Salt

Warren Buffett Plans to Give his Millions Away

Buffett plans to donate 85% of his wealth.  From the Times.

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society," he said. "At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

...His children, he said, were not at all disappointed not to be receiving the lion's share of his fortune.

"They've known all along my views on inherited wealth, and share them," he said in a news conference this afternoon. "They have money that most people would dream of. They're lucky, in that respect, when they selected their parents."

Buffett:  a man of integrity.   He offers one reason why the estate tax is the most reasonable tax the state has to protect itself against dynasties and monarchies.   

Excellent Blogs of Interest

There are now a few excellent blogs worth checking on a regular basis.

The best and most insightful critique of gay marriage in Nigeria, at present, is written by Matt Thompson of Political Spaghetti.  Read it all. 

Nick Knisley, with his sharp mind [he's a physicist] and writing talent, has become very popular, now summing up GC2006.

Mark Harris offers analysis:  Deputies now had to face into grim reality that the big guns had been brought to bear. If they did not vote for B-033 gay and lesbian persons and their progressive friends would be considered spoilers and would lose all political leverage for the future. If we did vote for B-033 we were making gay and lesbian candidates and others hostages to a bad piece of legislation. Only the fact that legislation can be changed by any General Convention made for a little light. Bad legislation can be reversed the next time we meet. Still, it means hostages for three years.

So we voted and passed B-033. The house was not informed as to how the Bishop’s voted. Immediately following bishops from the left and the right disassociated themselves from the resolution.

The House of Bishops, having initiated this resolution and brought out the guns to bear, now retreated into various forms of righteousness, leaving the House of Deputies to hang out without any protection at all. It was dirty, and insult and finally a shame on us all.

On Tuesday the House of Deputies had done a stunning thing: it had rejected a bad resolution (A161) that deserved to die a horrible death. A deeply divided house had found a voice for a moment. On Wednesday expediency ruled, and the House of Deputies lost its voice to Episcopal oversight.

And a Mad Priest who deserves regular attention.  It is the oft heard cry of the "biblically-based" Christian that liberal theologians reject any part of scripture that they are not able to fit in with their rationalist conclusions. This is an accurate accusation. But pre-biblicists are not liberals (there is often misunderstanding regarding this because so often our position on ethical matters is the same as those adopted by liberal theologians) and we fully accept that hermeneutically you "can't have your cake and eat it". Pre-biblicists view all parts of the Bible exactly the same - to us everything therein is the word of human beings with the exception of the words of Jesus Christ (subject to our knowledge that the words of Jesus Christ reported in the Bible are not exactly what he said). We accept divine inspiration in the writing of the Bible but we give equal import to divine inspiration in our individual and collective interpretation of the text.

But he is also very funny.  I, also, am a pre-biblical Christian.

Stay Tuned, as 2 Churches Struggle With Gay Clergy

Laurie Goodstein from the NYT uses four metaphors now common parlance in the debate, "conjoined twins," "divorce," "walking away," and "fudge."

In each church, the conservatives and the liberals are bound together like brawling conjoined twins.

We probably have a lot of our DNA in common. 

The liberals dominate the power centers of the denominations — the national offices and the legislative arms. The conservatives have threatened to walk away, but most have not because they say the church is rightfully, theologically, theirs.

They think we are walking separately, but we are still on the same road, whether they think so or not.

"It's all very well to threaten divorce, but it's another thing to go to the divorce court," said David C. Steinmetz, a professor of the history of Christianity at Duke Divinity School who has spent the last few years on schism watch.

It's true, because the real conflict will happen over property. 

Members of both churches had looked to this year's conventions to clarify their positions on ordaining gay clergy members and blessing same-sex couples.

But instead, each convention produced the kind of parliamentary doublespeak that some Episcopalians call "Anglican fudge," a concoction often used to smooth over differences at meetings of the global Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is the American branch.

Personally, I don't know what the problem with "fudge" is.  Fudge is delicious.  And it is perfectly sensible for words to be vague, if only to keep people, in practice, from judging each other so they can pray together. 

..."If the communion puts its stock in this promise, it's going to be terribly deceived," said Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, moderator of the Anglican Communion Network, a conservative group that has formed an alliance with conservative Anglicans in the developing world.

Bishop Duncan suggested in an interview that he had received assurances that the Anglican Communion would soon reprimand the Episcopal Church for disregarding orthodoxy.

Duncan has grand powers of discernment; and he knows that the Episcopal church deserves chastisement.  Right back at ya!  We're all sinners, my friend.   For each chip of righteousness, I'll raise you two of hypocrisy.   

The quote drips ressentiment.

Theological Assertions

A few theological points:

God works through politics.  It is sometimes painful, aggravating and challenging, but he is there.  Churches should be more political, rather than less.

For this reason, process is crucial to any organization.  Process should be understood by all participating.

