Lesbian Minister in PA

Wow! I just got this article e-mailed to me from my friend Lia. (Thanks for the tip!) The basic news is this: the ecclesiastical court of appeals in the Methodist church that was above the one that defrocked Ms. Stroud has reversed the lower court's decision and decided to reinstate her. What great news! At the moment, I have more questions than answers:

--How did the court come to this decision?
--Is this the highest level of appeal?
--What does this mean for other lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender clergy in the Methodist church?
--How does this affect the larger General Conference's ability to dictate the policies of the United Methodist church?

Hmmmm.... very interesting. I hope this will be a move forward for equal acceptance in the UMC.

Gay teen drama and the church

Apparently a fuss is being kicked up in Virginia over a teenager's play. It's called "Offsides," and it addresses a young man's process for coming to terms with his sexuality (among other things). There's a UCC church in town that invited the playwright to come and speak to them about the controversy. Gotta love the UCC churches--getting into the middle of the censorship debates. :-) Read about it here.

Jane Fonda

I was interested to learn from beliefnet.com that Jane Fonda has recently become a Christian. I guess I'm not up on all the Hollywood gossip, after all.

I found the article very interesting, though. Some salient points: Jane respects Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam, and even meditates as one of her spiritual practices, but she is clear about the fact that she is a Christian. She is, in her words, "attracted to Jesus."

I also was interested to learn that after having a very powerful experience of God's presence while reading the gospel of John, she had a hard time finding a community of faith that supported and built on that experience. I'm glad to see that she found some feminist Christians out there who were able to help her continue in her path.

I think Jane's experience can speak to many of us. First, Christianity is not something that was passed down to her automatically, it's something she accepted for herself, and accepted it because of its distinctiveness and appeal to her personally. Second, it surprises me sometimes, but I think that feminist and progressive Christians are a kind of well-kept secret. But we're out here, I promise, even if we're not always so noisy!

TV Turn-Off Week

I missed getting the memo, and so I watched TV yesterday and this morning (and was it worth it? No--the Red Sox lost.) but here are some interesting/scary statistics about how much time people spend in front of the television. Example: the average American family has the television on for seven hours and forty minutes per day. Click on the first link to open the Acrobat file.

Update on the Unitarian jihad

If you're ready to join the jihad, the first step is to get your own name.

Mine is: Sister Claymore of Forgiveness.

New Pope

Joseph Ratzinger has been elected as the new pope of the Catholic Church. This probably should not come as a surprise, since Ratzinger and John Paul II held similar views on church doctrine, and since John Paul II chose the vast majority of the cardinals who gathered to elect Ratzinger today.

Unfortunately for Catholics who were hoping for a more liberal turn in the direction of the Catholic Church, Ratzinger is not a likely candidate for moderating reforms in Catholic doctrine. One of his more well-known projects is heading up the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is "historically related to the Inquisition." In this capacity, Ratzinger has been an enforcer of church orthodoxy, preventing priests with liberal leanings from rising in the ranks of the Church.

There are many things that are disturbing about this choice. It appears to be a movement by the leading cardinals of the Catholic church away from accepting modern realities. Ratzinger complains that the church is falling apart in Europe, but it seems clear that at least part of the problem there is that it doesn't speak to most of the people in Europe.

What also disturbs me is this: given that Ratzinger was of particular assistance to John Paul II as his health was failing, Ratzinger was one of the people most responsible for the Vatican's disastrous response to the child abuse scandals in Boston a few years ago. Rather than facing the reality of abuse and addressing it forthrightly, the Vatican chose to lift Bernard Law out of Boston, effectively removing him from the reach of US law, and giving him work in the Vatican. Ratzinger honored Law by allowing him to celebrate one of nine funeral masses for John Paul II. In this horrifying scandal, the church, with Ratzinger's full knowledge, is protecting and honoring the protector of abusers. Because of a refusal to face reality, the hierarchy is protecting one of its own and in the process inflicting untold damage on the people it is supposed to be serving.

