A Guy in the Pew

My bishop, Kirk Smith of Arizona, offers some encouraging words about Lambeth: I was amazed about how well this morning's session went. You may be reading in the press about how fragmented we are. But this is due to the fact that a few hot heads are are quick to cozy up to any reporter they can find. There are two or three American bishops here who would like nothing better than to see the Conference fail. The truth is that there is an (dare I say it?) almost miraculous cooperative and respectful spirit at work here. This morning for example, there was no mention of punishing the Americans. The word "accountability" was not even mentioned. Instead, we talked a lot about the example of a marriage covenant which is based not on punishment but on a spirit of the parties "loving each other no matter what." It was pointed out that the current proposed Covenant with all its provisions for kicking people out of the Communion sounds more like a pre-nuptial agreement tha...

The Lambeth Conference is about to start. Bishops are flocking to England from all over the world as we speak. You won't see much discussion of Lambeth on this blog--as Anglican as I may be. Why? Because there are far better resources on Lambeth. Firsy, my colleagues and I at The Lead will be offering detailed Lambeth coverage, and our editor-in-chief, Jim Naughton is already in London. Jim plans to offer "live blogging" from Lambeth once the Conference starts. Second, my Lead colleague, Helen Mosher , has prepare a tremendous resource that she explains on her own blog: Last night at the Episcopal Cafe , we posted links to all the blogs we’re aware of written by Anglican bishops. In a fit of “how am I going to keep up with this,” I created a pipeline of the posts and gave it a single feed, which you can subscribe to here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/lambethbishops Hope it’s useful to some of you as well, especially with the Lambeth conference being next week. Its a grea...