They’ve elected a new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori. You have to look at her biography to see why I’m even mentioning a new religious leader:
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). …
The vast preponderance of scientific evidence, including geology, paleontology, archaeology, genetics and natural history, indicates that Darwin was in large part correct in his original hypothesis.
I simply find it a rejection of the goodness of God’s gifts to say that all of this evidence is to be refused because it does not seem to accord with a literal reading of one of the stories in Genesis. 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.
It’s a good thing that article is loaded with Bible quotes and other religious nonsense, or I’d be tempted to become an Episcopalian. Oh, well, even with all the wacky mythological stuff, she still looks like one of the good ones. Congratulations, Dr Jefferts Schori! While I’m not about to join a church, you do exhibit the kind of sensible perspective on the real world I’d like to see much, much more of in religious leaders…although, looking at the comments here, some Christianists are less than thrilled with the election of a rationalist to head a church, while others seem to be enthusiastic.
(via Kynos)
Very impressive lady.
And a very impressive stance.
Kudos to her.
That picture isn’t her.
This is:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41782000/jpg/_41782816_jeffertsschori203story.jpg
Hmmm…who was that lady? But OK, picture changed.
very impressive and intelligent lady
I am happy for her and sure that God is with her
I went to the link “her biography”, there I saw some impressive stuff but also negative hate email responses from the Rabid Right. It would seem the only love the Rabid Right has is that they love to hate, how sad.
It’s more impressive than you might realize. In electing Jefferts Shori the Episcopal Church is throwing down the gauntlet to conservative elements in the larger Anglican Communion and within the Episcopal Church itself. This is the culmination of years of politicking, and the spark for years more.
I personally respect the Episcopal Church more than just about any other Christian denomination (the Society of Friends comes close). My wife has attended that church for years, and one of the most influential Episcopal parishes in Southern California made her the head of their adult education program – even though my wife already holds clergy credentials in Wicca. That church had the following inscription literally carven in stone on the front of the building:
“Whoever you are, and wherever you find yourself on your journey of faith, you are welcome at this table, which is the center of our lives together.”
And they mean it.
Don’t let that stop you. An Episcopal priest said something to me once that I’m able to quote now verbatim, because it stuck in my mind: “An Episcopalian can believe anything. But really, most of us don’t.”
He was joking, but doctrinal flexibility is a cornerstone of the church, going all the way back to their founding. Episcopalians on the whole are one of the reasons why I take exception to the claim that “faith erodes reason.”
Reading recent news, including this item, I’m hoping that we may be seeing the first really solid signs of the anti-rational extreme Right’s loss of influence.
I have hopes there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when all the freaky anti-Darwin, anti-reason, anti-science types will be total fringers, and will get no mainstream attention. Except in those little “ha-ha, listen to this” news tidbits.
As an Episcopalian (and avid reader of this blog) I am proud of the Church for this, especially on the heels of the Gene Robinson vote a couple of years ago (I was in attendance at some of the services at that Minneapolis convention, and have heard Bishop Gene preach a couple of times).
In fact I’ve read a story about why Robinson was so drawn to the Episcopal church – having been brought up in a repressive church, when he started to go to Episcopal services he was told that he didn’t need to say all the words, just the ones he believed in. I think that this is a fairly big deal – you’re allowed to be your own, questioning person rather than just a sheep. It’s like with the often-quoted “Ten reasons for being Episcopalian” by Robin Williams, two of which are:
You don’t have to check your brain at the door
You get to believe in dinosaurs.
I would add that you also don’t have to be a repressive nutjob too.
Maybe the problem with Episcopalians is all them women and biologists, too. “Oceanographers are just biologists in swimsuits”, says Coulter.
Congratulations, indeed! Yes, I accept that many people think that a knowledge of science makes religion impossible. Nonetheless, how good to see in church leadership a person who has “the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.”
My father was such a Christian. A few years ago, shortly before he died, he told me that he had prayed for my two children, both now in their thirties, almost every day since they had been born. I asked him what he had prayed for, thinking he might say for kindness or a love of God. “I prayed,” he said, “that they would be curious.”
I should have known he would say that. All my life he taught me that there cannot be a conflict between reason and religion, because, in my father’s view, God expects us to use our reasoning ability to work out an understanding of the world.
