December 2012 - Dialogue - lists.wedgeblade.net

On Switching from 2012 to 2013
by steve har 31 Dec '12

31 Dec '12

Dec 31 End of year Accomplishments & Just How to Engage New Chalenges? 2012 Accomplishments via last lines in novels The Truth & Guards, Guards by Terry Pratchett Because nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth. Perhaps the magic would last. Perhaps it wouldn't. But then, what does? A River Runs Through It by Norman McLean: Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. Are there any questions? –Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale 1986 ------- 2013 Ways to Engage Looking for 13 ways of engagement in 2013 via YouTube Clips Here are 4 candidate how tos - less than 6 minutes Encourage skillful means http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozRK7VXQl-k Navigate via GPS or with distinctions of worth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g8ue3dYpN0 Be a spectator or play in a self-chosen game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJEZaJKqbwk Singing in the rain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcD1AeMx5II Any others [less than 6 minutes]? Blessings -- Steve Harrington -- Steve Harrington

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Christmastide greetings 2012
by DOUGLAS DRUCKENMILLER 29 Dec '12

29 Dec '12

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Attached is a short Christmas Letter with a few highlights of our year's special events. We hope you and your family are well and we wish you a happy new year. A photo album of our year's highlights can be viewed here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151388343936882.538269.523531881… We'd love to hear from you if you haven't already sent us an update. Doug and Pat

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John Burbidge
by Tracy Longacre 29 Dec '12

29 Dec '12

Is John Burbidge on either of these lists? John, if you are -- I've responded to your e-mail several times, but I'm guessing my mails are going to your SPAM folder? Because it seems you are not getting them. Sent a message via Linked-In as well. Don't know how else to communicate! Tracy E. Longacre from Yaoundé, Cameroon just another child of God Blog: http://tlongacre.wordpress.com Run Blog: http://revruns.blogspot.com Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tlongacre/ ———-O0ooo— ———–(——)— ————)–-/—- ————(_/- —-ooo0O—- —-(——)—- —–\-–(– ——\_)-

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12/27/12, Spong: Learning about Europe’s Economy and Christianity’s Place in it
by Ellie Stock 27 Dec '12

