Diocese of Niagara: where are the bodies buried?

Posted on by
2

Under the cathedral parking lot, apparently.

They were buried in the 19th century and have lain there unmolested ever since. The diocese plans to dig them up to rescue them, as Dean Peter Wall put it, from “asphalt hell.” It has nothing to do with the revenue the diocese will collect from the multimillion dollar condos planned for the land. Nothing at all.

From here:

Nineteenth century records stored in a McMaster University library may bring the Niagara Anglican diocese much closer to identify the remains of hundreds of people buried under Hamilton’s Christ’s Church Cathedral parking lot.

“The church has actually kept very, very detailed records of who was interred in the cemetery like that,” said Myron Groover, a librarian of archives and rare books at McMaster. “And those records all still exist, and in fact, are preserved in multiple copies.”

The bodies, Groover says, were buried from 1832 to 1853. And if the diocese gets its way, the remains be exhumed and identified — all in order to make way for a multi-million dollar condo project.

On Wednesday, the Very Rev. Peter Wall told city councillors the Niagara Anglican diocese would like to identify and remove the bodies, now buried in “asphalt hell,” beneath the parking lot of the James Street North church.

The Anglican Gaia hypothesis

Posted on by
2

Anglicans today are consumed by all thing temporal and few things transcendent. Hence,  they are participating in the Season of Creation:

A CEREMONIAL water-walk along the Great Lake, in Toronto; a river clean-up in Swaziland; and a protest by women religious at a landfill of radioactive material are among the activities that will take place this month to mark the Season of Creation.

[…..]

In Canada, a coalition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people will walk along the Great Lake waterfront to promote the better protection of waterways. A bi-weekly vigil and protest is being held at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri, where radioactive material is stored. It is being led by Sr Jeanne Derer, who said that the the Franciscan Sisters of Mary were “committed to acting in the name of justice and love for Creation”.

The environmental co-ordinator for the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, the Revd Dr Rachel Mash, spoke of a second year of drought. “If rainfall does not improve, the city of Cape Town could run out of municipal water by March,” she said. “Climate change has affected rain patterns, and the worst is yet to come. We have stolen the earth from our children. As Anglicans, healing the earth is a mission priority.”

If “healing the earth” sounds suspiciously like attributing life-like qualities to an inanimate object, it’s because it is. The Anglican eco-justice movement is a disguised form of Gaia worship.

Ironically, James Lovelock, the environmentalist who came up with the Gaia hypothesis has now repudiated it, demonstrating, once again, that the more contemporarily trendy the church attempts to be, the more irrelevant it becomes:

Lovelock is probably best known in environmental circles as the progenitor of Gaia theory – the idea that the planet is a self-regulating, living organism. In 2006, he boosted his green credibility even further with his bestselling book The Revenge of Gaia, whose doomsday narrative predicted that by 2100 climate change would have wiped out 80 percent of the world’s population.

But Lovelock has since renounced this view. Though he still thinks carbon dioxide is a problem because of its warming effects on the climate, he now believes the threat is not immediate.

His change of heart was brought about partly by being in Oslo when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was not impressed by the calibre of the scientists attached to the IPCC – least of all its then-head Rajendra Pachauri “who turned out to be somewhat corrupt.”

“There is global warming. But the stupid bloody academics screwed it up,” he says now – meaning that they got their sums wrong and exaggerated the speed with which the planet is warming.

A bigger worry, he says, are the wrong-headed policies being introduced supposedly to combat “climate change.”

He particularly loathes wind turbines because they are expensive, inefficient and environmentally damaging. The only reason they are being built, he says, is because “there is so much money in renewable energy. I’m sure there’s giant corruption going on.”

The solution, he argues, is nuclear power which has had a terrible press because of green propaganda most likely funded by fossil fuel industries. Nuclear’s health risks have been exaggerated by credulous greens who say “there’s no amount of radiation that can’t give you cancer.”

Pagans want their buildings back

Posted on by
1

From here:

A leader of some of Britain’s pagans is demanding the ‘return’ of two church buildings as compensation for property they claim was stolen from them during the conversion of England 1,300 years ago.

The Odinist Fellowship, representing more than 1,000 pagans, has written to the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby also demanding that the pagans be given a public apology.

