Category: Other Christians

I’m grateful to the conservative Episcopalians at CaNN, who have been ably keeping tabs on news about the Anglican Communion as their D-Day approached over the weekend. Their site was inaccessible for part of Monday, apparently due to a DDoS attack. However, being devout souls, they turned to God in their adversity and prayed as follows:

Almighty God, who lovest mankind,
we ask you to pour down your blessings
upon the heads of our enemies and
and those who persecute us,
that our Saviour Christ may be glorified;
and according to your will, and the work of your faithful servants,
restore our website that we may once again
contend for the faith once delivered to the saints
and minister to your church and people in this time of need.
Amen.

Very edifying.

Episcopalians used to have a charism for good taste. Oh, well, that illusion’s shattered.
(Thanks, Mark.)

I’m involved with a project at work, and maybe somebody out there can help. My employer’s annual calendar is very PC and includes major holidays of various religions and cultures, because, like a lot of high-tech firms, we have a culturally diverse work force. Since last year’s edition had a few mistakes in listing the Christian holidays, I volunteered to help gather info for the 2004 edition.
Apparently the editors had been using whatever info they could find on the web, and some of it was old or wrong; so I’m looking for official or at least reliable sources for the data I turn in. Documenting the Catholic holidays is not hard: the Catholic Almanac has a list. Can anybody point to some reliable source for a list of Orthodox holidays?
Also, what days would Protestant Christians consider important enough to list: just Easter and Christmas? Pentecost? Maybe Reformation Sunday? Obviously Protestant customs are going to be all over the map; but advice from our non-Catholic readers (if any) would be a boon. Thanks!

Search on Google for “Catholic”, and you’ll probably get this ad:

Are Catholics doomed.
Did you know that most people in
the Mafia are Catholic? Worried.
www.Dont_Worship_in_Vain.com

Click through if you want to see the site: it only costs them — oh, I’d guess about $0.15 each time.

NR’s John Derbyshire, an eminently reasonable and tolerant Episcopalian, is having second thoughts about tolerance itself. With this week’s approval of Canon Robinson, he has realized that the homosexualist lobby is not as willing as he is to leave others a broad sphere of private opinion, but demands approval and aims to silence opposition. In such a situation, truly libertarian tolerance is not possible: one side or the other — the normal or the abnormal — will dominate.

Perhaps our grandfathers were wiser than us. Perhaps there are some things that we, the normal majority, SHOULD, deliberately and consciously, disapprove and marginalize.

My favorite lesbian, the iconoclastic Camille Paglia, was interviewed for three hours on C-SPAN last Sunday, and offered a relevant insight. Although she’s in a ten-year-long relationship, and her partner recently gave birth, she is not a supporter of “same-sex marriage”. Paglia understands that marriage is essentially a religious rite, and as she is an atheist, it does not correspond to her beliefs. She observes that societies that give official sanction to homosexuality through “marriage” are generally decadent, and this worries her, because she wants Western civilization to survive. She argues that the principal civil effects gay people want (the ability to inherit, to be involved in medical decisions, etc.) can be achieved through wills, power-of-attorney agreements, etc., so the clamoring for marriage is unnecessary — and even sometimes hysterical.
Back to Derbyshire: he worries that the same trends wrecking the Episcopal Church are underway in the Catholic Church. He’s right: but Catholics have a reason for hope. Unlike Episcopalians who believe as a matter of course that Church councils can err and have erred — that the official teaching Church is fallible — Catholics believe that the official teaching Church is protected by a gift of the Holy Spirit who keeps her from accepting and embracing error in her doctrines. If this doctrine is true, the Catholic Church will always survive, preaching the Gospel, and the gates of Hell shall not stand against her.