27 Dec '12

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Learning about Europe’s Economy and Christianity’s Place in it Throughout the past few years, and certainly as a factor in the recent American presidential race, the state of the economy has been front and center. An important aspect of this debate is our sense of increasing globalization that ties all nations into a single world economy. The Dow Jones Average has been whipsawed by the economic crises in Europe, for example, with the almost daily threats of economic collapse in Greece, Italy and Spain. Most people do not yet embrace how deeply interdependent the world has become economically and, especially, how interdependent world banking has become. The potential collapse of the economy of Spain was feared because it would bring with it the collapse of most of the major banks of the world including the United States. So, I made it my business while in Europe recently to get a first hand look at those things that now threaten us all economically in this global village that our world has become. Each nation seemed to be approaching the crisis differently. My first stop was in the United Kingdom where Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, has opted for an austerity approach to the threatened economy of his nation. Unrest is obvious as the price of university education in the UK has tripled, health care cutbacks have been instituted and the Value Added Tax (VAT) on all purchases has been raised significantly, thereby inflating the price of every purchase. As a result of this strategy, the economy of the UK has slipped back into a recession and unemployment is still very high. France had an election in May in the midst of this European crisis and the Socialist party came to power. True to his party’s standards, France’s new President Francois Hollande opted to address the crisis by pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy and more public money to alleviate the economic stress of the masses. In was an approach that was the exact opposite of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the economies of Greece, Italy and Spain have been put under pressure from the European Union to put their fiscal houses in order as a pre-requisite for receiving the monetary assistance that would make national bankruptcy no longer inevitable. Germany, whose economy is Europe’s strongest, has become as a consequence the dominant political power in the continent, accomplishing through economic means what that nation sought to accomplish through military might in World War II. Rising from the ashes of defeat, a prosperous Germany now faces the response that all dominant powers always receive. Yes, there is gratitude from those Germany is able to rescue, but there is also resentment and thus hostility flowing from those forced into frugality against their wills. Spain totters on the edge of economic disaster with a conservative right wing government. Its unemployment rate is above 25%, and constant demonstrations that recall the memories of the Spanish Civil War mark its national life. Both Greece and Italy face ongoing political upheaval. It is of great interest to this American observer to see that whatever government is in power, whether liberal or conservative, is either blamed for the economic turndown or for not having done enough to restart economic growth. The fact is that in an interdependent world, the tide of the world economy will carry all nations and the particular government in power at the time will rise or fall on that tide with little or no ability to change that nation’s circumstances dramatically. Whether we were in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Hungary or Spain, the consensus was that the world’s economic collapse of 2008-2009 has been stopped, but that the progress out of that deep hole has been too slow to keep hope alive. The future at worst is bleak, and at best is not clear. As is always the case there will be overt political fallout for all those in power, whether liberal or conservative, until a full pattern of economic growth is established. There were several other things that also became obvious to me as we journeyed through these formative nations in Western civilization. The first is that boundaries are falling away in Europe faster than most of the people are emotionally prepared to accept or to admit. The common currency, the Euro, has brought a new sense of unity to the countries of Europe that most Europeans have not even imagined before. England still has its Pound Sterling, Sweden its Krona, Hungary its Forint, but the Euro has become a powerful sign of European oneness. The European Common Market now sets policy for all the member states on working conditions, environment, health standards and pay scales, which among other things are designed to make men and women doing the same work equal in compensation. Nation states resent this imposition on their sovereignty, but they recognize the impossibility of going on their own economically and so they bite their tongues and accept it. Grumbling is high, action is minimal. The second insight I gained on this trip was that the migration of people across Europe in search of employment is wide open. Citizens of the European Union no longer need to clear passport control to enter a member nation. Business leaders fly regularly from London to Moscow, Paris to Stockholm, Copenhagen to Rome, Zurich to Madrid in the same way that American business people criss-cross this nation by air on a daily basis. It is no longer a “foreign” trip. The populations of every European nation are today deeply integrated. One business I had the chance to visit had employees from Germany, Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. They all spoke German and English as well as the language of their own country of origin. Once there is economic unity, which is not far from being present now, political unity will surely follow. There is no illustration in history that might suggest otherwise. With people crossing boundaries that once seemed invincible, political unity will surely follow and the loyalty of citizens to a United States of Europe will in another century or so be at least competitive with if not deeper and more significant than loyalty to one’s nation of origin. That is the pattern that we have followed in the United States where today for most Americans, loyalty to this nation supersedes the loyalty to the state of our origin. Rapid population mobility makes that inevitable. My third insight was that in this scenario, it does not seem to matter that nation states of the past are today breaking into even smaller ethnic states: The Czech Republic and Slovakia have replaced Czechoslovakia. Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Slovenia are today where Yugoslavia once stood. The Soviet Union has dissolved and in its place are now Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Uzbekistan and others who are now self-governing units. Belgium is considering a split between its Flemish and its Walloon citizens. Scotland is about to vote in a referendum on Scottish independence. None of these smaller nations alone would be viable economically, but as States in the United States of Europe they can have the best of both worlds. Local autonomy is merging with corporate and national interdependence. My fourth insight was that Europe has one other reality with which it must deal. It has a history filled with dark chapters, marked by war, torture, genocide and the experience of being both the conqueror and the conquered. There is about much of this history a deep, corporate guilt. We saw this best in Hungary, a land that has been overrun constantly in its history, first by the Mongols, then by the Turks, the Hapsburgs, the Germans and the Soviets. Its history is filled with pain, deprivation and defeat. It also knows anti-Semitism and it still recalls the Jews who once lived in their midst, but who are no more. That is also true in Germany, Austria and Spain. We saw places where synagogues once stood, but are now marked by memorial monuments. We saw Jewish cemeteries that had been destroyed and desecrated. We saw public buildings into which Jewish tombstones had been placed as a kind of trophy. We saw memorial shoes planted on the bank of the Danube Promenade in Budapest, erected to mark the place where hundreds of Jews were lined up and shot with their bodies falling into the river to be washed by its tide into the Black Sea. We also saw the dark side of Communism, a system built on the dreams of equality, but which in actuality descended into the reality of slavery. We talked with Hungarians whose parents and grandparents had been removed to the Soviet Union as “war reparations laborers” to work almost as slaves in Soviet work camps and who were never heard of again. Europeans have known dictatorships of both the right and the left. They have known oppression and murder, dislocation and tribal hatreds. They see hope in an emerging sense of European oneness. They embrace that hope gingerly, not sure whether they can trust it, but seeing no alternative. They are in the vanguard of an emerging new trans-tribal consciousness that sees humanity as one, that now understands the fact that cooperation is better than war. They are also becoming aware that all religions in their past have been more divisive that helpful, that human consciousness does not stop at any boundary whether it be nationality, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or religion. A new world is being born. No, it is not an easy or comfortable world, but it is now seen as an inevitable world. With that new world, a new religion will of necessity also evolve. It, like the nations of Europe, will not deny its past, but it will have to transcend the limits that marked that past, surrender most of its irrational claims to have ever captured truth in its traditional religious forms and allow itself to evolve into something it has never been before. The changes in Europe make this an exciting time to be a Christian. The evolution of consciousness will require an evolution in religion. Christianity will be and must be changed into something it has never been before. Hopefully, we Christians will merge the treasures of our past with the dreams of our future. Europe, battered and bruised by its past, is prepared, I believe, to lead the world into that future. I hope a revived and open Christianity will be willing and able to be part of that tomorrow. ~JSS Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Colin T. Bent from Tulsa, writes: Question: I noted your use of the term “Post Christian world.” What do you mean? For some time it has come to me that when Jesus used the term, “I will be with you to the end of the eon” it meant to the end of the Christian era and that is the time we are in now. Am I totally confused or muddled with my thoughts here, or am I on to something? Answer: Dear Colin, My sense is that you have blurred some important distinctions and this has created a problem for you. First of all, you seem to be assuming that the text you quote, not exactly accurately, should be literally applied. That is a misuse of scripture. None of the words that we attribute to Jesus result from either a tape recording or an eye witness report. The particular text you are quoting is from Matthew’s gospel and it reads, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” It is attributed to the Risen Christ, and is part of the first quotation in any source that was said to have been spoken by Jesus after his crucifixion. In the opening chapter of Matthew, the annunciating angel says to Joseph that the baby’s name will be called Emmanuel which means “God with us.” The words attributed to the risen Jesus in Matthew’s gospel are designed by that gospel writer to complete the circle and to demonstrate that Jesus accomplished in his adult life what the annunciation prior to his birth proclaimed that he would be. It is, therefore an attempt both to affirm and to defend the messianic claim being made for Jesus by his followers. The end of time surely did not refer to the end of the Christian age because no one knew at the time Matthew was written, that there would be anything called the Christian Age. The followers of Jesus when Matthew was written were still members of the synagogue. There is no evidence that Jesus meant to establish a new religion or that he would have or could have said or used the words that you attribute to him. What did dominate the early Christian movement was the anticipation of the end of the world, which, they believed, would be marked by the second coming or the return of Jesus. This hope seems to have declined by the time the Fourth Gospel was written and John’s version of Pentecost or the coming of the Holy Spirit begins to be substituted for the literal second coming of Jesus. Pentecost stories appear only in the book of Acts and in the Fourth Gospel, both of which appear to be works of the tenth decade. Now, with that in mind, it is clear that Jesus did not promise to be with us to the end of the Christian era. The author of those words meant the second coming of Jesus, which would in that period of history mean the end of the world. What I mean by a Post-Christian era is that we have arrived at a time in history when the Christian Church or the Christian faith no longer dominates the life of Western Europe and the United States. The erosion of this influence began with the work of Copernicus and was brought to full fervor in the Enlightenment with the work of such people as Galileo and Isaac Newton. Christianity’s influence in Europe and in the United States today is minimal and, where it is influential, it appears to be so in the most negative of ways: Witness the Church’s war on women, which includes not only its negativity to both contraception and abortion, but also its still widely voiced hostility toward those who want to have women be priests, bishops, archbishops and Popes If that were not already enough, we could also point to the church’s continued prejudice against homosexual persons and its ill-fated attempt to diminish the insights of Charles Darwin. Ours is today a secular society and hence a Post-Christian era. I hope this helps. ~John Shelby Spong Announcements Note from the editors: The following message was meant to be included in last weeks essay. Our apologies for its delay. "We send to all of our subscribers and readers our best wishes for the Christmas season and our hope for a peaceful and just world in the New Year." ~John Shelby Spong and Christine Spong Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support(a)johnshelbyspong.com or 503-236-3545. Copyright © 2012 ProgressiveChristianity.org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have a membership at our website. Our mailing address is: ProgressiveChristianity.org 3530 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Unit 1 Portland, OR 97214 Add us to your address book . .

