How Should We Refer to God?

Yesterday’s sermon at my church referred to God a lot. Although the word “God” was frequently mentioned, no masculine pronoun was used to refer to the Christian deity. This was frankly annoying. A sentence like “God loves God’s people” sounds foreign to a native speaker of English. Moreover, the construction suggests to a “normal” person that two distinct entities, not one, are being talked about.

The reluctance to use masculine pronouns to refer to God is feminist political correctness run amuck. It is part of a program to eliminate “sexist” language, not only in sermons and theological discussion, but even in the prayer book liturgy. Doubtless, many avoid the use of masculine pronouns for God with self-righteous satisfaction, but one does have to wonder if they’ve thought this affectation through.

The most obvious reason to use pronouns idiomatically, rather than repeating forms of “God,” is that the latter practice sounds very odd. A major innovation of the Reformation was the recitation of the liturgy in the vernacular. Avoiding pronouns where they would normally be expected runs counter to the objective of making liturgy accessible. Instead, it just sounds goofy. Linguistic conventions do change over time, and even liturgy must adapt to change, but using language that no one uses in ordinary speech isn’t helpful or welcoming.

For Episcopalians, there is a more significant matter at issue. Our prayer book is supposed to be a book of common prayer. When large numbers of people in a congregation regularly make a substitution like “God’s” for “his” (as in “And blessed be his kingdom, now and for ever,” on p. 355), it can be jarring to others. Some, particularly visitors, may feel like they didn’t get the secret memo. Others may feel that the congregation is violating the social contract that fixes the liturgy until such time as the church’s General Convention, through its laborious revision process, decides to change it. We have a set liturgy to avoid unnecessary fights between prayer book revisions. We should take advantage of the fact.

It is bad enough when individual members of a congregation substitute “God’s” for “his.” It is a more serious offense when, in a printed service, the church itself makes such a substitution, as my own church is wont to do.

One of the joys of The Episcopal Church is the ability to visit any congregation and feel at home with the familiar liturgy. Unexpected and unauthorized variation can be exceedingly off-putting. An experience is burned in my memory of visiting what was clearly a conservative, evangelical Episcopal church. The sermon was not to my liking, but I felt comfortable with the overall service. Then came the dismissal, to which the congregation responded with one voice (though without mine) “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” What followed “God” is hardly objectionable in the abstract—it comes from 1 Corinthians 15:57—but, not being in the prayer book, it was supremely alienating. I suddenly felt like an unwelcome intruder in the congregation. I can hardly complain about evangelical Episcopalians straying from the reservation, however, if liberals engage in similar practices.

Of course, the feminists would be right in arguing that God has no sex, in the human sense. And they even have a point in arguing that the portrayal of God as masculine is part and parcel of society’s patriarchal bias that regularly slights half the human species. The notion of God as father is deeply ingrained in the Bible, though, and it is difficult to ignore Jesus’ use of “my father.” The feminists are bucking a very strong trend.

The substitution of, say, “God’s” for “his,” hardly achieves gender neutrality. “God” naturally seems masculine, since there exists another word for a feminine analogue, namely “goddess.” A bit of modern theological education might lead one to think of God as sexless, but the reality is that the English language does not contain a specific word for a sexless deity. If “God” suggests masculinity in one’s mind, eschewing masculine pronouns and repeating forms of “God” really doesn’t accomplish much.

I’m not an anthropologist, but, for what it’s worth, my impression is that nearly all cultures attribute gender to their deities. That, too, seems deeply ingrained.

I really don’t see much of a solution to the feminist “problem.” If God is neither male nor female (or even male and female) and we want to acknowledge that in our speech, three not-completely-satisfactory approaches come to mind. It does seem to be true that masculine pronouns used with the word “God” tend to emphasize the maleness of the deity. One alternative would be to use feminine pronouns (“And blessed be her kingdom, now and for ever.”) This, perhaps, bends over backward a bit too far and seems slightly schizophrenic.

A second alternative would be use grammatically grating plural pronouns (“And blessed be their kingdom, now and for ever.”) This is akin to the use of the plural in cases where sex cannot be determined, as in “A pilot is in charge of their plane.” (Personally, I don’t like this construction, but saying “his or her” or “him or her” all the time is tiresome.) The doctrine of the Trinity both justifies this locution and operates against it. If we want to refer only to the first person of the Trinity, use of a plural pronoun is confusing.

Finally, there is the logical solution—use neuter pronouns (“And blessed be its kingdom, now and for ever.”) This makes sense at one level, but people—and not just feminists—will argue that it depersonalizes God. The point is well taken.

As I said earlier, I don’t see a fully satisfactory solution to the feminist “problem.” It may be a matter best left to the theologians and liturgists, however.

