Another Old Boys Club gone...

Bishop Jefferts Schori said yesterday:

"Our primary emphasis needs to be feeding people, educating children and looking for healthcare for everybody."

What? What kind of Christian is this woman?

Oh, that's right... the caring kind.

And then there's this:

An oceanographer who studied squids and octopuses in the northeastern Pacific Ocean before going into the ministry in 1994, Jefferts Schori is considered a progressive. She supported the consecration three years ago of V. Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, as bishop of New Hampshire. She also has endorsed same-sex union rites in Nevada.

So, also the tolerant and loving kind.

And there's also this:

Her journey as "a person of faith and a trained scientist, begun in some struggle over how to understand the two of them together," she said.

As she read the works of great scientists such as Albert Einstein, she realized that scientists also "delighted in the rich mysteriousness" of all creation.

Science and theology are both ways of looking at the wonder and mystery of God's work, she said. "Scientists look to understand it. Theologians and people of faith look to understand the meaning behind life. I don't see why there needs to be a conflict."

So... also the rational kind.

Then I read this:

The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion of which the Episcopal Church is a part, said in a statement Monday that the presiding bishop-elect had his "prayers and good wishes as she takes up a deeply demanding position at a critical time."

But at the same time, he noted that "her election will undoubtedly have an impact on the collegial life of the Anglican Primates, and it also brings into focus some continuing issues in several of our ecumenical dialogues."

And I think, what is it they get up to, those Primates, that they can't share with a girl? I'm trying to be charitable, but I'm hearing "oooo- girl cooties!"

And those issues? They kind of need to be in focus, you ask me...

And then there's people like this:

"We feel sorrow for her, as she inherits the tragedy of a fractured church that has lost its sense of mission and lost touch with its grass roots," said the Rev. Canon David Anderson, president of the Atlanta-based American Anglican Council. "What signal does this choice send to the faithful in the pew and to the Anglican Communion worldwide? The election of Presiding Bishop-elect Jefferts Schori only intensifies the current trajectory of the Episcopal Church."

What signal? Possibly the signal that bigotry and hate have no place in the church, and that those who preach it are unwelcome here.

Just sayin'...

[Anderson] also noted that her election would present problems for those who do not recognize the ordination of female priests.

Well, duh. Like I said.

The Episcopal Church consecrated its first woman bishop in 1989. A few male bishops "irregularly" ordained women as priests way back in 1974; the next year, the Canadian church regularized it and did it legally and the US Church followed suit in 1976. (Check here for a brief history of women as priests and bishops)

The US, Canada, and New Zealand churches have women bishops; a few other places have women priests; most have only men. But the call for churces where women are people - even if second-class people - to reject that notion and go back to considering them as lesser beings to whom God will never speak is, frankly, a load of crap. The church (any church) always follows, rather than leads, such social change. But that's no excuse for giving up and going even further back to suit the least advanced and tolerant among us.

Quotes here from K. Connie Kang in the LA Times, 20 June 2006.