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Holcombes' Xmas Letter
by George Holcombe 26 Dec '12

26 Dec '12

Having a great holiday, hoping all of you are too. PDF of our letter, George Holcombe 14900 Yellowleaf Tr. Austin, TX 78728 Mobile 512/252-2756 geowanda(a)earthlink.net Hope appeareth, but it is not your Hope—you do not have anything to do with it. It just appeareth. It comes as a stranger, as an alien—it just appeareth! You do not even know why you hope. How in the world could you hope when there is absolutely nothing to justify any hope? ~Joseph W. Mathews

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Re: [Dialogue] [Oe List ...] Tony Elizondo
by jonzondo＠juno.com 24 Dec '12

24 Dec '12

Tony (my father) had an infection in the bone of his foot and had an operation last week to clean out the infection. All indications from my sister are that the surgery went well. I have not heard the recovery prognosis as yet. I will try to get a phone number to call and I will post it on this list. Thank you for the inquiry. And for all the prayers. In Beauty, Jon ____________________________________________________________ 1 Odd spice that FIGHTS diabetes Can this unusual "super spice" control your blood sugar and fight diabetes&#63 http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/50d802b1f1af42b10c00st03vuc Joann Williams called yesterday with the news that Tony is in the hospital near Houston. Perhaps Jon can get us up to date. George Holcombe 14900 Yellowleaf Tr. Austin, TX 78728 Mobile 512/252-2756 geowanda(a)earthlink.net Hope appeareth, but it is not your Hope—you do not have anything to do with it. It just appeareth. It comes as a stranger, as an alien—it just appeareth! You do not even know why you hope. How in the world could you hope when there is absolutely nothing to justify any hope? ~Joseph W. Mathews

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Re: [Dialogue] Tony Elizondo
by George Holcombe 23 Dec '12

23 Dec '12

Joann Williams called yesterday with the news that Tony is in the hospital near Houston. Perhaps Jon can get us up to date. George Holcombe 14900 Yellowleaf Tr. Austin, TX 78728 Mobile 512/252-2756 geowanda(a)earthlink.net Hope appeareth, but it is not your Hope—you do not have anything to do with it. It just appeareth. It comes as a stranger, as an alien—it just appeareth! You do not even know why you hope. How in the world could you hope when there is absolutely nothing to justify any hope? ~Joseph W. Mathews

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12/20/12, Spong: On Speaking at the Athenaeum in Madrid and A Christmas Letter
by Ellie Stock 20 Dec '12

