Friday, May 25, 2007

If suppose if you have to choose....

I suppose that if you feel that you cannot invite everyone who is a bishop with jurisdiction to Lambeth in 2008 and if you feel the need to choose who will be invited and who will not, the criteria had better be simple, consistent and easy to comprehend. Some are not sure that this standard has been met.

I'd like to offer a humble suggestion.

Actually, it's not my idea. It comes from a cartoon by Tom Cheney that was published in a recent New Yorker, which seems to me to offer as simple and coherent criteria as any I've seen.

(I can't reprint the actual cartoon on this blog because it's copyrighted, the New Yorker doesn't seem to like people who blog their artwork, and I can't afford a lawyer. You can, however, see it here and, if you like, buy it as a t-shirt.)

1 comment:

Muthah+ said...

This whole issue of realignment of Christendom does have some of Cheney's criteria about it. But in the meantime Church, we have to live with unbelieveable fracture. I have never seen the kind of bitterness played out by any other organization that I have served. I have always steeled myself against the "humaness of the Church" but the present conflict takes my breath away.

In my diocese the exclusion of all who disagree with what the powers that be is seen as demonic with no room for reconciliation. This in a diocese that was once one of the bastion of liberality.