What the Odinist Fellowship has failed to notice is that the buildings have already been returned to the pagans. It’s just that now they call themselves Anglicans.

Why Welby?

Posted on by
4

Justin Welby, supposedly an evangelical byproduct of big oil and Holy Trinity Brompton – home of the industrial strength evangelism programme, Alpha – is preoccupied with all the things we have come to expect from an Anglicanism that has capitulated to the spirit of the age: homoerotic sex, global warming, wealth redistribution, globalism, transgenderism, lady bishops. You get the idea – all the important stuff.

While the Anglican Communion crumbles around him, Welby has managed to find the time to climb out from under the rubble to declare that Britain’s economy is broken. Are Webly’s extra-curricular obsessions a diversionary tactic? Or perhaps he just can’t face the prospect of following in his predecessor’s footsteps by failing to do his own job and has decided to do someone else’s instead, hoping no one will notice.

Someone has and he is asking: what is the point of the Archbishop of Canterbury?

What IS the point of Archbishop Welby? QUENTIN LETTS questions why the Church of England leader is giving his views on the economy rather than filling emptying pews

The British Social Attitudes survey found the number of people who belong to a religion has for the first time dropped below half of the population.

Only 47 per cent of us now align ourselves with an organised religion and only 15 per cent say we follow the Church of England. Fifteen per cent!

As the U.S. novelist Raymond Chandler nearly said, it’s enough to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. If only they would.

Unfortunately, today’s bishops are too wet to be stirred to such action.

As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, he only seems interested in issuing Left-wing cliches about Brexit and egalitarianism.

The fundamentals and the mysteries of belief never seem to pass the lips of this outwardly dull ex-oil executive.

Yesterday’s statistics suggest the C of E is in a dire state.

Here is a once mighty civilising influence, an institution which from the time of Henry VIII has helped mould our sense of national identity and the British character.

It has for 500 years helped the poor and spread ideas of mercy and justice. Its Book Of Common Prayer and King James Bibles are wonders of world literature. This most lyrically Protestant of Churches has for half a millennium defined laws and inner horizons on morality and mortality.

Now barely one in six of us admits to being an Anglican and more than half of us set our faces against any organised idea of the spiritual and transcendent.

In other words, when our loved ones die, more than 50 per cent of us stonily refuse to countenance any glimmer of optimism that their souls may have passed elsewhere, and accept some cold, ultra-rationalist view that we humans are no more than a mere bagatelle of skin and gristle, extinguished at death as surely as a guttering candle.

How did Archbishop Welby respond to yesterday’s depressing social attitudes figures?

I wish I could say he met this crisis head-on, saying he understood or disputed the findings. I wish I could tell you he knelt in Trafalgar Square in public penance, or issued a fire-and-brimstone sermon, or told a joke, or issued a blood-curdling curse on all our houses.

Instead, he gave us his views on . . . the economy. He was putting his name to a report by a Blairite think-tank about economic justice and telling us (not that anyone was listening) Britain’s ‘economic model is broken’ and ‘we need to make fundamental choices about the sort of economy we need’.

Oh, and he was writing an opinion article for the Financial Times. That’s really going to bring in the faithful.

The report promoted yesterday by Welby had all the usual buzzwords and phrases of the London centre-Left: social commission . . . gap between rich and poor . . . new vision for the economy . . . zzzzzz.

Interfaith replaces Christian faith

Posted on by
6

Western Anglicanism seems to have reached the point where it no longer believes in its own creeds. After all, if Anglican clergy actually believed that God came to earth as a man, if he is the propitiation for our sins, if he rose bodily from the dead, if he is alive today and will one day return, surely they would want to convince others of this. Including those of other faiths. Including Muslims – they rarely tire of telling us how inclusive they are.

Rather than “make disciples of all nations” the mission has become “observe similarities with all religions”.

From here:

St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church in Leamington, Ont. made headlines recently with an ongoing foray into interfaith cooperation.

Following its annual picnic last September in which the church had invited Syrian refugees to attend, St. John established an arrangement with a local Muslim community to use the church’s community hall. A CBC report was shared thousands of times on social media, and the Anglican Journal later offered its own coverage.

