more from Fort Worth

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On Friday I pointed to Katie Sherrod’s wonderful satiric blog about life in the Episcopal Diocese of Forth Worth. Today, Barbi Click has a fine piece at the Episcopal Majority dealing with similar issues and pointing out that there are many Episcopalians in the Fort Worth Diocese who do not share Bishop Iker’s reactionary views. Here’s just the beginning of Click’s essay:

Sometimes, amidst the deafening silence, we forget that our voice can be heard by those outside of this diocese. Similar to a nightmare where the dreamer is trying to scream but no sound comes out – that is what it is like here in the Diocese of Fort Worth. We try to make our voice heard, but to no avail. Even the strongest grow weary with time.

There are good people here in Fort Worth, good loyal Episcopalians who want to be members of the Episcopal Church – far more loyal Episcopalians than anyone from the diocesan offices would ever admit. There are people here who disagree strongly with the bishop of Fort Worth on many issues. Yet at what price? Many have been worn down into silence simply because they have fought for so long to no noticeable avail. . . .

Both these fine pieces about Fort Worth deserve a wide readership. You can read the rest of Barbi Click’s essay here

pullibus non carborundum

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Regarding the recent Episcopal dust-up in Fort Worth, Katie Sherrod has a wonderful blog today, which she calls “Flying Chickens.” Here are a couple of excerpts:

Did you feel that? It was yet another gust of hot air emanating from the Diocese of Fort Worth. Yes, our Executive Council voted almost unanimously—apparently one rector dissented—to announce once again that they are mad at The Episcopal Church and are thinking about three ways to leave it. Sounds like a song title, doesn’t it?

. . .

They make their usual offensive and false charges against Bp. Katharine. There is the charge that she has “refused to accept the key recommendations of the Windsor Report,” as if that were akin to heresy instead of being what an editor of mine used to call “a bunch of words masquerading as a meaningful sentence.”

I love it! And I love this sentence especially, though I’m quoting out of context:

Well, an old friend of my father’s said of such attempts that, “You can put your boots in the oven but that don’t make ‘em biscuits.”

It’s almost as though Molly Ivins had returned to poke holes in Jack Iker’s stuffed shirt. But Sherrod is also very serious:

What Iker and the majority of the Executive Committee—and others in this white-male-clergy-led schismatic movement—simply do not “get” is that in the end, it comes down to relationships: the relationship of individuals to God, and the relationships of lay people with one another. Members of parishes here—and in other schismatic dioceses—who have worshipped and worked together for years on parish rummage sales, on vacation bible schools, on altar guilds, on vestries, on parish picnics, on fundraisers for the church pre-school, who have cared for each other’s babies in the nursery in the midst of deep disagreements about the ordination of women, expansive language, and/or human sexuality are not ready to say they “have no need of one another.” They are not ready to not meet one another at the communion rail.

Read it all here.

nothing more than culture?

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The Very Rev. Ryan S. Reed of St. Vincent’s Episcopal Church in Bedford, TX is quoted in a recent Fort Worth Weekly piece about the Episcopal Church. “The Episcopal Church is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the culture,” says Fr. Reed, speaking for what is perhaps the majority view of things in the ultra-conservative anglo-catholic diocese of Fort Worth. He is wrong, of course, but his error (to use a word I dislike in a context such as this) is of the heart, in my view. The Episcopal church is indeed a reflection of the culture of the United States of America, but not, I suspect, in the way Fr. Reed supposes. What the church reflects is in part a developing consensus about human sexuality and the law, not only in the United States and Canada, but in much of the world where modernity is an established condition. I don’t think this situation should trouble any Christian. It involves a relationship long familiar in the history of social justice issues.

