Anglican Mainstream

Parliamentary Briefing

The Redefinition of Marriage and the Effect on Society

6.30pm, Wednesday 23rd May 2012
The Boothroyd Room, Portcullis House,
Westminster, London SW1A 2LW

Organised by the Bow Group

Speakers include:
David Burrowes MP, Fiona Bruce MP & Andrew Lilico

Free Admission
Registration required
info@marriage2012.org.uk
020 3327 1122

From World Net Daily

[...]  Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.

The Daily Telegraph asks

Should gay marriage be legalised?

Here

The Guardian asks

Should the government abandon plans to introduce "gay marriage"?

Here

The Anglican Four have more news for you. Kevin and George bring you Today-in-History, More of The AMiA breakdown, Erastian Texans, picking Canterbury, and the weather for Ireland is spring. Peter breaks down behind-the-scenes GAFCON and AS Haley has breaking news from Christ Church, Savannah. Oh… and there is a surprise Guest this week.

Ben Johnson for Life Site News

ELMHURST, ILLINOIS, May 2, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – On the heels of saying the Bible is full of “bulls**t” and berating teenagers who walked out of a talk at a journalism conference for high school students, new video has surfaced of homosexual activist Dan Savage saying Pope Benedict XVI is homosexual and that LGBT children are beaten “because of religion.”

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Hilary White for Life Site News

VATICAN CITY, May 2, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a carefully worded diplomatic document, the Secretariat of State, the Vatican’s highest authority under the pope himself, announced this afternoon that Caritas International, is receiving a new set of rules and statutes which place direct governance in the hands of the Vatican. Today, all was smiles for the cameras, but relations between the Holy See and Caritas, the umbrella organisation that oversees the scandal-plagued Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (CCODP), have been strained for some time.

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DAVID CAMERON is ready to delay the implementation of gay marriage and House of Lords reform in an effort to appease angry Conservative backbenchers. The prime minister will make only a vague pledge to reform of the upper house in this week’s Queen’s speech, avoiding any commitment to a detailed timetable.

In a further concession to right-wingers who blame him for the scale of the party’s losses in last week’s local government election, he is also ready to put plans to legalise gay marriage on hold. No 10 sources say he recognises that he cannot push ahead with the controversial proposals in a febrile political climate. “Gay marriage is something we genuinely want to do, but because of everything that has happened, now is not the time,” said a No 10 source.

The prime minister is under pressure from his own party after Thursday’s election results, in which the Tories lost 405 seats and 12 councils.
 

Read here

Timothy Herrman for Life Site News

NEW YORK, May 4, 2012 (C-FAM.org) – Youth activists arrived at the UN in droves last week in an attempt to hijack the 45th session of the Commission on Population and Development (CPD) by promoting homosexual rights and abortion. However, countries rejected their demands and produced a fairly balanced outcome document that focuses on more pressing youth concerns like education, employment, health and development.

Sponsored by organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the Youth Coalition, and the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), youth activists flooded the conference floor and were strategically placed on country delegations with the hope of shifting the conference’s focus to sexual and reproductive health of youth and adolescents.

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The Rev. Theodore L. Lewis
Resident Theologian, All Saints’ Church, Chevy Chase, Maryland

For maybe the past year there have seemed to be no decisive developments in the Anglican Communion—decisive in the sense of changing the course, or courses, on which it has been set.  But with the conference of the Global Fellowshsip of Confessing Anglican (GFCA) Primates together with the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans in London from 19 to 26 April, the situation has changed.  The keynote address of the Primate of Kenya, Archbishop Eliud Wakubala, asserted the vital role in the Communion of the Global South and the need for the Communion’s return to Scriptural obedience, doing this virtually in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s back garden.  No less significantly, the conference issued a call for a governance change which could retrieve the Communion’s three Instruments of Unity (other than Canterbury) from the futility to which Lambeth maneuverings have relegated them.  These Instruments as they developed over several decades constituted Anglicanism’s conciliar movement.  In this raising up again of conciliarism lies even at this late date the possibility of overcoming the Communion’s present deep crisis.

    Archbishop Wakubala delivered his keynote address as chairman of the GFCA Primates’ Council and of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, both established by the Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON) in Jerusalem in June 2008.  (GAFCON, the riposte of the Global South and its northern allies to the sidelining of the Instruments, which assembled 1,148 participants including 291 bishops from around the world, produced the extraordinary Jerusalem Declaration, a ringing statement of Anglican orthodoxy.)  In his address the Archbishop decried the “other gospel” of the North American churches, their willingness “to bend the word of God to fit the fashionable ideas of their cultural context.”  He decried also the patterns of colonialism persisting in the Communion’s governance, through which the relegation of the Instruments had been brought about.  And he called for a Communion based on adherence not so much to Canterbury as to Scripture and Anglican doctrine as expressed in the Communion’s traditional formularies. These things had mostly been said before, in the Jerusalem Declaration itself and in subsequent gatherings of the Global South.  What gave them a special edge was that they were said this time not off in Africa or Asia but at St. Mark’s Battersea Rise, the church where the conference took place, not far up the river from Lambeth Palace.  Further, they happened to come in the wake of Rowan Williams’ announcement that he was stepping down as Archbishop of Canterbury.  Thus they served notice that the Global South expected to be taken into account in the choice of his successor. Read the rest of this entry »

From `Cranmer'

Following His Grace's reporting of the plight of Lay Reader Mr Peter Gowlland, who was suspended from ministry following differences of opinion on the Coalition for Marriage petition, the story has spread far and wide and the Diocese of Southwark has seen fit to put out an official statement. It has being inferred from this (notably by the ecclesial vermin) this His Grace was wrong in certain key facts, and even drew on a warped source for the story. Neither, in fact, is true.

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AM website comments that this controversy highlights an issue which has needed to come to the forefront, namely the lack of proper disciplinary procedures with relation to lay ministry, and thus proper protection for them from action that is contrary to natural justice.

Mariette Ulrich for MercatorNet

Has enough been made of the Hilary Rosen "stay-home-moms-don’t-work" calamity? Maybe yes, maybe no, but as a college-educated full-time mother of seven, I am not about to let it go without comment. (I wish I could have weighed in a bit sooner, but, well, I was busy with family activities.)

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Kathleen Gilbert for Life Site News

BEIJING, CHINA, May 3, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Chen Guangcheng’s bid for freedom took a dramatic turn Thursday when the human rights activist directly pleaded with President Obama to bring him and his family home on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s plane, after saying he was pressured to leave the U.S. Embassy by American officials this week.

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