At a time of rising Islamophobia across Canada and around the world, instances of solidarity between Christians and Muslims such as that at St. John provide counter-examples of Canadian attitudes toward Islam. The Rev. Andrew Wilson, rector at St. John, has received much positive feedback since the story on his church picked up traction.

“The response that people have actually sent to me, they said, ‘This is Canadian. This is who Canada is.’ And they say, ‘Yes, and this is who Christ is.’ So I’ve had both responses,” Wilson said.

Islamic prayer and worship within St. John Anglican church has provided an opportunity for the Anglican clergy and members of congregation to observe similarities between Muslim and Christian worship.

Fred Hiltz aims for “good disagreement” on same-sex marriage

Posted on by
6

Does anyone remember Rowan Williams’ attempt to solve the same-sex marriage mess in the Anglican Communion using The Covenant? It was still alive and kicking – well, twitching at least – as little as five years ago, yet now it’s deader than the dandruff falling from Rowan’s eyebrows.

Justin Welby ignored The Covenant and, instead, imposed “consequences” on provinces that defied the ban on same-sex marriages. No one, least of all Welby, took them seriously.

Having now jettisoned both The Covenant and Consequences, Welby has settled on the idea of “good disagreement”, an ecclesiastical version of the cold war with ersatz pieties injected into it for appearances’ sake.

Fred Hiltz has jumped on the good disagreement bandwagon and is applying it to the Anglican Church of Canada. Sorry, he is embracing it.

The question is, if same-sex marriage were to remain forbidden in the ACoC, would anyone be proposing good disagreement as the solution for calming bruised liberals? Of course not: the battle would continue and all we would hear about would be prophetic voices, inclusion, justice and equality, laced with frequent references to a rubber stamping holy spirit.   Good disagreement is just another smoke screen designed to cloud the judgement of conservatives in order to keep them in the fold, so as to continue to collect their offerings.

From here:

My own read is that many in our church are coming to accept and declare that we will never agree on this matter. There will always be those who favour same-sex marriage and those who oppose it, each from the ground of their own wrestling with the Scriptures and the long-held teaching of
the church on the nature of marriage. The challenge is, how do we live with such deep-seated differences of conviction?

At the heart of this challenge are two things—the acknowledging of our fears and the embracing of good disagreement.

Of the fear, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby addressed his own church at a General Synod in 2014, saying, “There is great fear among some, here and round the world, that that will lead to the betrayal of our traditions, to the denial of the authority of Scripture, to apostasy, not to use too strong a word. And there is also a great fear that our decisions will lead us to the rejection of LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender] people, to irrelevance in a changing society, to behaviour that may seem akin to racism. Both those fears are alive and well in this room today.”

Of the nature of good disagreement, 
the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, David Ison, wrote in 2015: “There is no expectation of achieving any consensus—in either direction—in the foreseeable future. But there is a task to be done of encouraging those within the church who are at odds on this issue to express their concerns in a safe environment, listen carefully to those with whom they disagree profoundly, find something of Christ in each other and consider together what the practical consequence of disagreement might be. From New Testament times the church of Christ has had to face disagreement. Fashioning our life as a church includes finding ways to ‘disagree Christianly’.”

I believe that in our church there is both a commitment and a capacity to do just that—to disagree in a manner that does not demean one another, but honours our calling in Christ. In good disagreement, no one is made to feel their position is of no value. No one feels belittled, walked over or pushed out. In good disagreement, there is, in truth, a continuing place for everyone in our church.

Comparing Anglican reaction to Barcelona vs Charlottesville

Posted on by
10

Fred Hiltz’s response to what happened in Barcelona and Charlottesville is reasonably representative of the reaction of other Western Anglican leaders.

For Barcelona he concentrates mostly on praying, in particular for our enemies:

So long as we pray for them, let us be bold in praying for those who with such malicious intent inflict such horrific suffering on others. Let us pray that they be turned from their malice, their hearts be moved and their plans thwarted.

He goes on to denounce terrorism without being at all specific about the particular brand of terrorism – they could have been marauding Mennonites, after all.

With people of all faith traditions who condemn the terrorism that stalks our world, we gather in our churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, in our homes and in our public squares, turning with one voice and one heart to God.

