Sunday, January 17, 2016

Sunday morning breakfast links

I'd have been better off this morning if I hadn't looked at the weather map and learned that it's minus-4 outside --- and more cold is predicted overnight. Now I'm cold, too.

It's been a busy week blog-wise, so I'm taken the easy way out by sharing links to a couple of articles I've been reading before dawn's early light.

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The Des Moines Register has an excellent piece today about Iowa's Muslim community --- you can find it here (but be prepared for a political advertisement when the video comes up).

I'm not sure how many Iowan's are aware that Cedar Rapids is home to the oldest mosque in the United States, the Mother Mosque of America. You can learn more about it here.

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The Episcopal Church had its collective hand slapped this week in Canterbury during a meeting of top bishops in what's called the Angliican Communion, a loose affiliation of national churches that trace their origins to the Church of England.

The U.S. church is the most socially liberal of these churches, open in all aspects now --- including marriage --- to LGBTQ people, with the Church of Canada coming in a close second. This has caused considerable consternation, especially in Africa, where the churches are far more conservative (at least one African bishop has expressed support for not only imprisoning but in some cases killing gay people).

Anyhow, a majority of those conservative "primates" recommended a variety of sanctions against the U.S. church, to which our presiding bishop, Michael Curry, responded with a good deal of grace.

Here's a link to Ruth Gledhill's response. Gledhill, who writes from an orthodox Church of England base, covered religion for The Times of London for many years and now is a contributing editor to Christianity Today.

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Finally, here's a piece by David Gushee that's a few days old now --- from Religion News Service --- that takes a look at the difficulties at Wheaton College, bastion of Evangelical Christian higher education, when Prof. Larycia Hawkins made the grave error of suggesting that Christians, Jews and Muslims worship the same God.

Land a Goshen --- bring me the doctrinally correct smelling salts, Maude.

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