Human equality and what we now call human rights have more often than not entered the modern Christian church by the back door, just as they have most usually claimed the teachings of Jesus as a warrant along with (take your pick) “the laws of nature and of nature’s god,” Kantian categorical imperative, history, the Constitution and laws of the United States, etc. I am thinking primarily of my own experience with civil rights issues since the 1950s, but I could document the claim going back at least to the time of Wycliffe in the English-speaking world, in the western colonies, and in post-colonial times. But I would rather put the case positively as Richard Rorty has, in a recent essay, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” claiming that Christianity, enlightenment idealism, and skeptical pragmatism may be able to find common ground in the proposition that “love is the only law,” or as he was fond of putting it in the past, “Cruelty is the worst thing we do.” Rorty’s affirmations do not seek to conquer cruelty but rather to persuade against it “through . . . positive examples of a community-affirming discourse,” as one commentator has put it.

While I understand why many liberal Christians affirm that their social and ethical beliefs originate with Jesus and only with Jesus, I’m not myself troubled if somebody thinks I am “faithless and apostate,” as claimed in a passage noted on The Rev. Susan Russell’s An Inch at a Time:

This is not a matter of opinion, mine or anyone else’s, but of objective fact. If you are gay, support gay ordination or the gay lifestyle, then you are not a Christian, and will go to hell. Again, this is not opinion or a matter for conjecture: it is simply what the bible says. It is fact.

When I was a kid in West Texas, I was declared apostate by my classmates in the Church of Christ because I was a social gospel Methodist and read the RSV, which had “taken all the blood out” of the Bible. When I was a young adult trying to persuade fellow members of my downtown Methodist church in Durham, NC that it was OK if African Americans came in and worshipped with us, sat among us, etc., I was declared apostate. So–I had a fair amount of on-the-job experience before I became an apostate in the present-day Episcopal Church.

I remain convinced that “love is the only law.” I continue to believe that as a Christian citizen of a democratic society I am to practice the second commandment, whether it comes to me from Jesus or Emmanuel Kant or my own cultural identity, without regard to ancient prejudices against “all sorts and conditions” of humans. And I continue to believe that we apostates (I suspect I have a good many colleagues in the church) should continue to persuade against cruelty “through . . . positive examples of a community-affirming discourse”; though it’s my prose and entirely private opinion that people who think they know who is going to hell don’t know shit, as we used to say in Abilene.

Finally, I want to thank Fr. Nick Knisely for a wonderful piece that appears today at the Daily Episcopalian. In it, Fr. Knisely describes his experience in an ecumenical venture with Moravians, who “won’t fight and insult each other in the manner in which some Episcopalians revel,” even though

The Moravian Church is struggling with the same issues that the Episcopal Church is at the moment. They have groups and congregations breaking away over the same concerns, and they have to manage the same sorts of resolutions that we do at our national meetings. 

And I’d like to thank Fr. Mark Harris as well, for his critique today of Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola’s recent rant against the United States, in which the good Archbishop claims that hate-crimes legislation pending in the U. S. Congress is an abridgement of the freedom of religion. Too bad the Archbishop wasn’t on the Supreme Court when it ruled against cross burning. Fr. Harris notes ruefully that “The Archbishop has entered the morass of American religious politics.”

Soon he will be on the talk shows and an established darling of the religious right. After all, he has a proto-diocese here [in the United States] now.

I can’t forbear to point out that Archbishop Akinola is able to make his voice heard in this country because the United States of America is what it is. The good Archbishop is a beneficiary of the very capitalist multiculturalism he and his American disciples deplore. He will not only continue to benefit from the openness he decries as decadence, but if Fr. Harris is right he will be rewarded with media stardom as well, at least for a while.

Later this month my beloved and I will attend the Mennonite Relief Sale in Iowa City. We’ll eat a good dinner, have some pie, meet friends, and contribute to “the worldwide relief program of the Mennonite Central Committee.” Aside from the fact that it’s one of the most effective of U. S. Charities, it’s a love-in. I’m hoping there will be some good gospel music to listen to before the big auction as there has been in the past. The Mennonites have generally been more tolerant regarding divisive issues of sexuality than other theologically conservative churches, though the record is mixed and some Mennonite churches have been expelled from their regional organizations for being too permissive.  Still, I thank God for the Mennonites (who ordain women, by the way).

calling it evil

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This week’s New Republic carries an essay by Gregg Easterbrook that takes issue with the media’s use of the words shooter and gunman to describe the person eventually identified as Cho Seung-Hui in coverage of the recent murders at Virginia Tech. Easterbrook also takes umbrage at the use of shooting spree to describe his actons.

