A Sarabande by J. S. Bach that I found while digging through a pile of old sheet music:
Sarabande
Reply
Rowan Williams tries to make the best of it
As the Anglican empire crumbles around him, Rowan Williams wants to “work together” with Rome to assist in its further dismemberment; the good news is that efforts towards “ecumenism” and “ARCIC” can continue unabated – not that anyone really cares.
Hats off to Rowan, though, for being able to say that this move by the Vatican should not “in any sense be seen as a commentary on Anglican problems”; not many could pull that off with a straight face.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itIF0k-nluo]
The Episcopal Church has a promotion
TEC has issued a characteristically vague statement in response to the Vatican’s recent overtures to disaffected Anglicans.
The last sentence struck me as particularly revealing since it unwittingly portrays the confusion of TEC’s view of its mission:
The Episcopal Church is a member of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and works together with other Provinces and with our ecumenical and interfaith partners to promote God’s reign on earth.
God does reign on earth, with or without promotion from TEC. What Jesus asks of TEC is in the Great Commission:
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
TEC is too busy promoting its own reign on earth to bother with this.
Senior IBM VP, Bob Moffat arrested for insider trading
I have worked in large corporations for the last 43 years; one of them was IBM. The main thing I have learnt is, as Jeremiah says, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? – Jer 17:9.
Apparently there has been financial hanky-panky at the most senior levels of IBM:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – It isn’t often that big blue gets a black eye.
But Friday IBM , the leading U.S. technology firm known for its conservative management, found itself entangled in the largest ever hedge fund insider-trading scheme involving Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam.
Robert Moffat, senior vice president and head of IBM’s systems and technology group was named as a defendant. Executives at leading chipmaker Intel Corp and management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. were also implicated.
At IBM, when the mighty fall, they are not put on display for public excoriation as an example to plebeians who might otherwise be tempted to follow in the footsteps of their putative betters: instead, they disappear. An attempt to look up Bob Moffat at IBM yields: The biography you tried to access does not exist. He has been cast into outer darkness.
Moffat had been with IBM since 1978, so he was a true blue IBMer; clearly he didn’t take the yearly pledge of obedience to IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines very seriously, though. In recent years his popularity with the rank and file at IBM has not been high since he was the architect of numerous purges and of moving North American jobs to India, Brazil, Argentina – anywhere where labour is cheap. IBM euphemistically calls this “Global Resourcing” – GR for short.
Unsurprisingly, when the news of Moffat’s arrest was made public, there were reports of cheering employees in IBM buildings all over North America. I confined myself to a smile.
See amid the winter’s snow
arranged by John W. Duarte, played by me on a Martin OM-21 special:
Anglican justice for the hungry but not the unborn
The Anglican Journal points out that:
Failure by governments and international institutions to ensure people have access to food means that for the first time more than 1 billion people are undernourished, according to a coalition of religious, human rights and development groups.
Much of the Anglican Church of Canada’s effort to feed the hungry is devoted to parading a few bedraggled zealots at Queen’s Park and spending money on full page newspaper ads imploring the government or somebody – anybody – to do something about poverty; something that doesn’t affect the $100K per year earned by the average bishop.
Co-incidentally, Lifesite News reports that 1 billion abortions have been performed worldwide. I am still waiting for a definitive and clear condemnation of this from the Anglican establishment; I fear it will be a long wait.
Doing Funerals “My Way”
Funerals for the lost:
A LEADING Tunbridge Wells clergyman has been branded “insensitive” after unleashing a scathing attack on modern funerals.
Father Ed Tomlinson, of St Barnabas’ Church, Quarry Road, said he had better ways of spending his time than at crematorium services where the dead were “led in by the tunes of Tina Turner…and sent into the furnace with ‘I Did It My Way’ blaring out across the speakers”.
The vicar whose blogsite rants attract a cult following, said the widespread fashion for “a poem from nan combined with a saccharine message from a pop star before being popped in the oven” left him feeling like an unwanted guest at many funerals.
He added: “I have… stood at the ‘crem’ like a lemon, wondering why on earth I am present.”
There was a time when even non-believers craved the aesthetics of the Church at the important moments of their lives: marriages and funerals. Now, it seems, all that is left is the expectation that a tame vicar will do the honours while trite secularisms-du-jour are injected into the ceremony. Congratulations to Father Ed for speaking his mind.
Toronto to host 2014 homosexual World Pride event
It appears that Toronto won its bid:
An international celebration of gay rights will be held in Toronto in 2014.
The city has been chosen to host World Pride, a statement on the website of the Pride Toronto organization announced Sunday.
World Pride, which includes a parade, festivals and cultural activities, promotes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues on the international stage.
One wonders what there is to celebrate: an onslaught of tourists and money, I suppose – and the enshrinement of buggery as a socially acceptable diversion.
