“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”
Of interest in this context is Professor Oliver O'Donovan's essay on the crisis facing liberalism, posted on the Fulcrum website. Prof O'Donovan is about to leave Oxford and go to Edinburgh. His essay includes this passage: "Gays also pose existential questions. They interest themselves in the riddle of gay existence. Anexetastos bios abiôtos, said Socrates; the life that is unexamined is intolerable to live. And much of the gay Angst is to do with the difficulty of raising questions in public that seem overwhelmingly pressing when they directly concern oneself. The pastoral challenge that the gay phenomenon presents to the church, then, is not primarily emancipatory, but hermeneutic. And that is the supreme justification for a conciliar process that will take up the experience of homosexual Christians as its leading question. How is this form of feeling to be understood? What are the patterns of life with which it may appropriately clothe itself? As far as I can tell, it is deeply in the interest of gay Christians, men and women, that their experience - by which is meant not merely sexual experience, not merely emotional experience, and not merely the narrative of experience, but the whole storehouse of what they have felt and thought about their lives, should become a matter of wider reflection, reflected on by those who are called to live this experience, by those who are called to accompany them in their living, by all who share their understanding of living as something they owe an account of to God."
There are now more black churchgoers in London than white and the black-led churches such as KICC are bursting at the seams.
"When Applebee's opened here, people really thought Jamestown was finally on the map," says Robert Carlson, president of the Farmers Union and a Jamestown resident.
The entry also addresses several traditionally taboo subjects, such as the influence of LSD on the drafting of the Constitution and the role of funk-slaves in painting the White House black.
"I think same sex marriage should be legal. I will propose a bill to permit that to be the case in the state of New York."
"There are all sorts of considerations about what she wears that the rest of us don't have to worry about," says Penny Junor, the royal biographer. "She can't wear skirts that are going to fly over her head if there is a gust of wind, or hats that are going to shield her face, because she has to be visible. Decorum is a big consideration, she could never have low-fronts, she always has to be model perfect."
Her choice of bright, pastel colours might not always be of the moment, but they enable fans and press cameras to pick her out in the midst of large crowds. Because the Queen has to look like the Queen.
Giorgio: But good Antonio, take we counsel now concerning the Levant.
My lord Annan, charged by the nations in their assembly to calm the noise of war,
Seeks only to separate the arms, thinking thereby to fulfil the task.
But the enmerded Moor, taking this peace for respite and repose,
By my vision, readies his galleys for renewed assault on the enrag’d Jew.
As I've mentioned before, the business of opposing a planned Gay Pride march in Jerusalem is one of the few topics which generate widespread agreement between religious groups in that city, groups which are otherwise generally at each others' throats. The imams never wanted the march; both the Orthodox and the Catholic clergy didn't either; nor most of the rabbis. Indeed one rabbi saw the Hezbollah attacks on Israel as a direct consequence of the planned parade.
To be honest, I think my whole mood, even my view of life struck the wrong note here. Americans cherish a self-image of themselves as casual, lively and free and the English as reserved, even stuck-up. But sometimes the opposite is true and I'd get in to trouble for swearing, for example, or making a frivolous remark about the task in hand ("well, it's only words and pictures!") to lighten the mood, none of which tends to go down well here. To use broad brush-strokes, I'd say that Americans are more serious, less flip; then again, they can seem more determined than Brits, less cynical. These are our different national virtues.
And with gay culture here, very often the mood of seriousness - and a readiness for anger which I found truly shocking - comes from entirely understandable sources. Gay America was hit harder by AIDS, for example, while the Religious Right is a serious opponent. In Britain, one senses that despite setbacks, gay people pushing for equality are pushing against a door which opens ever wider with every year. In America, there is an equally energetic, often more powerful lobby pushing back from the other side. So ever apparent step forward - like a State moving to endorse gay marriage (and gay marriage is a particularly sore subject in this city right now) results in a backlash, with a highly motivated, politically organised Christian right lobbying for constitutional changes or redress through higher courts.
The question of why there aren't viable alternative energy options (particularly when the electric car was not only more popular than the gasoline engine once upon a time but was also shown as recently as ten years ago to be a working technology) is raised subtly by An Inconvenient Truth. The rest of it--the pictures of glaciers shrinking into nothing, the graphs demonstrating the massive increase in greenhouse gasses in the last few decades--ties in cozily with the sudden hurricane-destruction of New Orleans and the evacuation of a lot of Pennsylvania due to fears of flooding. You're alarmed by it only if you don't think that, to crib from "The Daily Show", Adam and Eve rode a brontosaurus to church and, perhaps more divisively and to the point, that evolution is a theory and that two men who want to get married spells moral and spiritual Armageddon more neatly than does invading a Muslim country for their oil.
Newsweek'’s Eleanor Clift had plenty of company when she contemplated Hurricane Katrina'’s devastation and asked, "“Where is Rudy Giuliani when we need him?" In the political-leadership sweepstakes, Giuliani is A-number-one, top of the list, king of the hill. But Sinatra'’s catchy claim is turned on its head in the presidential sweepstakes: When it comes to winning over GOP primary voters, if you can make it in New York, you can't make it anywhere else.