Similarly odd was the frequent use of the phrase “shooting spree” to describe the Blacksburg horror. A spree is a gay, carefree outing. Those who say “shooting spree” make it sound as if killing at random is therapeutic, even recreational: He felt depressed, so he went on a shooting spree. The only term that fits what Cho did is “rampage,” and a few reports used this word. But a disturbing number opted for “spree.”

Easterbrook’s argument is that such terms do not identify the evil in Cho’s actions, that they are not judgmental, that they are terms which refuse to acknowldge the moral universe, and that they are used in the service of a misguided and foolish political correctness. After browbeating his reader for several paragraphs, Easterbrook concludes more or less as follows:

Evil exists and must be spoken of as evil, not in euphemism. On a windy Monday morning in Virginia, evil armed itself and performed the most despicable of acts: pleasure in the taking of innocent life. Evil will arm itself again. As George Orwell showed, unless we call a thing what it is, we can neither think about it clearly nor oppose it.

To be sure, the language Easterbrook deplores is the language of media cliché, and that is dreadful in its own way. But it seems to me that there may be a number of valid reasons for seeking neutral, descriptive language for reporting about terrible and terrifying events. I’m not sure I understand Easterbrook’s indignation, and I very much fear that if journalists followed rules such as the ones he lays down, the result would be sensationalism, not moral edification. Also, since I myself initially found it difficult to find words to talk about the Virginia Tech murders, and since I don’t particularly like having motives prescribed to me by press pundits, I beg to differ.

First and foremost I think the problem we have with language in the face of mass murders is understandable because it is human, and it is human because evil, however monstrous, is human. When our minds are invaded by yet another proof of the moral horror of which we human beings are capable, a first reaction is to recoil from the knowledge. Far from being a sign of decadent public discourse, I think the media’s tendency to fall back on trade clichés is a sign of decency. Indeed I wish I could think that all the press coverage of the murders at Virginia Tech had reflected a decent distaste for voyeurism and sensation. I was bothered by the constant attempt on the part of reporters to provoke emotion from the young people they interviewed, asking them how they felt at a time when such a question bordered on being obscene. My friend Tim Burke put this in excellent perspective when he wrote on this blog:

 . . . Is it so hard to let the dead lie in peace for a few days, to reflect quietly and somberly on the horror and pain of it? Do we have to domesticate every event into the simple-mindedness of single-cause arguments, master the meaninglessness that sometimes comes with being human with the jabber of the punditocracy? Can’t we just reach out collectively to put a quiet hand on the shoulder of those who have lost friends, family and colleagues?

Easterbrook also charges that “news reports have treated the murderer’s history gently,” rather than labeling him a madman. “There simply are no circumstances under which a person of sound mind would slaughter 32 unarmed innocents.” Fair enough. I’m imagining a two-inch headline that reads, “MADMAN GOES ON KILLING RAMPAGE, MURDERS 32!” Such a head would satisfy Easterbrook’s criteria, but this is the kind of language we expect from The National Enquirer. Such language trumpets the horror itself as a commodity, a form of sentimentality; and it objectifies the murderer and his victims.

The unarmed innocents at Virginia Tech, their families, friends, colleagues, and associates, all who were slain, traumatized, or otherwise directly involved in Cho’s murderous rampage (see, I can use judgmental words), were, are, all of them–valuable and precious human beings. And while I am saying that I must also point out that Cho himself was a human being. Reporting that has attempted to understand Cho as a deprived and lost soul is not misguided. To seek to explain a particular evil as the absence of some good is deeply embedded in our culture. Before it was part of secular therapy, it was Christian. Indeed, it remains Christian. I hope there will be many who will include Cho in their prayers along with those whom he killed and hurt, as I do.