The work of Jesus is comprehensible first by understanding his process: parable, story, and revelation.  His process of interpreting scripture must be our process.  This is one example of "following Jesus:" recognizing the the beauty to which scripture directs us.  As sinners, we will always be arguing over some form of content: but it is the process that allows us to work through our divisions. 

It follows that Scripture does not exhaust human experience.  The dualisms, for example, in Galatians [Jew nor Greek, etc], are not the complete taxonomy of all binary systems.  It instead points to the direction Jesus works in our lives - as someone who forces us to reexamine the yes/no stance we are inclined to take.  Abundance, Joy and Freedom are affirmed because the chains of our habits have been revealed; our anxieties are redeemed not through an exhausted ideology, but through the Word, the communication of God, as represented by the cooperative engagement with other brothers and sisters clothed in Christ. 

Recent Quotes on General Convention

From Liz Zivanov [via],

When Bonnie Perry got up and asked the HoD if A161 meant that gays were to return to lying and deceiving about who they are in order to be in the church,, I watched three priests from the Diocese of Dallas look at each other, chuckle, and nod their heads. So much for unity and honesty.

Questioning Christian agrees that the compromise might have been smart.  A standing committee has to decide whether to consent to the (hypothetical) election of a bishop who happens to be a partnered lesbian.  The standing committee is inclined to consent to the election, but it also feels compelled to honor the General Convention's request in B033.  In this situation, the standing committee has a duty to assess for itself whether a genuine process of healing and reconciliation is underway in the Anglican Communion.   If not, then for purposes of the standing committee's decision, B033's predicate hasn't been satisfied, and the committee is free to give its consent.

Elizabeth Keaton describes the scene.

A Comment on the New Presiding Bishop

It is always amusing to hear a conservative call the ECUSA "imperialist."  I can understand it perfectly - it is as if ECUSA has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and told Muslims and Conservative Christians that they have to take orders from women and create democratic institutions. 

Yes, that's our army there in Iraq.

But we are also the Columbus Tea Party, restoring our identity as an American Church against our adolescent Anglophilia. 

Someone shouts, "The Queen will not be pleased." 

Exqueeze me?

We're concerned about how the Queen of England thinks about Queens?  And Women?

And we're calling this an imperialist move because we're not asking the British what they think?

Aren't these the same people, who in political life, think our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are exercises in charity?   

Granted, the liberals in ECUSA should be perfectly aware that the South sees it all together:  homosexuals, Iraq, Hollywood, hypocrisy, affluence and decadence.  We should hold this in tension, and keep building relationships with those who are victims of economic destitution. 

Katharine Jefferts Schori is the person who can do this.  She is properly focused on the issues of poverty.  And she has the skills to handle the tension between theology and evolution.  She will bring a reliable theological response to the problem of global warming. 

Salon on Schori

June 19, 2006 | It's always a bit of a shock when God shows up in church. There's not much in Scripture to suggest that God's particularly interested in church of any kind, and Jesus, with his deliberate flouting of religious laws, had a notable impatience with the enterprise.

And yet, as Christians, we hope and pray that it will happen. The election of the Right Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, bishop of Nevada, as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States appears to be a hint that something's going on beyond the usual human bickering, self-congratulation, scapegoating and piety that abound whenever church people gather. The "kingdom of God" -- a phrase used by Jesus and often equated by Christians with the church -- is like a weed growing in the tidy garden of human culture. It grows as it will, unbidden and frequently unwanted; its growth is always to God's design specs, not those of tradition-bound churches.

Jefferts Schori, a former oceanographer, was considered a long shot for the position by most church experts: Although she's a fairly mainstream liberal, her gender made it unlikely that the church would choose to be stirred up at a moment when it seemed to require smoothing over and calming down.

The Episcopal Church -- the American branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion, with 77 million members -- had already outraged conservatives three years ago by electing the openly gay Right Rev. Gene Robinson to head the Diocese of New Hampshire. Conservative African Anglicans joined with reactionary American Episcopalians, threatening to pull out of the Communion entirely if the enfranchisement of gay Christians was not stopped. There were name-calling, backstabbing, breakaway parishes, fights over property and thundering sermons about "abomination" and deviance. "The battle is about the authority of Scripture," proclaimed conservative American Bishop Robert Duncan. "It's about the basics of Christian faith ... The issues have to do with sexuality and morality, but at the very heart of it is whether Scripture can be trusted."

The struggle isn't just about gayness, of course, but, rather, a more fundamental conflict between believers who crave certainty and those who embrace ambiguity; those who insist Scripture is inerrant and unchanging, delivered once and for all time, and those who believe the Bible is only part of God's ongoing revelation. The struggle is also about how to define a Christian: as one who seeks to keep religion "pure" or one who welcomes outcasts. It's hardly a conflict unique to Anglicanism or, for that matter, Christianity. As Chris Linzey, an English priest who edited a book on Anglicans and homosexuality, wrote, "The agenda of conservatives is a rolling one: today it is gays, but biblical inerrancy, interfaith worship, women bishops, remarriage after divorce will surely follow. The logic of all purity movements is to exclude."