When it comes to Charlottesville, things are quite different. No prayers are offered for those being violent, nor does Hiltz shrink from identifying them as white supremacists; instead, he denounces them – quite rightly – and demands secular leaders denounce them.

Could the fact that Hiltz fails to denounced Islamic Jihadists and their sympathisers along with calling for imams to do the same mean that he and his fellow clergy are shamelessly biased? Does Hiltz think white supremacists are not worth praying for because they are beyond redemption? It is tempting to think so.

In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, many governors, senators and mayors across the United States have called on the President to be unequivocally clear in denouncing the principles and activities of white supremacy. Many world leaders have also called him to exercise strong leadership in this regard.

Ontario Elementary teachers receive inclusiveness training

Posted on by
11

Elementary school teachers in Ontario are being offered Inclusiveness Training that focusses on all matters LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP . For those few of you who have no idea what that means – I’m sure it is very few – here goes: Lesbian, Gay, Genderqueer, Bisexual, Demisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Twospirit, Intersex, Queer, Questioning, Asexual, Allies, Pansexual, Polyamorous.

So you can rest assured that if junior enters elementary school in Ontario perfectly normal, he is liable to emerge as demisexual, or at the very least, polyamorous. I imagine the best you can hope for is asexual.

Diocese of Ottawa parish hosts a course on Islam

Posted on by
2

Christ Church Seaway has as its motto “to know Christ and make him known”. I first heard this in a visit to St. Paul’s in Darien, Terry Fulham’s church; that was their mission statement.

Christ Church Seaway has decided to make Christ known by inviting an imam to the church to talk about Islam, not something that Terry Fulham had in mind, I suspect. There is nothing at all surprising about this: for years liberals have been stealing words and phrases used by evangelicals in order to twist them into meaning something different. For another example, I’m sure you have noticed that no decision is made at an Anglican synod without the wholehearted endorsement of the “Spirit”. Another spirit, not the Holy Spirit.

From here:

It is common for churches to offer courses on Christian spirituality during the season of Lent. This year, Christ Church Seaway hosted a different kind of Lenten course. In response to local confusion about Islam and how Christians should respond to a growing Muslim presence in our region, The Rev. Patrick Stephens decided that the time was right for his community to formally begin the work of inter-religious dialogue.

A special guest speaker was present for the first session and helped the group get started on the right foot. Imam Dr. Mohamad Jebara from Ottawa’s Cordova Centre shared with the group about his own faith and was gracious in responding to questions from the floor. The course ran for a total of five sessions and was based around readings, video presentations, and group discussions.

Anglican clergy encounter the real world

Posted on by
1

For years I’ve been convinced than Anglican clergy live in a theological bubble, drifting aimlessly on an ocean of meaningless letters generally preceded by LGBT. Now, it seems Anglican deacons are awakening from their stupor and, much as Plato’s cave dwellers, wish to see what lies beyond the rainbow shadows that have hitherto been their only encounter with the cosmos and venture into the Real World.

To this end, they have sought inspiration not, as one might have hoped from the Bible, but from Elizabeth May and Leonard Cohen, the first of whom sees everything through a green mist and the second a sexual haze.

From Leonard they learned that “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” and from Elizabeth that “If you don’t have informed practice, you’re just flapping your arms in the wind”, rather like one of her beloved windmills.

After that blaze of illumination, who needs the Bible?

From here:

Hosted by the Chapter of Deacons of the Diocese of British Columbia, the conference brought together more than 70 deacons from almost every diocese in Canada, as well as representatives from U.S.-based The Episcopal Church, to talk about poverty, homelessness and reconciliation.

The conference kicked off July 27, in the evening, with an address by Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada.

Reflecting on a famous line from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” (“There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in”), May challenged the deacons to engage with the tension between the perfection of God’s creation and the pain and brokenness of the world.

[….]

Sharing from her own experience with tent city, she noted that good intentions are often not enough to make real and lasting changes in people’s lives, and that “lovely acts of kindness that don’t change anything” aren’t enough if they aren’t coupled with a wider analysis of the structural barriers marginalized people face.

“If you don’t have informed practice, you’re just flapping your arms in the wind,” she said.