No, my father was not an Episcopalian; he was a Baptist (pause for anyone who feels the need to moan or snarl). But it certainly is nice for just this one moment to see atheists and Christians alike celebrating the joys of studying squid!
“I prayed that they would be curious.” You know, that was really sweet of him. I mean that.
I was happy to see that Schori was chosen, but it was quickly dashed by the nay-sayers who want to preach the “controversy.” How is picking a woman “controversial?” What century is this?
and
I will just add here that thinking for yourself is a cornerstone of the Baptist faith. The priesthood of the believer. I am proud to call myself an American Baptist. Most of the noise and embarrasment comes from the southern branch of baptists and in my view are on their way to being another denomination altogether.
I am an American Baptist living in the south and I think most of these folks are nuts.
For the reaction by the Freeopers, one always goes to Pam, and she has the goods.
It’s good to see American Christianity doing something good for a change.
Just as the fundies have their code words that the faithful know and recognize, this sentence here is a rephrasing of a very standard Anglican explanation for how the Anglican church determines religious decisions.
It probably comes as no surprise that every religious group has an explanation for why it has made the correct decision, and Christian denominations, even when they’re getting along, still have their own little internal reasons why they think that other denominations don’t have it quite right. Anyway, the story we Anglicans tell ourselves goes something like this:
I note that our new Presiding Bishop has ommited Scripture, probably shoving it into Tradition, and has introduced what I guess I’d have to call Church Consensus in its place. This is a pretty serious shift. I suspect more schism-like noises (but little or no action) in certain parts of the Episcopal church, and some sort of condemnation by the heads of various African Anglican Communion churches. The next Lambeth Conference (every ten years bishops from all over the Anglican Communion get together, talk, disagree loudly, and issue a stack of non-binding but harshly worded resolutions) in 2008 should be interesting. We might actually get a call for the ECUSA to be ex-communicated; however, I don’t think that the current Archbishop of Cantebury would endorse such a move, so it would certainly fail. Still, we’re going to get yelled at.
Well I would disagree with them almost totally here then:
1. You can never, ever lean to heavily on reason. Any religion that uses more reason and less of anything else is most likely to be more ‘correct'(if such a thing is even possible) than ones who don’t. So in this regard Quakers 1 ECUSA 0 :-)
2. Tradition should never, ever be given equal footing with reason. Or for that matter be given any weight whatsoever. You take a case on it’s merits and it’s merits alone. Especially when < 'Tradition" here means what the larger community of Christians has taught and accepted on this question> when there literally is no such thing on virtually any issue outside the major faith tenets. It’s turtles all the way down.
Only PZ could find a squid in a bishop. Or think to look for it.
Being raised Episcopalian, this doesn’t surprise me. When I would attend church occasionally as a child/teenager it always appeared to me that the people at the church were there mainly to be seen. Sure there were a few here and there that appeared to be getting something serious from it, but most just used it as an extension of their buisness meeting round of golf at the two Country Clubs everyone seemed to be a member of.
So what I got from it was that while they all claimed to be there for the “word”, there were really there for the “goods”. So it wasn’t all to serious. If my small sampling is any indication of the whole then their openess to a somewhat radical departure from what other denomications sees as acceptable wouldn’t be that big of a deal as long as they can still be seen on Sunday.
But of course this is just my experience.
Chance:
I agree, but only to a point. This “Reason, Tradition, Scripture” approach sounds like a (somewhat confused) version of the scientific method, which I find refreshing. The “Reason” part is rather obvious, and I suppose I’d lump new research/observation/experimentation into that. The “Tradition” part could be similar to the effect of the current state of opinion and knowledge in the scientific community, and peer-review. “Scripture” might (barely) be compared to researching existing scientific literature.
Of course, in practice I don’t think this is what they’re doing, literally or metaphorically. At least not if I understand their meanings of tradition and scripture. Giving an idea authority merely because most people in your community always have and an old book makes an untestable claim doesn’t work for me.
I don’t think so. Not to belabor this but I don’t think it’s a good analogy. There is so much diversity of opinion in the religion as to render any reference to the evidence based science moot.
In this case it’s some people have thought this way and we won’t examine it because we’ve always done it this way. Not all churches are like this however. But those that do simply can’t use tradition as a meaningful way to find correctness.
