Episcopal Schism Ahead

NATURALLY EVERYONE is worried about the prospect for schism in the Anglican Communion. The very liberal faction of the American Episcopal Church just elected liberal bishop Rt Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori as presiding bishop of the American church.

Here is Jonathan Petrie reporting that a conservative Texas diocese is already planning to split from the overal American church.

But really, they should get on with it.

In his Acts of Faith sociologist Rodney Stark demonstrates that church believers vary in their need for orthodoxy and �strictness.� The result is a Bell curve. A lot of people want to belong to a moderately strict church, and a few people want to belong to a very liberal church (Unitarian) or to a very strict church (Jehovah�s Witnesses).

On top of that you will usually find that a rapidly growing church is a moderately strict church. It�s a marketing thing. Moderate strictness is where the people are.

The Anglican Communion worldwide is split between the growing, strict church of Africa and the liberal, shrinking church of Britain and North America. Just as the American Church is split between traditionalists and liberals.

The best thing to do is to accept reality and formally split.

But there is the little problem over who gets to own all the churches.

And another thing. The best way to save the Church of England from its decline would be to disestablish it, just like every church in the US except the liberal Church of Positive Self-Esteem.

But that is a topic for another day.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

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Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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