A greater part. There are good reasons to regard the style manual of the American Psychological Association as the best academic style manual around these days. Chicago is more comprehensive and probably should be everyone’s manual of last resort, but the APA Manual is elegant and practical. I started using it with the third edition back in the 1980s. It’s now in the fifth, and I suspect a sixth edition isn’t far off. Here’s a short section from its guidelines regarding gender bias in language.

Lesbian and gay male are preferred to the word “homosexual” when used as an adjective referring to specific persons or groups, and lesbians and gay men are preferred terms over “homosexuals” used as a noun when referring to specific persons or groups. The word “homosexual” has several problems of designation. First, it may perpetuate negative stereotypes because of its historical associations with pathology and criminal behavior. Second, it is ambiguous in reference because it is often assumed to refer exclusively to men and thus renders lesbians invisible. Third, it is often unclear.

Having said that, I’d like to say as well that Fr. Mark Harris has recently posted the best statement about human sexuality I have yet to read. It too is elegant and practical, entitled “We rise to play a greater part.” It is also pious, in the best sense of that term. Here’s Fr. Harris’ powerful conclusion:

In an age of great venality and greed, in a time in which governing begins by inducing fear, in a country that has tamed the Lord Jesus and domesticated the Scriptures and bought the silence of the churches, I see no virtue or even moral efficacy in the condemnation of committed relationships in which there is some comfort, companionship, joy and sexual delight, simply because those relationships are between two persons of the same sex. Indeed making something of relationships, let us call it making love, is the only adequate response to an age that attempts to reduce everything to owning, grasping, greed, power and war.

Read the entire statement here.

Relativism. Nicholas Knisely has written an incisive piece a few days back about the bugbear of relativism and how shrub and the press misunderstood and mischaracterized Pope Benedict’s statement in regard to relativism as “The Central Problem for Faith Today.” As Dean Knisely puts it, “Apparently the President’s people based the President’s remarks on the title of [this] essay and not the actual text.” An old dig at English professors has it that they know more than you do and if you wait long enough they’ll tell you about it. As a now-superannuated English prof, I’ve always been convinced that physicists really do know more than the rest of us. Still, I’m not sure that uncertainty in physics and epistemological uncertainty have the same basis, though I accept them both as facts. I’m working on some thoughts about some of the Pope’s teaching statements, and I’ll publish them in a bit.

Read the rest of Dean Knisely’s essay here, or here.

Lambeth. I’m grateful to Susan Russell for catching me up with the ABCs plans for tea at Lambeth Palace. Dr. Williams’ statement–read it here–seems mostly benign, calling as it does for a time of prayer and fellowship which he hopes will make all the attendees “better bishops.” And since Bishop Robinson has let all his colleagues off the hook and urged them to attend, I guess I should be grateful that the thing seems to be going forward. But there’s some language about covenants that disturbs me in the ABC’s talk. Here’s part of it.

We don’t want at the Lambeth Conference to be creating a lot of new rules but we do obviously need to strengthen our relationships and we need to put those relationships on another footing, slightly firmer footing, where we have promised to one another that this is how we will conduct our life together. And it is in that light that at this year we are discussing together the proposal for what we are calling a covenant between the Anglican Churches of the world.

This disturbs me because it begs a good many questions. I’d like to know who decided that we need the things Dr. Williams says we need. I told my own Bishop recently that I didn’t want a covenant, any covenant. He said he didn’t either but that one might be forced on us. I don’t want to have to confront that eventuality. Pastor Russell notes the ABC’s admission that Lambeth “has never been a legislative body.” I’m not sure I should take any comfort there, after the Windsor Report.

Moreover, I can’t see what use it will be for the Bishops who attend the Lambeth conference to spend solemn hours discussing a putative covenant when the Bishops who have forced the issue are boycotting and apparently well on their way to organizing a rump third world church that will continue to stick its finger in the eye of the Americans and the British. A covenant, unless it stigmatizes gays and lesbians, is unlikely to make this writer happy. And if Lambeth is indeed “a lost cause for the orthodox,” what’s the point?