest of us.
Pondering crimes against the planet
I’m not but the Anglican Journal is:
The almost magical confluence of Good Friday and Earth Day on Apr. 22 presents an opportunity for Christian environmentalists to ponder humankind’s crimes against the planet. And at this time of penitence, sacrifice and redemption, to reflect on ways to reverse our unremitting exploitation of the created world….
In his Good Friday reflection, Lind links our environmental trespasses to our role in the crucifixion. “In our indifference, in our callous disregard for the needs of all living beings, we have put the Earth upon the Cross,” he writes. “Today is the day for us to recognize our guilt in perpetuating injustice against our partners in Creation and confess it.”
A magical confluence of environmental hocus-pocus and redemptionless, Earth Day self-flagellation, brought to you by your partner in poppycock, the Anglican Church of Canada.
Rowan Williams in the House of Love
From here.
Why dress like a sausage?
To prevent body heat loss, shaking, swaying and an upset in the body’s equilibrium. It only works for women, though. 
From here:
Veil is a legitimate right of a woman to protect her modesty as per Qur’anic and Hadith injections. Apart from this, there are a number of health and moral benefits that wearing the veil can provide. Many behavioral science studies that suggest that the veil is the best attire for women.
Protecting the head is very important from a health perspective. Results of medical tests show that 40-60 percent of body heat is lost through the head, so persons wearing head coverings during cold months are protected about fifty-percent more than those who do not. Wind is said to cause sudden changes within the body and shaking, swaying and other movements that potentially upset the body’s equilibrium; thus, creating bad health.
Hell Pizza
Hell Pizza is running a silly advertisement:
This has upset the Anglican Church:
Hell Pizza, a chain in New Zealand, has angered the Anglican Church over its new ad comparing its limited time offer of hot cross buns, which is decorated with a Satanist symbol, to Jesus.
But St. Matthews Anglican church is not in the least perturbed and is displaying its own version:
Auckland Anglican church, St Matthews in the City, has put up a new billboard similar to the pizza outlets, advertising a hot cross bun with a pentagram symbol.
It says “Hell no, we’re not giving up pizza for lent”.
Priest in charge Clay Nelson says it’s about taking the mickey out of those Christians who complain about Hell Pizza’s “clever” ads.
He says people shouldn’t take things so seriously and go to war with secular society which doesn’t do Christianity any good.
If St. Matthews doesn’t take Hell seriously, what, I wonder, does it take seriously? Progressive Christianity, apparently, and the only thing it takes seriously is the act of not taking Christianity seriously.
All in the name of Art
Andres Serrano is the artist responsible for the notorious Piss Christ, a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine.
Christians aren’t entirely happy about this and the rotten spoilsports will keep trying to destroy it. The latest attempt occurred on Palm Sunday with a bunch of intolerant Christians attacking the exhibit with a hammer.
I’m all for free speech, so in a spirit of tolerance, artistic licence and love of orange, rather than spoil the fun by being a philistine, I have my own contribution to offer.
I call it Piss Serrano – the artist and his girlfriend submerged in the same fluid. Still his fluid.
Reasonably priced prints can be ordered by emailing me from the Contact Page.
Enjoy.
UN to debate the rights of Mother Earth
From here:
United Nations diplomats on Wednesday will set aside pressing issues of international peace and security to devote an entire day debating the rights of “Mother Earth.”
A bloc of mostly socialist governments lead by Bolivia have put the issue on the General Assembly agenda to discuss the creation of a U.N. treaty that would grant the same rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Mother Nature.
Treaty supporters want the establishment of legal systems to maintain balance between human rights and what they perceive as the inalienable rights of other members of the Earth community — plants, animals, and terrain.
This sheds a whole new light on the sticks of asparagus whose rights I trampled by thoughtlessly ingesting them for lunch.
What, one wonders, is this really all about? Read on:
Communities and environmental activists would be given more legal power to monitor and control industries and development to ensure harmony between humans and nature. Though the United States and other Western governments are supportive of sustainable development, some see the upcoming event, “Harmony with Nature,” as political grandstanding — an attempt to blame environmental degradation and climate change on capitalism.
How unusual! A loose consortium of despot infested banana republics wants to take pot-shots at Western capitalism.
The mad hatters in the Anglican Church are playing their part too, of course.
A 70 day prison sentence for burning a Koran
Not in Saudi Arabia – in Carlisle!
From here:
A former soldier has been sentenced to 70 days in prison for setting fire to a copy of Muslim holy book the Koran in the centre of Carlisle.
Andrew Ryan had previously admitted religiously aggravated harassment and theft of a Koran from a library.
Ryan was exercising a form of free speech – his version of Fatwa 40378 – a commodity that is evidently in short supply in the politically correct madhouse that has become the UK.
As a Christian, I can’t bring myself to endorse the deliberate desecration of another religion’s paraphernalia – but I’m finding that increasingly difficult to say with conviction.
A police inspector sagely noted:
After sentencing, Insp Paul Marshall, of Cumbria Police, said: “This incident was highly unusual for Cumbria as we have such low levels of hate crime in the county.”
This leads one to speculate on whether Inspector Marshall would recognise a “hate crime” – which surely has to involve someone being injured as opposed to merely offended – if it paraded itself in front of him and took up lodging in his helmet.