Ratzinger has chosen the name Benedict XVI. The last Benedict--number 15--was a moderate in the wake of Pius X's conservatism. Let us hope that Ratzinger's Benedict will follow in his namesake's footsteps, rather than his own.

Warning!

The Unitarians are coming! Beware!

So much for observing the Sabbath

This Sunday I preached for two services at a church 30-40 minutes from my apartment. I finished writing the sermon on Saturday, but I like to do a once-over a few hours after I've written something just to smooth out the edges a little bit, so I didn't print it right away.

The next morning, while getting ready for the 8:00am service, I went to print the sermon, and, while the printer did in fact make promising noises, it produced only blank sheets of paper.

The time: 6:50am.

I called Kinko's. They were open. I saved the sermon onto a disk, finished dressing, and we were on our way. It took one and one-half minutes for me to get my 6-page sermon printed, including the time it took to drive up, park, walk in, walk out, and drive away. And the salesperson, while groggy, was very friendly and helpful. As I told Heather, I was horrified that they were open, and at the same time, EXTREMELY grateful.

I guess in another era I would've had to write down an outline and wing it. Or plan ahead. Ahem.

Forums

Am I the only one who finds most message boards to be both frustratingly shallow, and mind-numbingly overwritten at the same time?

Maybe it's because I'm always surfing the religious ones. Or because my eyes hurt from staring at a computer screen all day.

Thought-provoking Literature

Katy has a link to Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology, which in more innocent times my friend Lindsay and I used to read whenever we got ahold of a Citypaper. There are some really neat poems and writings on the home page. I recommend a look.

Who Knew Revelations Could Be So Relevant?

For those of you looking for some creative interpretation of the Bible, this article on Slate is worth a look-see. I give it four stars for creativity, sarcasm, humor and making Britney a spiritual issue (thereby redeeming my earlier post). In particular I recommend the "fulfillment" of Revelations 17:1-5.

FYI

If you're a tried'n'true Amy blog fan, you'll want to know that I preached on Sunday. The sermon is posted in my sermon blog.

Britney Spears

Okay, so this isn't my most "spiritual" topic, but was anyone surprised by Britney's big announcement today? And does her official website seem a little weird, or is it just me?

I just took a quiz on Beliefnet: What Kind of Christian Are You? and it is eerily accurate. I've highlighted the sections that I find particularly eerie.

"Bishop Spong Christian
(a.k.a. "Biblical Revisionist")
You think the Bible is a powerful metaphorical narrative and believe that Jesus was a heroic figure similar to Gandhi. You believe in God as a loving creator and that She will forgive you for just about anything. You're willing to admit that you don't believe in the resurrection.

You go to church for the sense of community and the music and because you like to hector your fellow Christians about their backward ways. You read Toni Morrison, Elaine Pagels, and Bishop Spong, the controversial Episcopalian prelate.

You enjoyed the "The Da Vinci Code" as a thriller and found its ideas about Christian history thought-provoking, if not always historically accurate. Though you probably didn't see it, you're sure that "The Passion of the Christ" presented an utterly backward version of Christianity. You ardently support gay rights and feel guilty that you yourself are not gay. (If you are gay, you're in a loving, committed relationship).

You live in a leafy university town, order Chai at the local coffee house (never Starbucks), and subscribe to The New Yorker. You watch TV so you can talk disdainfully about how bad TV is. You give to charity, preferring the local homeless shelter to those bureaucratic national charities. For you, the crux of Christianity is Jesus' revolutionary message of empowering 'the least of these.'"

I mean really, how did they know that I don't like Starbucks? This thing was better than my Myers-Briggs inventory!

(Cue creepy organ music)

Gender Bias

Pulled from a Slate article. Discuss.

