Latest news with #Anglican
The Age
3 hours ago
- Politics
- The Age
Anglican Church can't grow if it fails to accept gay reality
The other day a friend showed me photos of her friends' same-sex wedding. Such joyful scenes as family and friends celebrated with the happy couple. It wasn't a church wedding, and certainly not an Anglican wedding – not even a wedding blessing. While the Anglican Church's highest court has said it is not against the church's constitution to bless same-sex weddings, only a handful of Australian dioceses have permitted that. And now Melbourne Diocese – once the progressive capital of the Australian church – has elected an archbishop firmly opposed to same-sex weddings. There will be no wedding blessings here. He is quoted in last Sunday's Age as saying that church must welcome people in same-sex relationships. But that rings hollow. How can you welcome people while damning their relationships as sinful? The newly elected archbishop, Ric Thorpe, a bishop from London, is first and foremost a church planter. That is why his Melbourne supporters have chosen him. The church is in decline in Melbourne, with numbers of worshippers dropping and many small parishes struggling for survival. His supporters want to see significant growth in the church, and think that means planting lots of new congregations. But will those brave new plants be attractive to Australians in the 21st century, when presumably they will be preaching against same-sex marriage, given the core group of Melbourne Anglicans who campaigned for his election hold the same view? When more than 60 per cent of Australians voted in favour of same-sex marriage in the 2017 plebiscite? Bishop Thorpe claims the Scriptures are clear that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that cannot be set aside. Many significant scripture scholars read the Bible differently. They say the very few Bible verses that are claimed to prohibit same-sex relationships actually prohibit only promiscuous, predatory relationships. But conservatives have latched on to same-sex prohibition as their line in the sand. Some would argue they took up the cause when they lost the debate in the 1990s about ordaining women. It has given them a stick to knock progressive Anglicans into the ground. The election of Bishop Thorpe shows they are winning. The debate has echoes of the nasty debate that raged in the Anglican Church over divorce last century. Divorced people could not remarry in church, and often were made distinctly unwelcome in congregations. It was Melbourne Diocese in the 1970s that overturned that, and pushed the national church to change. And in 1972, Melbourne Diocese called for homosexuality to be decriminalised, eight years before the state government agreed. How sad that Melbourne has now joined the conservatives. Bishop Thorpe is quoted as saying that the same-sex debate is 'a distraction' from the message of the church. No, it is harming the church's message. The church's message is that God is love, and loves all people unconditionally – and that includes gay people, their spouses and their families.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 hours ago
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
Anglican Church can't grow if it fails to accept gay reality
The other day a friend showed me photos of her friends' same-sex wedding. Such joyful scenes as family and friends celebrated with the happy couple. It wasn't a church wedding, and certainly not an Anglican wedding – not even a wedding blessing. While the Anglican Church's highest court has said it is not against the church's constitution to bless same-sex weddings, only a handful of Australian dioceses have permitted that. And now Melbourne Diocese – once the progressive capital of the Australian church – has elected an archbishop firmly opposed to same-sex weddings. There will be no wedding blessings here. He is quoted in last Sunday's Age as saying that church must welcome people in same-sex relationships. But that rings hollow. How can you welcome people while damning their relationships as sinful? The newly elected archbishop, Ric Thorpe, a bishop from London, is first and foremost a church planter. That is why his Melbourne supporters have chosen him. The church is in decline in Melbourne, with numbers of worshippers dropping and many small parishes struggling for survival. His supporters want to see significant growth in the church, and think that means planting lots of new congregations. But will those brave new plants be attractive to Australians in the 21st century, when presumably they will be preaching against same-sex marriage, given the core group of Melbourne Anglicans who campaigned for his election hold the same view? When more than 60 per cent of Australians voted in favour of same-sex marriage in the 2017 plebiscite? Bishop Thorpe claims the Scriptures are clear that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that cannot be set aside. Many significant scripture scholars read the Bible differently. They say the very few Bible verses that are claimed to prohibit same-sex relationships actually prohibit only promiscuous, predatory relationships. But conservatives have latched on to same-sex prohibition as their line in the sand. Some would argue they took up the cause when they lost the debate in the 1990s about ordaining women. It has given them a stick to knock progressive Anglicans into the ground. The election of Bishop Thorpe shows they are winning. The debate has echoes of the nasty debate that raged in the Anglican Church over divorce last century. Divorced people could not remarry in church, and often were made distinctly unwelcome in congregations. It was Melbourne Diocese in the 1970s that overturned that, and pushed the national church to change. And in 1972, Melbourne Diocese called for homosexuality to be decriminalised, eight years before the state government agreed. How sad that Melbourne has now joined the conservatives. Bishop Thorpe is quoted as saying that the same-sex debate is 'a distraction' from the message of the church. No, it is harming the church's message. The church's message is that God is love, and loves all people unconditionally – and that includes gay people, their spouses and their families.
