In an interview that aired last week, Stephen Colbert — possibly the only Catholic whose popularity rivals Pope Francis himself — admitted that one of the times the Eucharist felt “most real” to him was when he attended an Anglican service and heard a woman consecrate the bread.
“The freshness of hearing a woman say that gave the message a universality that it always should have,” said Colbert.
Today, if you walk through the red doors of an Episcopal church on Sunday morning, the person presiding over the Eucharist might be female, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. But on Sept. 12, some of the first women ordained as Episcopal priests reminded the church: it hasn’t always been that way.
Forty years ago last week — before women were allowed to be priests — four women were "irregularly" ordained as Episcopal priests before the altar of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington, D.C. Closely linked with the "irregular" ordination of eleven women in Philadelphia (the “Philadelphia Eleven”) the previous year, the ordination of the Washington Four — Lee McGee Street, Alison Palmer, Betty Powell, and Diane Tickell — is seen by many as a key step in securing women’s ordination in the Episcopal Church.
“Most Revd Justin Welby is expected to propose the creation of a two-tier Anglican Church, with Lambeth Palace comparing the proposal to that of a married couple ‘moving into separate bedrooms,’ instead of full scale divorce over the issue.
A Lambeth aide is also quoted as saying the Archbishop doesn't want his successor ‘spending vast amounts of time trying to keep people in the boat and never actually rowing it anywhere.’
The Archbishop believes successful discussions may allow him to maintain relations both with the liberal churches of North America, which recognise and encourage gay marriage, and the African churches, led by Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, who are agitating for the recriminalisation of all homosexual activity in their countries.”
“The man who bludgeoned Van Treese to death, Justin Sneed, testified that Glossip hired him for the murder. But jurors weren't presented with evidence that Sneed gave contradictory accounts to police about what happened, wrote Sister Helen Prejean, who ministers to prisoners on death row.
Prejean also noted the lack of evidence linking Glossip to the crime.
Glossip's scheduled death will also be the first in Oklahoma since a bitterly divided Supreme Court allowed the use of the drug midazolam in June.
This pilgrimage reminds me of that experience. We are walking — 100 women from all over the country, each with our own story of migration, joy, and hardship — to echo the pope’s message on immigration. Pope Francis is a very influential person who understands that humanity is one body and the world is our home. He knows that separation of families does not fit with that idea. That is why I am walking. I am walking for my family, for families everywhere, and even for all of humanity. Pope Francis can touch the hearts of any person, of any religion, even Congress or President Obama.
Within her tale of adding reconciliation to her annual lessons and carols was a challenge to the church: to come out of the hole of escapism and into “a place where we dive right into difficult truths.”
With hard-hitting candor, Pastor Nadia asked, “When we find ourselves in a world where we see up-to-the-minute images of human suffering...can we really afford quite so much sentimentality in Christianity?”
As we see bodies of child refugees washed upon shorelines, can we sit comfortably in our pews, not asking for any changes to our hospitality or political structures? When we know that innocent lives continue to be lost at the expense of keeping control of our guns for our own personal safety, does it make sense for us to gloss over the stories in the Gospel where Jesus proclaims peace over all things? Is Christianity about memorizing the most inspirational verses of the Bible, or is it about putting them into action to combat the injustices of our reality?
Ahmed Mohamed, 14, loves to invent gadgets in his free time. He brought a homemade digital clock to school on Sept. 14, but his teachers weren’t impressed.
Ahmed’s teacher confiscated the clock when he presented his invention. The principal and a police officer later led him to a room with multiple other officers and questioned him about the device.
Despite a Hawaii birth certificate and repeated professions of his Christian faith, fairly large numbers of Americans still believe President Obama is a Muslim born outside of the United States.
True, 80 percent of Americans do believe Obama was born in the U.S., according to a new CNN/ORC poll, but 20 percent do not.
Of that total, 9 percent claim there is “solid evidence” Obama was born elsewhere, while another 11 percent said it is just their suspicion, CNN reported.
I can’t help but think old William Penn would be proud of Gov. Wolf earlier this year as he made his announcement to halt all executions. Penn was a pacifist and a serious skeptic of capital punishment. His Quaker heritage held that every human being carries the essence of God, and that no one should ever take the life of another, not even the state.
As Pope Francis leads worship on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in the heart of Philadelphia, a statue of William Penn will be looking down on him from atop City Hall, and I can’t help but think our Quaker forefather will be smiling — especially as Pope Francis continues to insist that every person carries the image of God in them… and that no one is beyond redemption.
I look forward to the end of the death penalty, and I hope we get one step closer to it as the pope comes to the City of Brotherly Love.
What has surprised me over the years is how many men are now registering to take the Sexual and Domestic Violence course and are taking violence against women seriously and have contributed greatly to the conversation. Because the class has a balance of men and women, we have been able to embrace the presence of violence against men while still emphasizing the social, systemic, and historical context that gives rise to violence against women and why the course is necessary.
As Mariame Kaba of Project Nia notes, police violence is not simply just the killing of peoples. It includes the every day forms of harassment, surveillance, and profiling that support both gender and race hierarchies.
The campaign to #sayhername is not simply about remembering and organizing around black women and other women of color who have been killed by the police. It is about re-conceptualizing what police violence means. When we center women of color in our analysis, we see that police violence is much more than individual acts of police brutality. It is an entire system of harassment and surveillance that keeps oppressive gender and racial hierarchies in place.
We are then left with the task of not just holding individual police officers to account, but re-conceptualizing what justice, safety, and accountability should be.