Theology and church history according to the upper middle class

...the work of the Prophet Elizabeth who foresaw, back in the 1500s, the day when what Susan Russell likes to do in her off-hours* would no longer be a sin and thus crafted the Elizabethan Settlement strictly to accommodate homosexuals and for no other reason so don’t even think about asking. Have you got that?!!

— the Episcopalians’ Oppressed Minority™ du jour as depicted by MCJ (right about the Episcopal row, wrong about everything else)

On ‘schism is the worst ecclesiastical sin’, a new favourite line of Broad Churchmen pretending to be Catholic (not only dressing up but adopting a high ecclesiology when it suits them, that is, to push gay weddings):

Have you got that, Roman Catholics? Orthodox? See what you did when you split from Anglicanism?

Seriously, with which Thomas would they have stood in November 1534, Cranmer or More? (Regardless of the controversy about the origin and scope of his office the Pope is England’s lawful patriarch.)

These elderly hippies are right about Iraq but so what?
MCJ aims its Nasty Remarks™ at David Crosby (according to these Bushite Protestants only a ‘lard-bucket’ would oppose torturing people or attacking a country that didn’t attack yours) but boomer spirituality — mixing various faiths because ultimately they’re worshipping themselves as opposed to religion, serving somebody above you — is fair game and obviously these protests don’t work. Again if I were Karl Rove a couple of years ago and took these people seriously I’d have shut them up right quick by calling for an invasion of the Sudan.

(Don’t get me wrong: Buddhism has a lot going for it. But Christianity like the other two Abrahamic faiths has an exclusive truth claim.)

+Fort Worth is right (audio)
The three Catholic dioceses in the Episcopal Church have no future in that church in the long run. (As for how long Catholic parishes flying under the radar in non-Catholic dioceses will last I’m not a betting man. But ultimately they have no future there either.) But a valid question is have they got one in the Protestant Global South? Of course the Episcopalian spin is ‘everybody knows Catholics hate women’ so Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa must have belonged to the transgender community.

A celebrity example of why any of this matters
Anglican cultural expressions of the Catholic faith are worth saving. That includes tolerant conservatism: don’t ask, don’t tell, we give you your space and God forgives but we don’t teach that it’s not a sin.

It is largely an intra-Protestant row but the conservative side happens to agree with Catholics on the Controversial Issue™ at hand; I don’t think the latter — the Pope, the Patriarch of Moscow and others — can be dismissed as Puritans, Bibliolaters or fundamentalists.

*As that writer sometimes does, this is pushing it but fair game as she has made it very public: she is the head of Integrity, a gay group.