Godly Snippets
- An interesting piece of spontaneous ritual here, "from the Guardian:":http://www.guardian.co.uk/transport/Story/0,,2234023,00.html a story about a boy who woke up in hospital after a car crash and had to be told that three of his friends, who had been in the front seat, were dead. So the first thing he asked for was his mobile, so that he would text one dead friend "Goodbye".
- And the latest in the astonishing unravelling of the global Anglican coup, organised to destroy the American Episcopal Church on the pretext of its open tolerance and even encouragement of homosexuals. I say "the pretext" without in any way wishing to deny the sincerity with which these people loathe gays. But there are other agendas, too, involved. Some of the plotters hate women priests; some hate all priests, because they are Calvinists. And some of them feel that the Anglican Communion is soft on Islam and suspiciously pro-Palestinian. I suspect that that is why Peter Akinola, who in Nigeria, is quite close to a religious civil war with Islam, has announced his counter-Lambeth conference will be held in Jerusalem this summer. Now the Bishop of Jerusalem ["has announced he was not consulted, and thinks this is a rotten idea.":http://www.j-diocese.org/newsdetail.php?id=34] His boss, the Primate of the region, has also said he thinks it shouldn’t happen in Jerusalem, and been slapped down with astonishing rudeness for his pains by Akinola. The point, of course, being that Christians in that part of the world are almost all Arab, and consequently hate the Jews and ["have little time for Zionism.":http://www.religiousintelligence.co.uk/news/?NewsID=1391] Not many American evangelicals know this.
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Surely most of Akinola’s money comes from Britain and/or America? Can’t the taps be turned off until he learns to behave himself, or until his clergy, starved of luscious cash, oust him in favour of somebody better? I don’t imagine the bulk of them are bigots any less vicious than he is, but surely withholding payment from pipers who insist on calling their own tunes would concentrate the pipers’ minds wonderfully.
Most of it, I think, comes from Nigerians; the money that is used to destabilise the Anglican Communion, however, comes from some of the same loonies as funded the persecution of the Clintons: in particular the Scaife and Ahmansson foundations.
So that won’t work. And the bigots in this country are very well funded, too. There is nothing like hatred to open the purse strings. A charity devoted to harming humans will probably be even more popular than one promoting animal welfare.
The Jerusalem diocese has the further problem that it’s pretty conservative (as one might expect) and not at all keen on anything other than manliness in cassocks. Thus, as I understand it, it maintains friendly and useful connections with like-minded churches in America – who as you say will be very unamused by the strong connections with Fatah and the cause of Palestinian liberation, should they realise what’s going on.
Complicated business, this Anglicanism. Makes for strange bedfellows.
Whatever happened to the Broad Church?
Akinola, as Andrew observes correctly, has his own domestic anti-Islamic agenda (if I recall correctly, he has said some very Christian — as in Crusading — things about violence towards Muslims) as well as being extremely homophobic.