Irish Examiner
a day ago
- Science
- Irish Examiner
Clodagh Finn: The ‘prowling pilot' who became Ireland's first female flight instructor
When I was in my early 20s, I wanted to grow up to be like Dr Daphne Pochin Mould. She was, among other things, a geologist, a photographer, a writer, a 'prowling pilot' and Ireland's first female flight instructor who, it was said, regularly took her hands off the controls to lean out the window and take aerial shots of the landscape below. For a long time, I thought that story apocryphal but to my great delight I see it verified in a spirit-enriching piece by the late Matt Murphy in Sherkin Comment, a Sherkin Island Marine Station publication. Here's the thrilling proof from the mouth of one of her students Simon O'Flynn: 'To take photographs… she would open her side window of the Cessna 150 single-engine plane and with two hands on her camera shoot away.' Simon, for his part, sat beside her white-knuckled, holding his breath. Now, as a much older woman, I still aspire to be like Dr Daphne, as I like to call her, and testimony such as that just sharpens the desire. What I wouldn't give to have accompanied her on one of those unnerving flights. In a sense, though, we can join her in the skies because she left behind an immense body of writing (25 books), which includes this bird's eye vision of the country: 'If anyone asked me to show them Ireland in all her beauty, colour, variety, I'd take them flying in a light plane. HISTORY HUB If you are interested in this article then no doubt you will enjoy exploring the various history collections and content in our history hub. Check it out HERE and happy reading Islands and cliffs, strands and mountains, lakes, rivers, canals, ancient monuments and modern developments, ring fort and turf-burning power station, all are there in an ever changing pattern of colour and form. In another piece, she described flying over Killarney, leaving its wild jungle of arbutus, rhododendron and oak behind as the high mountains of the MacGillycuddy Reeks, boiling and smoking with rain clouds and swirling mists, came into view. It is not surprising to find that Dr Daphne Desiree Charlotte Pochin Mould, to give her her full name, always wanted to write: 'I remember composing stories and poems before I learned to write, and dictating them to members of the family who wrote them down for me. "None of these early efforts, which so far as I remember were often about fantastic animals have, fortunately for me, survived!' What a shame for us, though, as I would love to have read the words of the very young girl who once tried to climb on to the famous prehistoric structure at Stonehenge in Wiltshire only to be immediately hauled off by an irate official. She was clearly spirited and curious from the off. And a bit different. Born in Salsbury in November 1920, eyesight difficulties meant she was home-schooled by an aunt who turned to Homer's ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey, when her young charge was less than impressed by the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. She was brought up an Anglican but would later abandon it, thinking that religion and her quest for truth were incompatible. She wrote: Science for me meant the discovery of truth, reality, the nature of being, finding out what things were, what life was about. As a teenager, she went into the country to identify plants, trees and birds and to examine rocks, fossils and the nearby chalk pits. When she learned to drive, at 17, she borrowed a car and went further afield into Scotland which, with its rivers, glens and mountains, tempted her to move there in the late 1930s. She enrolled in Edinburgh University and began her degree 'with the wail of sirens and the crackle of machine gun fire as the first air raids took place on the Forth Bridge', as she later