I agree that’s sometimes the way it’s done (tradition for its own sake). And yeah, I hadn’t considered your point about the diversity of opinion, that’s a pretty fundamental difference.
I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about the science/evolution angle to this story…all the reports I’ve been seeing have focused on female clergy and to a lesser extent her support for (Robinson?)
Reiterating what was said upthread, the Episcopals don’t seem to be dogmatic much at all. A friend is considering converting, and one of the pamphlets at her house said something like (paraphrased): “We are Episcopal because of the prayers we say and the rituals we perform, not because of what we believe.”
On the other hand, I went to Episcopal school for two years (because they promised I could learn Latin, which they then reneged on) and it was quite fundie in retrospect. Lectures on the devil in rock music, etc. I imagine it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, depending on the leanings of the pastor.
rrt? rrt? Are you the rrt I once knew? One who knew someone called “z” a few years back?? (sorry for the off-topic, pz)
Here’s another religious news item that may interest you:
Tailing a monkey man in search of healing powers
(More OT in response, sorry)
matt: Not sure…probably not but my memory is notorious. Hit me up at my secondary (yay spam!) email address at threepwood76@aol (dot com, of course) and we’ll figure it out. :)
That’s a nice slap in the big fat face of the Fundies!
Chance,
Of course you can. Reason your way into or out of love. Try to substitute reason for compassion and you’ll get a very inhuman (and inhumane) system. Reason is an extremely useful tool, but it can be (and has been) overused by applying it in situations where other tools work better.
Scientists and engineers do it all the time. There’s even a “reasonable” basis for doing so. The basis is the fact, proven by experience, that a process of gradual change and the accretion of knowledge over generations has an excellent record for building up useful ways of doing things. It’s not the blind approach that you might be thinking of: “This is the way we’ve always done it, so this is the way it should be done.” It’s more like, “We know this works. We do not know that this other thing will work better.”
Sure, you can say, “The only way to find out is to try it.” And that’s true, both in its good side and in its bad side. Engineers who depart from traditional approaches to a problem may sometimes come up with a radically better way. They may also fail spectacularly. The more critical something is in terms of its human impact, the less acceptable spectacular failure becomes.
Reason, in fact, cannot work without tradition. Reason has to have inputs: it generates the new only by starting from the old. A new design is developed by first considering old ones and determining what worked well and what worked less well.
In other words, if we don’t give tradition “any weight at all,” then our bridges collapse. The combination of reason and tradition leads to gradual, incremental progress.
It’s there in the name: Episcopal. That is, of the bishops. The tenor of the ECUSA in a particular area will often reflect the tenor of the particular bishop. For example, after the ordination of women was approved in the late 70s, many bishops refused to ordain women or allow female priests to celebrate communion inside their diocese. The prerogative of bishops is not something that is generally messed with. (wrt. the ordination of women, the General Convention did finally force the last holdouts to accept female priests a few years ago, but it was not a move taken lightly)
That said, the ECUSA often accumulates an odd collection of churches even within a single diocese – for example, some of the most conservative ECUSA churches are found throughout the solidly blue mid-Atlantic states. (why? Basically, old money and the churches that the old money families have attended since before the US revolution) Note that the one person mentioned in the article to speak out against Bishop Schori was from Maryland; this doesn’t surprise me. (as an aside, his statement can basically be decoded as “I still don’t like ordained women” – “imperialist” is a code word traditionally used against anyone who thinks that the ECUSA shouldn’t have the same positions on anything sex- or gender-related as the most conservative Anglican churches worldwide, which happen to be located in Africa)
PaulS:
‘Love’ has alot to do with hormones that can override the brain and it’s workings. But if your smart you don’t make rash decisions during that rush phase of meeting another person and you do use reason. Unless of course you don’t.
Where do ‘other tools’ work better than reason. I stand by the fact that it can never be overused.
Your logic is pretty specious here. What a scientist is doing is not based on tradition. At least not in any meaningful sense. He is building upon the work of others. Also if science finds a new, better way it will quickly change and move away from the prior idea. Simply isn’t how religious traditions work.
Thats just bullshit. Religious tradition rarely looks inward or examines anything. When it’s examined and found lacking it virtually never changes instead calls the dissenters heretic and maintains the course.
