The New Yorker on the Anglican Communion

This article from The New Yorker is very interesting. I find it not surprising that Bp. Gene Robinson openly complained at Sewanee about his having to recite the Nicene Creed, which contained beliefs that troubled his conscience. The school chaplain’s solution: just don’t recite the parts you don’t like. I was not a aware that one could customize a Creed.

One of the highlights of the article was the quote from megachurch celebrity, Rick Warren:

The evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren also addressed the gathering in Pittsburgh, and put the property question to them bluntly. “What’s more important is your faith, not your facilities,” he said. “The church is people, not the steeple. They might get the building, but you get the blessing.” Bob Duncan says that the future looks like a series of unpleasant legal battles—“And the question that the state courts are going to have to figure out is, Who are the Episcopalians?”

And lastly, while I don’t typically like the outlook of Paul Zahl, I found it interesting that he was saying this sort of thing:

“I would say there is a constitutional weakness [in Anglicanism], which this crisis has revealed, which may in fact prove to be the death of the Anglican project—the death, at least in formal terms, of Anglican Christianity. We’ve always said that we’ve had this great insight, and I used to think that we did. But I’m not quite sure whether we’re not on very sandy ground. . . . It’s at the edge of the abyss. It’s about to be extinguished, and that’s not histrionic.”

The New Yorker is admitedly of a leftest bend, but I think the article is pretty responsible. I recommend it.