Katherine Jefferts Schori, the Mostest

I called it.  The last time I had a vision was when I thought the Spurs would win the championship a few years ago for the first time.

This is better. 

Remember in 2004 when the Guardian sent a bunch of letters to Ohio, angering American voters?  Get a bunch of English bishops from a post-Christian state telling American Bishops what to do, and you'll probably scratch the independent itch. 

What of the Catholics?  They don't give a damn about Episcopalians.   Did they consult us about changing the mass?  Nope.  A few Orthodox will be gracious, but generally, they've got their own incense to burn.   And if we have to sign a document, let it be with a woman's hand.   

Ruth Gledhill [I do love reading her blog.  The picture helps on her bad days.], in her blog says, "I couldn't help but feel a shiver of excitement at the election of a woman to the position of Presiding Bishop, putting her on a level with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the 36 other primates at the head of the Anglican Communion."  That's the truth, Ruth.   

Nazr Ali, the Bishop of Rochester urged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take firm action against the liberal leadership of the Episcopal Church. Matters were so serious that “fudge won’t do”, Bishop Nazir-Ali said. “Sometimes you have to recognise that there are two irreconcilable positions and you have to choose between them. The right choice is the line with the Bible and the Church’s teachings down the ages, not some new-fangled religion we have invented to respond to the 21st century,”

Schori says in another interview, [via]

We believe that revelation continues, that God continues to be active in creation, and that all of the many ways of knowing -- including geology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, and arts such as opera, punk rock or painting -- can be vehicles through which God and human beings partner in continuing creation.

Given this worldview, we are compelled to use the resources God has given us.  Not to use our brains in understanding the world around us seems a cardinal sin.

As a scientist and an Episcopalian, I cherish the prayer that follows a baptism, that the newly baptized may receive "the gift of joy and wonder in all God's works."  I spent the early years of my adulthood as an oceanographer, studying squid and octopuses, including their evolutionary relationships.  I have always found that God's creation is "strange and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139). ...

Making any kind of faith decision is based on accumulating the best evidence one can find -- what one's senses and reason indicate, what the rest of the community has believed over time, and what the community judges most accurate today."

Ali vs. Schori.  HM.  Guess what.  Schori wins.

So we prayed for clarity.  And Duncan understands.  Sometimes, in God’s permissive will, our prayers are answered in ways we had not anticipated.  That's right. 

Let's Really Send a Message: Elect Schori

As I was dozing last night, I had a mad vision.

You know, perhaps we should sign everything in the Windsor report.  Why not? 

In exchange, elect +Schori Presiding Bishop. 

That would really screw up the system.  Far more than signing the Windsor Report, because even if we were to sign a document, and formally agree to some kind of repentance, gay people would still be blessing.   Hey, let the conservatives police the state.  That's what they are good at, and good for.  Policing.  I'm all for policing.  They have a place in our church, also.

But Electing Schori would really screw it up.  For everybody. 

No RC dialogue.  No Orthodox Dialogue.  And then immense pressure on the Anglican Communion which has agreed to let women be a "local" issue.  It would be a local issue no more.

Really screw it up.  Let's create chaos.  Within chaos, God will do that separating thing.

A woman as head of the entire church?

Lets see how Akinola would deal with that!   What rebellion that would inspire in his ladies. 

Yeah.  I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

More Episcopal Blog Review

Well, its Friday and it seems as GC is still going strong. 

Gerns reports a conversation with Sentamu:  I asked him if regret had to with actually consecrating +Gene, and he said no. Our regret must turn on how we needed to get a wider consensus in the Communion. We cannot, and must not, 'take back' +Gene's election and consecration. Our regret is that we did not make the case to the rest of the Communion as to the biblical basis for what God is calling us to do....  Third, having given ourselves and our friends in the Communion space, we have the chance to make the case. we need to make the biblical case for our vision of the church and our actions. He says we have a good case, but that we have only made a start in articulating it in a way that others, particulary with strong, positive biblical approach.

Danforth emphasizes reconciliation and emphasizes that sex isn't important. Via

Post Gazette tells its readers church is still talking about sex. 

Where conservatives hate fudge, AKMA offers precision. 

I’m not defending vagueness, but rather precision — about matters on which there is not a clear, distinct agreeement. That’s not a vice, but a virtue.

On the other hand, I see so little clear, precise writing that I sympathize with partisans who doubt that official church pronouncements aim not so much at precision as at empty but congenial sonorousness.

We need more philosophers, I suspect at GC and fewer ideologues.

Anderson Blames Homosexuals for the decline of the Episcopal Church.  700 people a week have left because of liberalism, he says.  Actually, the problem is women.  They got jobs. 

Bates reports on GC.  Note the word "appease" the Communion.  Appeasement. 

Stephen Colbert interviews Rep Lynn Westmoreland.  Colbert didn't need to do much.  For a moment, Colbert looked really disappointed and perplexed at the very end, amazed at Westmoreland's limitations.