20 Dec '12

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR On Speaking at the Athenaeum in Madrid It was a uniquely Spanish event held in the beautifully ornate Athenaeum in downtown Madrid. It followed the format of a carefully orchestrated, intellectual and cultural pattern. The audience numbered over 300 participants. It began at 7:00 p.m. and lasted until 10:00 p.m. after which we went out to dinner. That was not late night dining in Madrid, where life goes on deep into the night. Restaurants do not open for dinner before 7:30 p.m. The siesta tradition of napping during the heat of the day is still in force. A Westerner thus has to slide the clock forward about two hours in order to adjust to the Spanish lifestyle. Westerners also have to slow both their clocks and the pace of life, for in Madrid nothing we attended in our four days there ever started at the scheduled time. Time does not drive life in Spain. This Athenaeum-hosted activity was well advertised. I had been invited to do a public lecture on the subject of homosexuality, as it expresses itself in the public, political and ecclesiastical life of the Western world.” This lecture had three sponsors: first was the Athenaeum itself and especially the philosophical wing of the Athenaeum; second, was the two-year old national lobbying and educational group known as the Federacion Espana por Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Bi-Sexual people (FELGTB), and third was a national group organized around the work of a French Christian philosopher and mathematician named Marcel Legaut, who sought to do his work outside the structures of institutional Christianity. Prior speakers at events at the Athenaeum have included Madame Curie, Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, Unamuno and Sarah Bernhardt among many others. The Athenaeum imposed its normal format on that evening. I was the person around which all the publicity was focused, but preliminary speakers, prior to my being introduced that evening, included Victoria Caro, the secretary of the philosophy section of the Athenaeum, Philosophy professor and head of the Philosophy division of the Athenaeum, Ilia Galan, a deputy from the National Assembly of the Spanish government and one who is a strong political activist for transgender people, Carla Antonelli; the nationally known attorney for homosexual causes, Manuel Rodenas, and finally Aurelio Lepe Gil, the coordinator of religious affairs for the FELGTB organization, who along with Domingo Malero, who heads up the Legaut group, were the principal architects of my visit. It was the longest preliminary build up and introduction to a lecture that I have ever experienced. The people in the audience, however, were clearly familiar with this format and seemed to be engaged in it. Finally, after about 45 minutes of preliminary speeches and activities, I was introduced and began my formal presentation. Since my Spanish is quite limited, my lecture was translated line by line by two people, one an atheist, Michael Thallium and the other a candidate for ordination in the Metropolitan Community Church, Brian Christinakis. The uniqueness of this moment lay in the fact that I was the first bishop from any religious tradition to speak publicly in all of Spain in favor of gay rights, full inclusion of gay and lesbian people and in support of same-sex marriage. Spain’s dominant religious institution is the Roman Catholic Church, but this Church is quite unpopular with the people. The reputation of the Catholic Church has been badly tarnished by two events in Spanish history. One was the Inquisition in the 14th century and the other was the far more recent memory of that Church’s support for General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. There is a bitter memory of that military dictatorship, which was viewed as repressive, inhumane and even destructive to the life of Spain. The negativity toward the Catholic Church is so deep that Spain can best be described as a secular nation, but carrying from its history a deeply Catholic footprint In any event, a bishop dressed in the purple vest of my profession, speaking publicly on behalf of gay rights was a unique and noteworthy event in the Spanish context. The press was particularly intrigued. I began the lecture by announcing that the battle for the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in both church and society has been won and all that remains is for us to live into a new consciousness that this victory has been achieved. I repeated my firm conviction that the moment a society begins to debate one of its cultural prejudices that prejudice begins to die. The reason for this is that all prejudices are rooted in justifying cultural definitions. Once those definitions are successfully challenged by new knowledge, the prejudice is doomed. No reputable psychiatrist today, for example, would define homosexuality as the manifestation of a mental illness and no learned person, scientist or otherwise today still regards homosexuality as a choice that morally depraved people make. Yet those were the two most widely accepted “cultural definitions” of homosexuality until new knowledge demonstrated that neither of these definitions remained defensible and that both were quite simply wrong, embarrassingly wrong. When this new knowledge began to penetrate the previous debate then homophobia was on its way to the museums of antiquity, to take its place beside the witches of Salem, Massachusetts and the once widely assumed abnormality of left-handedness. I noted, sadly, that despite this new knowledge the major Western institution where resistance still remains to the new acceptance of homosexual persons as minority but not abnormal, is the Christian Church in both its Catholic and Protestant forms. The leadership of the Catholic Church, which continues to operate out of the completely discredited definition articulated by Pope Benedict XVI that homosexuality is “deviant,” has become almost hysterical in recent days in its negativity, even using the threat of excommunication to enforce its dying prejudice. Protestants, especially those in the evangelical, fundamentalist traditions, see the movement toward the acceptance of homosexual persons as a direct assault on the authority of the Bible, which