She's moved, taking most of her intrepid commentors with her.
The new spot is called "Open Book" and you can get there by clicking here:
Everything that's ever been posted on In Between Naps is still here - and the comments too - you can get there by clicking on the archives link on the left.
Update (May 2010)...The place where I now blog is called Charlotte Was Both and it's here.
To go along with at least one of your openly non-celibate gay priests.
St. Paul, call your office. Or maybe not - I doubt anyone's calling you.
The point being, of course, the discontinuity between an act like this and historical Christianity. If that's not important to you fine - then stay out of this discussion, for that's what's at stake.
By the way, someone complimented me in a comment on being interested in this. How can I not? It's a watershed for all Christian churches, not just the Anglican communion. I may be Roman Catholic, but my MA is in religion from Vanderbilt Divinity School, and my MA thesis had nothing to do with Catholicism (it was on the debates over women's role in 19th century American Protestant churches, most particularly on the uses of Scripture in the debates), and I'm just jazzed by religion generally, especially when the issues at hand drive us back to historical considerations.
According to www.yourcongress.org, 144 members of the 107th Congress identified themselves as Catholic: 15 Democrats and 9 Republicans in the Senate, and 71 Democrats and 42 Republicans in the House of Representatives.
In a political scorecard measuring the voting records from the 107th Congress, the homosexual activist Human Rights Campaign gave all 15 Senate Democrats, one Republican senator, 61 House Democrats and 2 House Republicans perfect or near perfect scores for siding with homosexuals in legislative votes.,p>"This is all part of the unfortunate legacy of John F. Kennedy, who perhaps paid too high an admission price to enter the race for the presidency in 1960 by basically telling people that he would never bring his religious values into American public life," C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Massachusetts Catholic Action League told CNSNews.com Friday. "Looking back on it, the election of Kennedy in some ways represented the empowerment of the Catholic elite but a defeat for Catholic values."
Doyle said when politicians say they are not going to let the Church tell them what to do, it really means that interest groups, media institutions and the "big money campaign contributors that make their careers possible" will call the shots for them instead."When they say that they're deeply concerned about the separation of church and state, what that really means is that they're going to do exactly what the polls tell them to do. The response of the vast majority of politicians in this case is going to be both cynical and cowardly, and intellectually dishonest," Doyle said. "It isn't that our politicians have the wrong principles, it's that as a class, elected politicians, including Catholic politicians, have no principles. As a class, they are self-serving careerists."
So if it comes to your town or (in a few months I'm sure) video store, please go see it.
Gene Robinson’s journey to becoming bishop of New Hampshire passed a crucial milestone Sunday afternoon when the House of Deputies voted to consent to his election as bishop coadjutor. In a vote by orders on resolution C045, lay deputations voted 63 yes, 32 no, and 13 divided. Clergy deputations voted 65 yes, 31 no, and 12 divided. With the deputies' action, the final decision now rests with the House of Bishops, which will take up Robinson’s consent at 2 p.m. Monday. If the bishops grant consent, then Robinson may well be seated in the house that same day. The custom with the other bishops-elect who have achieved full consent this week has been for the bishops to give them seat and voice.
When you read history, one of the things you notice in recent work is the commonly held and frequently voiced assumption that traditional Christian thinking has emphasized a dichotemy between body and spirit, a separation, and modern thinking is all about the reintegration of body and spirit. I have to say that this never made sense to me, and even less so these days. It seems to me that both of the conversations of this week - on homosexuality and marital sexuality - revolve around the question, "What does what we do with our bodies have to do with the spirit?" Does what we do with our bodies affect our spirit, our total being? Should what we do with our bodies reflect any greater plan or purpose built into creation? That's simplistic, but you know what I mean. And the answers fall into two camps: those who wish the Church to give into contemporary Western culture on this score say, in essence - no. What I do with my body has little relation to anything beyond itself. Those who wish the Church to resist the temptation to give into culture say, yes. My body and what I do with it matters, and matters not only in the context of my bed or even my own emotions, but matters in the context of what God wants for His creation.