recalled. She graduated with a first-class honours in geology and later got a research fellowship to study a previously unmapped stretch of land – 100 square miles of it – beside Loch Ness. Her study earned her a PhD in 1946 and crystallised her plan for the future. She wanted to write 'something Highlandy' so moved to a dilapidated house in Fort Augustus. (It was 'also on Lough Ness but I never saw the Monster,' she wrote.) A neighbour Sandy Grant taught her to scythe, make hay and harness a horse to a cart. She also learned how to use a two-wheeled walking tractor and ploughed the three-acre paddock she had worked to reclaim. The same neighbour was a Catholic who attended mass at the nearby Benedictine monastery, an incidental fact that would later have a profound effect on Daphne. While writing a book on the Iona of St Columba, she undertook research which, she said, was designed to 'show up' the saints and the Church for what she thought they really were. Instead, while using the library kindly offered by Fr Augustine at the monastery, she discovered St Thomas Aquinas and a Catholic philosophy that combined reason and religion. 'After a year of struggle and argument', she was received into the Catholic Church in 1950. Life in Ireland Her interest in saints brought her to Ireland. She moved to Galway in 1951 with her parents and later to Aherla in Cork. She spent the rest of her life here and became so immersed in Irish culture that she said she 'passed readily enough for a born Irishwoman!' any time she returned to the UK. That was true even by 1957 when she wrote Irish Pilgrimage which opens with this evocative passage: 'There is a magic in the road, in the very fact of travel, in the track which leads out to the islands. Many indeed seek to travel for the sheer delight of it, for the changing scene and the sense that the delectable mountains are always beyond the next bend or the next city…' The dust jacket offers this charming vignette: 'Miss Mould… is in love with Ireland, with its antiquities, its traditions, its culture, and she imparts her devotion to the reader. She has not only lived with the people; she has joined them in their faith and gone on pilgrimages with them, the length and breadth of the country. She has climbed mountains in the predawn and rowed out to holy islands.' That love was reciprocated. Trawl the archives and you'll find several tributes to this true Renaissance woman who mastered several disciplines and broke new ground by learning to fly in the 1960s. She became Ireland's first female flight instructor and she was also a pioneer of aerial archaeology, recording and sometimes discovering archaeological features from the air. In the 1980s, the Cork Archaeological Survey commissioned her to take photographs for the five-volume series The archaeological inventory of County Cork (1992–2009). Her collection is now held by the Muckross House Trustees in Killarney. It's one that will, in time, come to be considered in the same way as the Lawrence Photography Collection, according to her friend Matt Murphy. Daphne Pochin Mould, a true Renaissance woman who instilled a sense of wonder. Picture: Richard Mills In his beautiful article, he wrote about her difficult final years when, due to failing health, she moved from guest house to hotel to nursing home. She felt like a 'caged lioness', he said, but she continued to write despite the arthritis in her hands and the lack of an archive. Her memory remained razor-sharp. Both Daphne and Matt are gone now. Matt Murphy, founder of the Sherkin Island Marine Research Station and passionate environmentalist, died earlier this year but, between them, they leave behind an invaluable legacy. Let's make sure we preserve it to inspire a new generation and instill a much-needed sense of wonder in this battered but still-beautiful world. Read More Clodagh Finn: How a true pioneer emerged from the shadows