they are quite certain condemns homosexuality as “sinful.” So in my address, I looked first at the large numbers of homosexual men who have served well in both the past and the present in the Catholic priesthood, about whom they have never been honest. Then I cited the historical record of that church, which has regularly been wrong on social issues, ranging from its condemnation of Galileo and Darwin to its attempt to change the left-handedness of children in parochial schools, and its refusal until recently to allow suicide victims to be buried from the church. In these examples new truth became self-evident long before the hierarchy of that church recognized that they were wrong and finally changed their attitude. I assured my audience that the same thing will ultimately occur in regard to the issue of homosexuality. Next I spoke to the Bible concerns of Protestantism, going one by one through the battles of history in which Christians quoted the Bible on the wrong side of great moral issues. The literal Bible was the Church’s ally in the battle against the Magna Carta and in favor of the divine right of kings. The Bible was quoted by the Christian Church to justify the institution of slavery and later to enable segregation and apartheid, slavery’s bastard step-children, to become established. The Bible was quoted by the male establishment in both church and state to oppress the legitimate claims of women and to keep them in positions of social, political and economic servility. So when the Literal-minded Christians quote the Bible today to condemn homosexual people, it has the quality of being the last gasp of a dying mentality. Such a use of the Bible also depends on biblical ignorance being rampant. To illustrate that I went through the nine specific biblical texts that are regularly used by Bible-quoting Christians to oppose homosexuality and to pronounce it to be condemned by God. Each one can be quickly and competently set aside in the light of contemporary biblical scholarship. Who among us, for example, is ready to use the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as a biblical text to condemn homosexual persons, when in that story the incest of Lot with his two daughters does not disturb his designation as a “righteous man?” Who among us will give credibility to Paul’s strange argument that homosexuality is God’s punishment inflicted on those human beings who do not worship God properly? To quote the literal words of the Bible, which was written between two and three thousands years ago to condemn homosexual people today, is hardly a rational procedure. I concluded this lecture by turning to the gospels, in which homosexuality is never once mentioned, to show that the portrait of Jesus drawn from gospel sources makes it clear that he was always on the side of the victims of prejudice and rejection. One has only to look at the way Jesus related to and treated such people as the lepers, the Samaritans, the Gentiles, the woman with the chronic menstrual flow and women in general, who were yearning for equality. The lecture was well, even enthusiastically, received and I spent the next sixty minutes responding to questions from the audience as people processed new thoughts. Accounts of my time in Madrid were widely reported the next day in the papers not just in Spain, but across Latin America. At an earlier press conference when the questions were concluded, I stepped down from the stage and, as I always do, I went over to my wife, Christine, and kissed her. For me there was nothing unusual about this, but it seems that the reporters found it noteworthy. In every account that I read they mentioned that the “bishop kissed his wife on the lips at the end of the press conference.” Perhaps if they knew more bishops who had wives that they love as much as I love Christine, this single act would not have received worldwide notice. Consciousness, however, is raised in all kinds of ways. As one of my Episcopal predecessors in the office of bishop noted, as he stood before a massive and beautiful Roman Catholic cathedral, “Well, they do have better quarters, but we have better halves.” To which I say “Viva!” ~John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. A CHRISTMAS LETTER TO MY READERS: Dear Friends, The images of this past weekend collide in my brain this holiday season in a violent and cacophonous way. I have the mental picture of children, six and seven years of age, piled up in the corner of a school room riddled with bullets from a civilian version of the M-16 rifle used by our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. No child in this mental picture received less than three bullets, some of them received as many as eleven. In the pile of carnage with them were their teachers. Down the hall were the bullet riddled bodies of their principal and their guidance counselor. Twenty children, twelve girls, eight boys, and six adults, all women, the youngest 27, the oldest 56, were dead. On Sunday I was in my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey for worship. It was pageant Sunday and the church was filled with children costumed as angels, shepherds, wise men and even as lambs, donkeys, cows and camels walking on four legs. King Herod, who was about seven with his crown in place, directed our attention to Bethlehem. Then we heard the familiar story of the presence of God being experienced in the life of a helpless baby, a dependent child. We listened to the narrative in which the “Holy” was found in the vulnerability of an infant, who was subjected to the dangers of human existence. Our gifted rector, Janet Broderick, spoke to the children about their fears, the pain that life inflicts. She did not hand out panaceas or cheap grace. She did not seek to dull the pain we were feeling with rosy pictures of heavenly bliss now being enjoyed by the victims, nor did she delude us with the idea that twenty-six new stars are now shining in the sky. Instead she let us feel the trauma of the Newtown shooting, the human situation where no one is ever completely safe and the fact that we must embrace and live with these exigencies of human existence. Her message was not “God will take care of you,” for clearly God did not take care of these Connecticut children, but rather that God is with you, God