My wife and I have become Unitarians, which is farther out than Episcopalianism. That’s meant in a good way. (We both used to go to Episcopal churches, but stopped believing in the divinity of Christ.) From Wikipedia: “[A]mong eminent scientists, Lehman and Witty (1931) found that Unitarians were most overrepresented with 81 times the proportion of Unitarians in the U.S. population.” A lot of Episcopalians are very liberal and tolerant. Some are not — different local churches have different personalities. Contrary to what one person said here, the churches we attended were very oriented to achieving positive social change. People did NOT go to church just to be seen. They thought hard about their religion and how to put it into practice in a way to help the less advantaged. I think they made a wise choice in electing the new bishop. She’s a real progressive.
Here’s a Wikipedia entry for her: (Humor — my god, she’s not only a PhD but a primate too!)
“The Rt. Revd. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori (born 26 March 1954 in Pensacola, Florida) is the Presiding Bishop-elect of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. She is the first woman elected primate in the Anglican Communion.
Jefferts Schori attended school in New Jersey, then went on to earn a Bachelor of Science in biology from Stanford University in 1974 and an Master of Science in oceanography in 1977 and a Ph.D. in 1983 from Oregon State University. She also earned her M.Div. in 1994, and was ordained as a priest that year. She served as assistant rector at the Church of the Good Samaritan, Corvallis, Oregon, where she had special responsibility for pastoring the Hispanic community. In 2001, she was called and consecrated as Bishop of Nevada. She was awarded a D.D. (honoris causa) in 2001 from The Church Divinity School of the Pacific. It is a standard practice for a bishop in the ECUSA to be awarded a DD (honoris causa) from her or his alma mater seminary.
She married Richard Schori, an Oregon State professor of topology, in 1979. They have one adult daughter, also Katharine, 24, who is a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force.”
Chance,
You’re talking about how you respond to love. That’s not what I asked. I asked you to reason yourself into or out of love. That is, using reason, persuade yourself to love someone, or to stop loving them.
How would you use reason to create a beautiful sculpture, or write a poem? Would reason be the best tool to comfort a child after his mother’s death? Would you think your way through a fight for your life?
Read through those three sentences again. What do you think tradition is, if not building on what has gone before?
It would be nice, but it’s not nearly that neat in practice. Science is actually a fairly conservative discipline. The scientific community is slow to commit to something new, instead preferring to test it thoroughly and make sure it really is better than existing models. And that’s just the theoretical part. The human element adds still more complexity. I’d like to suggest The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. He says it better than I can.
I’m sorry, but as you put it, that’s just bullshit. Chance, how much have you actually studied the history and practice of religion in general, and the Episcopal Church in particular?
Is scatology really your best argument Chance?
“Reason” is nothing more than a set of principles for moving from an input to a conclusion. When an engineer goes to build a new circuit, he doesn’t just sit down and work out Ohm’s Law for himself all over again. He looks at what has been done before, then decides whether and to what extent he can improve it. If he is trying something radically new, it is still grounded in something that someone worked out before him, though perhaps he will be doing something entirely novel with it.
Take your students on a desert island. Strip away ALL their “tradition” – that is, the language they use, their cultural history, their education (which is nothing but the history of what others have discovered and found workable). Take away everything that connects them to the past of their culture. That will, of course, include any training in reason that they might have had.
I don’t know about you, but at that point I don’t like their chances on that island.
As for your ideas about opposition to women as clergy, those are simply, factually wrong. Opposition to female clergy is nearly ALWAYS based largely on scriptural arguments. Tradition plays a role, in the sense I described earlier (“If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”), but scripture is key in those debates. It certainly was in the case of the Episcopal Church.
No, it is an argument from practicality. If you present an engineer with a radical new idea, he will want to know why you think it will work better than the designs he already has. And he will expect you to prove thoroughly that it will work better before he gives up those designs.
The more critical the application, the less willing he will be to use something new. That’s simple prudence on his part: if people are going to die as a result of his design failing, he’s going to want to stick to things that he is confident will not fail. Doing otherwise would be irresponsible.
You’re right that tradition slows progress. It also slows and prevents disasters. As with so many things, the ideal situation is a balance.