CTV News
2 days ago
- General
- CTV News
'Opening the space to the creatives,' London's Anglican Cathedral will continue to be a place of worship, but also a location for community events
London's oldest church has a very new look. The leadership at St. Paul's Cathedral says it's all about making a space for creativity and fostering new connections with the community. Two things stand out in the re-furbished interior of the Anglican cathedral, the first is that the traditional large oak pews are all gone. Kevin George is Dean of Huron and Rector of St. Paul's Cathedral. 'The church was built for a day when parishioners really were meant to sit in straight rows, put in their place and listen to the voice of the big guy up there, or whatever. That's not who we are anymore.' George told CTV News the pews in St. Paul's were designed to hold about 700 people, but many services now attract about 150 people, or less. George said it's important for people to worship in a way that's comfortable and welcoming. 061925 - St. Paul's cathedral St. Paul's Cathedral in London re-imagined as a multi-use space (Gerry Dewan/CTV News London) 'With the pews removed, we can now situate our chairs together. People can talk together; they can pray together. They can hear one another sing.' According to George, the change also means the cathedral can now be a multi-use space. 'Opening the space to the creatives, to people in our community who are looking for a venue on that venue ladder where they can start with five, six or seven hundred people. They can come in here and perform, they can collaborate, they can record. We can have visual art here. And it's a space that can be used for all kinds of different purposes, banquets and trade shows. It's another space, 8,000ft² in the very heart of London, where people can gather. And that, to us, is exciting.' The other very noticeable change is a labyrinth in the middle of the floor. Twenty-eight feet in diameter, the labyrinth is reminiscent of labyrinths found in many European churches. It's made entirely with wood inlay, including an elaborate medallion in the middle. Parishioner Roland Vishnu sponsored the design and installation of the labyrinth. According to St. Paul's leadership, labyrinths differ in mazes, in that they offer a clear path and are designed to promote spiritual contemplation and calm. 061925 - St. Paul's cathedral St. Paul's Cathedral in London re-imagined as a multi-use space (Gerry Dewan/CTV News London) The labyrinth in St. Paul's was designed and installed by Jason Vivash, owner of Paris, Ontario-based J.L. Vivash Custom Wood Floors. 'This was the biggest, largest piece of medallion that I've ever made. And it is absolutely the most unique one I've made so far,' said Vivash. Originally the space in the middle was going to be plain wood, but Vivash offered to make it something more, and at no additional cost. He told the St. Paul's leadership, 'I would like to create something in the centre of this. So, let's work together. Give me some of your ideas, and let's create something incredible, something that would honor the artisans that we see in this building.' The entire cost of the renovation, including new HVAC and air conditioning equipment, is $1.9M, with about $800,000 still to be raised as part of the Dreams and Visions fundraising campaign. George is confident they'll reach their goal, and he says the focus is on connecting with the community. 'A lot of what I heard when I took on this role only a year and a half ago was 'the door is always locked, we can't get in.' Well, we pride ourselves now in making sure the doors are open every day.' The Anglican Church of Canada will hold its 44th General Synod at RBC Place London next week, and the transformed St. Paul's cathedral will be featured prominently at that event.