This matters because, whatever the influence of genetics may turn out to be, there is no doubt that the enduring social consensus that women are on average worse than men in math and science plays a major role in shaping women's careers and their career choices. It does so in two ways: through discrimination and through socialization. Contrary to the pie-in-the-sky assumptions of many of Summers' media defenders, studies show that discrimination against women in the academy is alarmingly widespread, if often unconscious. M.A. Paludi and W.D. Bauer conducted a study in which 180 men and 180 women were asked to grade a paper on a five-point scale. When the author was "John T. McKay" rather than "Joan T. McKay," the men on average graded the paper a point higher—and the women scoring the test weren't much more egalitarian. And studies have shown that men writing mathematics papers are less likely to cite women than women are (1.2 percent of the time, compared to 4.8 percent)*. Scientists and engineers may say they aren't biased. But consider the case of classical musicians: Until blind auditions were held for national orchestras, women were radically underrepresented in field of classical music. Many argued that women had less wind power and were biologically incapable of performance at highest levels on many instruments. Since blind auditions have been held, though, the participation of women has risen precipitously—evidence that it was almost entirely discrimination that was keeping women out.

[...]

Steele studies the way stereotypes affect people's performance. And he has found that when women are told that a test is going to measure cognitive differences between genders they tend to do much worse than men. But when they're told a test is gender-blind, they tend to perform as well. The pressure of the "stereotype threat," as Steel terms it, actually leads women to do worse, in other words. The amazing thing is, as Steele convincingly argues, stereotype threat most affects those at the high end of the spectrum in math and science, because they're the ones who are the most identified with the field and have the most to lose as they move upward and are increasingly identified as, say, a "female engineer." This doesn't mean that men aren't outperforming women at the very high end of the bell curve, as my colleague Will Saletan points out; but it makes it look as though socialization is a weighty factor in gender disparities at top levels.

Activist Judges

So the latest conservative beef seems to be with the basic structure of our national government--the independence of the judicial branch. As Dahlia Lithwick writes for Slate magazine here, the New York Times bestseller Men In Black has risen to the top almost exclusively because of recommendations by right-wing commentators. The basic tone of the book is an attack on judges for making decisions the writer doesn't agree with. And it's a best-seller.

It may be that folks who throw the phrase "activist judges" around are not actually trying to attack the foundations of our government by suggesting that the judicial branch should not be independent from the executive and legislative branches. Rather, they may be relying on that independence to provide a foil for their own partisan posturing, knowing that in all reality the judicial system must continue to make independent decisions. (Ironically, they don't seem to be complaining too much about Bush v. Gore, one of the most activist decisions by the Supreme Court in many years.)

The strength of the judicial system is not that it is always right, or even that it is always fair, but that it is a different mode of democracy from the legislative mode. In the judicial system, people get a hearing and the chance to argue the facts. Decisions are made based on a long-standing system of criteria, and careful interpretation of existing law.

It might be possible to argue that the judicial system is less biased than the legislative system of democracy. At the very least, it is possible to argue that it is biased in a different way. Not necessarily in a more "liberal" way, but biased toward the letter of the law, rather than the spirit of political struggle. In fact, in that way it is more conservative, because it preserves the law's effect when momentary political struggles sway public opinion. We need both forms of democracy, however inconvenient, and to me it is a show of bad faith for people to disagree so disrespectfully as to wish for the destruction of the one they are in conflict with. Conflict is the driving force behind our government, and to bring it to an end it to bring to an end the democracy it gives life to.

Back Online

Friends, you'll be glad to know that after much consideration, I decided against baptism into a new branch of the Christian faith this Sunday. I'll continue to blog for you, my loyal readers, as a member of a slightly less exotic faith community--the United Church of Christ. I just don't know what came over me Friday! :-)

Yours,

Amy

Important Announcement

Friends, I am grateful to all of you for the time you've spent reading my blog. I've enjoyed our conversations, comments, discussions, and deep thoughts. Which is what makes what I'm about to say so difficult: This Sunday I am going to be baptized into the Old Order Amish Mennonite Church at services in Lancaster, PA.

After that, I will no longer be able to write to you on this blog.

Again, let me thank you sincerely for all that you have meant to me. If you would like to continue receiving my blog, please e-mail me your postal address and I will send you a hand-written copy of each of my blog updates.

Blessings,

Amy