It's six days now since returning to green Indiana after three-and-a-half weeks on the mostly brown west coast. The fact that I am back to blogging means that I have pretty much resurfaced; the infrastructure of my life (I am a creature of routine if there ever was one) is back up and running. At a macro level, I am immeasurably blessed and grateful; I love my life. At a micro level, things are ... well ... interesting.


One of the tidbits of reality that was impressed on me at the recent General Convention of the Episcopal Church is how many lives my "ministry of the word" touches--whether at this venue, or over on my personal blog, or on the General Convention listserv (the venerable, and often toxic, "HoB/D"). The number of people who sought me out to thank me for…

Will Rowan Williams' two-track proposal gain traction? And if it does, will this be a good thing for conservative and moderately conservative Episcopalians, particularly those who are minorities within more liberal or progressive dioceses?

We have Communion Partner bishops and Communion Partner rectors. I've proposed that there be a Communion Partners Clergy Association that would include all clergy, regardless of order or position.

And what about the laity who wish to jump on the Covenant bandwagon?

What we need is something akin to a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval--a Good Churchkeeping Seal of Approval. Up until now, that "Seal" has been structural and visible communion with the See of Canterbury. But as we have seen in recent years, communion with Canterbury is no bar to rougish and unedifying behavior on the part of either the left or the right, nor does…

As a freshman in college, I was taught that parallel lines never cross. This is the mathematical layman's way of summarizing the fifth postulate of Euclid's Elements of Geometry. Euclid's plane geometry, in which space has no curvature, is the standard geometry that we use to explain the world as we experience it. In a Euclidean world, all triangles are 180 degrees, for instance. Euclidean geometry is beautiful and regular; its elegance and symmetry helps to explain our everyday experience of the world, and for many centuries it was assumed that Euclidean geometry was an absolute explanation of reality.

Mathematicians, however, including Euclid himself, were not happy with the fifth postulate because it was neither self-evident nor provable. This led, in the 19th century, to the development of non-Euclidean geometries, which reject the fifth postulate. As a senior in college, I was introduced to Lobachevsky's non-Euclidean geometry,…