Spectator
3 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
The tangled bureaucracy of appointing an Archbishop
Cardinals elected the new Pope within a fortnight but it will take almost a year to choose our next Archbishop of Canterbury. The beloved Anglican interregnum is intended to 'take soundings'. These are unproductive if held in an echo chamber. The chairman of the Crown Nominations Commission for the successor to Justin Welby, Lord Evans of Weardale, is an efficient and discreet public servant. But most of the large group of voting members, including both its C of E bishops (York, Norwich), come from the fastest-declining part of the Church, its liberal wing. Thanks to Welby's reforms, the commission now has no fewer than five members from the wider Anglican communion, only one of whom is from the burgeoning, usually traditionalist African churches (total membership c. 43 million). The others include an engineer from Argentina (total membership c. 22,500), a Maori hemp farmer and a bishop from the ever-shrinking liberal Church in Wales. Then come six elected by the mainly liberal General Synod and three from the ultra-liberal Diocese of Canterbury. Read the last's 'statement of needs' about 'the Archbishop we are seeking', to feel whither the wind bloweth. It orders the next Archbishop to get on well with his or her suffragan, the Bishop of Dover, who shoulders most of the diocesan duties, expressly emphasising the importance of this particular one, the liberal Rose Hudson-Wilkin, a protegée of Archbishop Welby. You would think she had the right of veto over any candidate proposed. The statement also insists that the successful candidate 'has worked and will continue to work constructively with the Living and Loving in Faith Process' (LLF). This entirely liberal project, little known to the outside world, is the latest attempt to permit same-sex marriage in church. Opponents protest at the procedural sleight of hand which evades the rule that a change of doctrine can pass only with a two-thirds majority in all three houses of the synod. If pushed forward, LLF will split the Church at the February synod, with orthodox believers (the growing part of the Church) departing. LLF has been so beset by controversies that even its current chairman, the liberal Bishop of Leicester, Martin Snow, has recently resigned. It was beginning to dribble away. But if Canterbury's 'needs' prevail, it will jump back up again. Oh dear, things were so much fairer when a well-instructed prime minister – say, Harold Macmillan choosing Michael Ramsey – simply made the appointment himself. Without bureaucracy, the established Church sort of worked. With it, it sort of doesn't. Last Saturday, we went to London for a lovely party to celebrate the 90th birthday of my ever-vigorous uncle by marriage, John Oliver, ex-Bishop of Hereford. It was held in a club in Pall Mall. On our walk to and from Charing Cross, we saw the following things: 1) About 30 dog-carts, drawn by horses trotting and occasionally cantering past. They were unpoliced and unstewarded, and dashed along, scattering pedestrians as they turned the corner at the bottom of Haymarket. I loved watching, but they were dangerous. 2) On emerging from the club, several people in morning dress and cavalry officers in ceremonial uniform having come from Trooping the Colour. 3) Thirty seconds later, 100 or so naked people, mainly men, riding bicycles as fast as they could peddle, some carrying Pride flags. The intention, I think, was genial, but the overall impression was genital, and repulsive. The next day, at a party in the country, I met Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary. He told me about his ongoing campaign to dramatise the degradation of the public realm under Labour and brandished a photo taken the day before of two men, naked except for their shoes, smoking weed in the park opposite Apsley House. I wonder if they were two resting bicyclists. I later discovered that we had witnessed an annual event called the World Naked Bike Ride, 'a protest against car culture and oil dependency'. I agree with Mr Jenrick that a growing constituency are utterly sick of exhibitionists of all kinds who hog the public space and create what mayors call a 'vibrant' city. If he could persuade the teams of police currently deployed to arrest solitary women praying outside abortion clinics to clear this mess up, he might one day become prime minister. Sir Geoff Palmer has died, professor of beer and first black professor of anything in Scotland. His obituaries repeated his story that when seeking a job in agricultural research at Nottingham University in 1964, he had been interviewed by Keith Joseph, cabinet minister and future mentor of Margaret Thatcher. In Sir Geoff's account, Joseph 'told me to go back where I came from and grow bananas'. When I first heard this story, I greatly doubted it [see Notes in September and October 2015]. Joseph, said Sir Geoff, was the Min of Ag representative on the interview panel. But Joseph was never an agriculture minister and knew nothing about agriculture. I was also assured by a former MAFF permanent secretary that it was against departmental rules for a minister to interview anyone for such a post. Besides, Joseph, whom I knew, was a scrupulously courteous anti-racist, the only member of Ted Heath's shadow cabinet to refuse to oppose Labour's Race Relations Act. Sir Geoff had got the wrong man. He hotly denied this, but never produced any evidence. Of course, I never doubted his claim that somebody said this unpleasant thing to him, but that person was not Keith Joseph. In further researches, I found a professor long associated with Kew Gardens with a very similar name. I wondered if this might explain the mix-up, but did not push the point in case this too would unfairly blame another. In fairness to Sir Keith's reputation, I think all Sir Geoff's obituaries should take the story down, as has Wikipedia.