That's simplistic, and there are countless complexities and caveats that could be offered (and will be, I'm sure!), but it just strikes me that those who maintain the truth of traditional Christian thinking on sexuality are more attuned to the relation between body and spirit than those who want to dispense with it.
Now granted, this connection between body and spirit was more often than not presented in negative terms - you do this with your body, this happens to your soul. The proper relationship between body and soul was of the former being subjugated to the latter. But the relationship was there and understood, nonethless. We are not angels or spirits only temporarily housed in bodies. Perhaps the gift of the modern era is in helping us to see the positive aspects of our integrated beings - not only as we see the positive aspects of marital love, for example, but also, on a more fundamental level, as we unpack the relations between body chemistry and emotions, etc.
The Franciscan community covering the East Coast has shrunk to about 430 priests and brothers from 1,100 in the early 1960s. As a result, the order will no longer staff St. Joseph's Church in West Milford, where friars have preached the Gospel since the late 1800s.The parish will continue to operate under the diocese, which will supply its own priests."We're a disappearing race,'' said the Rev. Boniface Hanley, who celebrates his last Mass at St. Joseph's today. "That's a fact.'' The Franciscans are considering a range of other cutbacks, including leaving another West Milford church, Our Lady Queen of Peace."I just buried four [friars] last month," said the Rev. John Felice, the order's provincial minister in New York City. "And people are wondering why we are doing this?"Franciscans, Felice said, typically live in communities of at least three friars. After St. Joseph's had been reduced to one priest - the 78-year-old Hanley - the order decided it couldn't spare the manpower to bring the staffing up to previous levels."We are committed to living in community - that's who we are," Felice said. "We love being in these places, but the math just doesn't work for us."
More on Michael's appearances here
At this point the only other appearance I have scheduled is a talk at the Diocese of Bridgeport (CT) catechetical convention, which is the first weekend of November.
Secular commentary on the cathedral has dwelled on its abstractions, seemingly more Zen than Catholic, and emphasized, appreciatively, how understated are matters of faith in the building's structure. But there is nothing subdued or Zenlike in Simon Toparovsky's life-size bronze figure of a man, black skin flayed, nailed to a post in the moments before his death. Those who have gathered this morning reach out to the feet and knees of the figure on the cross, touching them tentatively. Some lean in to kiss the metal, which is already losing its dark, iron oxide patina. Their consoling embraces recognize the sacredness of the sculpture and make it ours.
The cathedral resists other embraces. Later, during the sermon, the servers bring out a large brazier to illustrate a point the priest is making about prayer. He pours a handful of incense onto the coals and another until the flames drive up a thick column of gray smoke. I anticipate that the cloying odor of burning incense — a powerful instigator of Catholic memories — will fill the air. It doesn't. By an accident of geometry or ventilation, the cloud ascends, spreads into a veil and joins the light it cannot change. The burning incense leaves no smell.
Ronchamp, chosen in an American Institute of Architects poll a few years ago as the most significant church building of the last 500 years, represented a startling shift in direction for Le Corbusier. "If you look at his previous work," Safe says, "he did these very stark towers, so the fact that he would get into this sort of poetic, formal manipulation for a church was pretty remarkable. Here is this man who was designing these relentlessly square and, I'm not kidding, mile-long blocks of apartment buildings that he proposed for Algiers and Paris, and all of a sudden he got poetic."
And like any good poem, the chapel at Ronchamp provokes a wide range of readings. Some believe the roof is shaped like the habits worn by French nuns; others feel it's intended as a metaphor for Noah's Ark. Safe has his own theory. "Le Corbusier always had a shell on his desk, and the structural idea behind it is very derivative of a double-sided shell with a bottom and a top with an open structure between it, and I think that's probably more likely." Even the Ronchamp gutter prompts speculation. Pointing to one of Hervé's pictures, Safe says, "This scupper where all of the rainwater comes off of the roof, people talk about [it as representing] a woman's breasts and the liquid of life coming out of the thing. I don't think Le Corbusier ever sat around and explained any of this to anybody, so we're free to interpret."