Richard Dawkins and his merry band of bigots
English eccentricity is a time-honoured and necessary part of what used to make Britain such a likeable culture. Patrick Moore, whose TV programme The Sky at Night I enjoyed many years ago, is a typical eccentric: he is an astronomer who was a member of the Flat Earth Society.
This impulse for self-mocking comes from a gentler time when people who held strong opinions (Patrick Moore doesn’t believe the earth is flat) still had a sense of humour. Oh that Dawkins and his ilk were as civilised. Here is a typical Dawkinism:
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).
Now the assertions of young-earth Creationism may have the appearance of being scientifically untenable – and I don’t subscribe to them – but Dawkins consistently lumps anyone who questions evolution’s dogma into one category, that of mindless folly.
Dawkins enthusiasts take their cue from their master:
By the way, the reason biologists ridicule and insult creationists is because they are too lazy to learn anything, and too bloody stupid to understand anything.
That’s funny that a believer in magical creation would call the basic facts of evolution “pseudo-scientific nonsense”. You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.
Humourless, arrogant, unreasonable, tedious and bigoted.
For John Shelby Spong the listening process is over
From Ruth Gledhill’s blog; apparently Spong has written a new book whose theme is “I will not listen”:
‘I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.”
….
‘I will no longer take the time to refute the unlearned and undocumentable claims of certain world religious leaders who call homosexuality “deviant.” I will no longer listen to that pious sentimentality that certain Christian leaders continue to employ, which suggests some version of that strange and overtly dishonest phrase that “we love the sinner but hate the sin.” That statement is, I have concluded, nothing more than a self-serving lie designed to cover the fact that these people hate homosexual persons and fear homosexuality itself, but somehow know that hatred is incompatible with the Christ they claim to profess, so they adopt this face-saving and absolutely false statement.
….
‘The world has moved on, leaving these elements of the Christian Church that cannot adjust to new knowledge or a new consciousness lost in a sea of their own irrelevance. They no longer talk to anyone but themselves. I will no longer seek to slow down the witness to inclusiveness by pretending that there is some middle ground between prejudice and oppression. There isn’t.’
….
‘I will particularly ignore those members of my own Episcopal Church who seek to break away from this body to form a “new church,” claiming that this new and bigoted instrument alone now represents the Anglican Communion. Such a new ecclesiastical body is designed to allow these pathetic human beings, who are so deeply locked into a world that no longer exists, to form a community in which they can continue to hate gay people, distort gay people with their hopeless rhetoric and to be part of a religious fellowship in which they can continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives.’
…
In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by “fair-minded” channels that seek to give “both sides” of this issue “equal time.” I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people. There is no way that justice for homosexual people can be compromised any longer.
I will no longer act as if the Papal office is to be respected if the present occupant of that office is either not willing or not able to inform and educate himself on public issues on which he dares to speak with embarrassing ineptitude.
I will no longer be respectful of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to believe that rude behavior, intolerance and even killing prejudice is somehow acceptable, so long as it comes from third-world religious leaders, who more than anything else reveal in themselves the price that colonial oppression has required of the minds and hearts of so many of our world’s population. I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it. I will dismiss as unworthy of any more of my attention the wild, false and uninformed opinions of such would-be religious leaders as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Albert Mohler, and Robert Duncan.
…
I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church.
…
I will also no longer act as if I need a majority vote of some ecclesiastical body in order to bless, ordain, recognize and celebrate the lives and gifts of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church.
…
The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture’s various forms of homophobia. I do not care who it is who articulates these attitudes or who tries to make them sound holy with religious jargon.
I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the “Flat Earth Society” either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union.
I am tired of being embarrassed by so much of my church’s participation in causes that are quite unworthy of the Christ I serve or the God whose mystery and wonder I appreciate more each day. Indeed I feel the Christian Church should not only apologize, but do public penance for the way we have treated people of colour, women, adherents of other religions and those we designated heretics, as well as gay and lesbian people.
…
This is my manifesto and my creed. I proclaim it today. I invite others to join me in this public declaration. I believe that such a public outpouring will help cleanse both the church and this nation of its own distorting past. It will restore integrity and honor to both church and state. It will signal that a new day has dawned and we are ready not just to embrace it, but also to rejoice in it and to celebrate it.’
He sounds a bit like Richard Dawkins giving his reasons why he won’t debate Creationists.
And, apparently, since I attend a church that is a member of the ACNA, I am a “pathetic human being” (without the saving grace of Christ, very true) who is “deeply locked into a world that no longer exists” (if only) in order to “continue to hate gay people” (I actually rather like the gay people I know), and “continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives.” (poor tortured me).
I suspect Spong’s pension fund must have been hit by the recession and this is a publicity stunt to sell books.