is in you, so have courage, live life fully each day, love wastefully, to all that each of us can be and make every moment count as if it is part of eternity. I looked at the faces of those children in my church last Sunday. They had embraced the horror of the Newtown shooting. Yet, they set it aside momentarily to bask in the glow of knowing that they were performing and were appreciated and loved by their audience. Every parent, however, held his or her child a bit more tightly, a little longer than usual, and much more poignantly. I looked around at the faces of those in that congregation that I know so well. I saw a number of people who had recently lost their spouses. They were both elderly and young. They were black and white. Their losses were six months ago, three months ago, three weeks ago. I looked at the faces of parents with whom I have walked when they lost their children to sickness, to accidents, or to the violence of the natural world. In that congregation on Sunday we prayed not for the security that life will never possess, but for an enlarged capacity to live, a greater ability to love. We prayed not for the absence of pain and hurt, but to be enabled to share in a peace that transcends pain and hurt, the peace that passes understanding. It is not peace “as the world gives.” I then went over in my mind the arguments heard so often in America’s political gun law debates. “To limit a citizen’s access to own legally any sort of weapon is an infringement on their freedom.” Twenty-six people in a single school in Connecticut have had their freedom dramatically ended by a legally owned weapon! “The constitution guarantees us the right to bear arms.” Does that constitutional guarantee allow anyone the right to bear assault weapons? “The reason guns need to have an expanded magazine for rapid firing is that in target practice it takes too long to reload after every shot.” Does that minor inconvenience override the worth of a single child whose life is snuffed out by a barrage of fire power designed to stop an advancing army? How long will we continue to allow the paranoia of a few to endanger the lives of the many? Can this nation, which was born in a new world with a frontier that had to be tamed, get over the gun obsession that we have incorporated into our national psyche and ever grow up to recognize that the frontier is not there any longer, but that we have become a large interdependent society of diverse people, where all of us must temper our individual desires for the sake of the well-being of the whole? We do that in thousands of ways already. We drive on the right side of the street, we stop on red and go on green, we have rules about who can drive and we take licenses away when the privilege of driving has been violated. Is it too much to think that we must ban once and for all the personal ownership and use of weapons designed for mass murder, prosecute those who sell or possess arms illegally and close the loopholes that now exist in background checks for all gun owners? When does a person’s right to carry fire arms conflict with another person’s right to live without fear of violence? As the Christmas season is celebrated, we see the smiles on our children’s faces, but we also remember those bullet-filled bodies in Connecticut. We hear the message of peace on earth, but we also remember to the shame in our unwillingness to act politically to make our children safe. It is not just our children, we need to recognize that we also did not make safe Representative Gabby Gifford of Arizona, nor did we make safe our own political leaders like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and Malcolm X. Do we want to be a society where children are at risk and where political debate is decided with the use of guns? Is that responsible citizenship? Is that a faithful way to be followers of the one we call the Prince of Peace? A blessed Christmas to you all. ~John Shelby Spong IN MEMORIAM Charlotte Brown, 6 Grace McDonnell, 7 Daniel Barden, 7 Ann Marie Murphy, 52 Rachel Davino, 29 Emilie Parker, 6 Olivia Engle, 6 Jack Pinto, 6 Josephine Gay, 7 Noah Pozner, 6 Ana Marques-Greene, 6 Caroline Previdi, 6 Dylan Hockley, 6 Jessica Rekos, 6 Dawn Hochsprung, 47 Avielle Richman, 6 Madeleine Hsu, 6 Lauren Rousseau, 30 Catherine Hubbard, 6 Mary Sherlach, 56 Chase Kowalski Victoria Soto, 27 Nancy Lanza, 52 Benjamin Wheeler, 6 Jesse Lewis, 6 Allison Wyatt, 6 James Mattioli, 6 Announcements Between now and December 31st, get a great deal on the perfect Christmas gift! Give someone you love a year-long subscription to Bishop Spong’s Weekly Newsletter, and you’ll be giving them the insight and thoughtful commentary you have come to appreciate from one of the leading voices for “believers in exile”. 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Re: [Dialogue] [Oe List ...] more on guns
by David Walters 18 Dec '12

18 Dec '12

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more on guns
by jlepps＠pc.jaring.my 18 Dec '12

18 Dec '12

Colleagues I'd like to add one more note to this lively dialogue (which I hope continues, and perhaps even begins to focus). It's obviously the case that a change of heart is required in this situation. The question becomes how to make that happen, and I'm reminded of Martin Luther Kings's response to us WASPS who were opposing desegregation because "we need to have hearts change to support integration." To paraphrase him, "Laws can't make you love me, but they may prevent you from killing me." Strict gun control may be that kind of law. And, IMHO, whatever will prevent this sort of mass murder is worth doing. Also I've noticed that hearts are remarkably adaptable to their external situation. In terms of luring the tiger, the question now that she's out of her lair (sorry Cynthia), what do we do: well perhaps something initial like forbidding the sale of assault weapons and mass magazines. That might be able to get some support from tigers. After all, we endure considerable inconvenience to insure safety on airplanes,, so perhaps the inconvenience of forbidding access to these instruments of mass destruction might be a possible first step. I don't believe we'll be able to change tigers into lambs, but maybe we can help de-fang them! John

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