Episcopal Café Performance Improves

“Sluggish” was hardly adequate to characterize the abysmal performance of Episcopal Café when the new site was rolled out nearly three weeks ago. More than one friend expressed the view that continued reading of the blog was more trouble than it was worth. When I complained to editor Jon White about the interminable waits for stories to appear, he indicated that neither he nor members of the Episcopal Café team were encountering the same problem. I was concerned that the blog would never be as useful as it had been in its former incarnation.

Lately, however, performance has greatly improved. I again wrote to Jon and asked what had  changed, but I received no reply.

Anyway, because I complained so much about the poor performance of Episcopal Café, I thought it necessary to acknowledge the improvement, even if the Episcopal Café team never admitted that there was a problem to be solved.

Anyone who has given up on the blog, should give it another try. The user experience, though flashier than strictly necessary, is reasonably satisfying. And The Lead continues to provide news of the Episcopal/Anglican world that is not otherwise available in one place. My previous posts about Episcopal Café (here and here) can be helpful in learning how to navigate the new site.

Happy reading! It’s good to have a serviceable Episcopal Café back.

Curve-stitch Experiment 2

I posted a curve-stitch design a few days ago that I thought had interesting properties. A slight modification of the design yields the image below. I cannot decide which is more satisfying.

Click on image for a larger view.

Curve-stitch Experiment

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Click on image for a larger view.

Update, 12/15/2014: I posted a related design on 12/13/2014. You can view it here.

More Episcopal Café Mysteries

Although I have not been trying systematically to discover everything odd or simply wrong with the re-designed Episcopal Café, I do keep running into quirks. (See my last post “Probing the Mysteries of Episcopal Café” and my comments on the site’s welcome post.)

First, I should note that a couple of my early complaints have been addressed. The original background image, a purple field of a repeated geometric pattern, about which I was not the only person to complain, has been changed to a solid color. At first, it became a garish purple, but it has now been transformed to a demure, Episcopalian purple. Thanks for that. I do wonder if the new background is permanent or whether it is the background color of the Café for Advent.

Also, the Café logo now has the proper accent on the “e” of “Café.” (See image above.) I would have separated the two words in the logo with a bit more vertical space, but at least the spelling is correct now. The accent is missing in other places, however, most noticeably in the categories list and in the heading “Please support the Cafe” in the sidebar, and on the Support the Cafe page.

Now for some features I have not mentioned heretofore. As best as I can remember, all posts on the old site indicated who had posted it. The poster was not necessary the author, but it was useful to know who had thought the post worthy of attention. The new site is inconsistent in this regard. For example, “Church of England to push BP & Shell towards a low-carbon economy” carries no indication of authorship. “The Magazine: Not the Secret Gnosis—An interview with the leadership of St [sic] Gregory’s of Nyssa, San Francisco” indicates an author below the title, though it isn’t clear whether the author is the poster. “Formalizing a bad idea” shows both the poster and subsequent updater at the bottom of the post. It would be good if the new site consistently indicated who posted an item.

Another missing feature, sort of, is the ability to link to a particular comment. Well, one can do that, but how is something of a mystery. On many sites, the time stamp on a post or comment is a link to that item. This works on Facebook, for example, and on my own blog. Comments on Episcopal Café carry a date but not a time, and the date is not a link. “Reply” under the date is a link. It takes the reader to the desired comment, but with a reply form below it. This isn’t terrible—one can still see the comment in its original context—but it is odd. If, on a particular comment, the “Reply” button is a link to http://www.episcopalcafe.com/welcome-to-episcopal-cafe-2-0-2/?replytocom=44544#respond, the proper link to the comment in context but without the reply form is http://www.episcopalcafe.com/welcome-to-episcopal-cafe-2-0-2/#comment-44549. I doubt such a link will be used very often because it isn’t at all obvious what the proper form is.

It is oddly annoying that, on the home page of the site, the sidebar does not appear. One has to load a particular post for the sidebar to be shown.

Finally, as one commenter noted, the Subscribe to RSS Feed button works differently in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer, and, in Chrome, it is virtually unusable.

Probing the Mysteries of Episcopal Café

As many readers surely know, Episcopal Café has been redesigned. There were several reasons for updating the collection of Episcopal blogs, but the most pressing was probably that the software underlying the site was no longer being supported.

The new site is more attractive than the old, but, like any newly designed Web site, it has its teething problems that will take some time to work out. The first problem that I noticed, for example, was that “Café” had lost the acute accent on the “e.” (See logo above. I am told this problem is being fixed.) Other issues are more problematic. Additionally, the site is organized differently, and that organization can be confusing if you don’t understand it.

The most serious problem is one of performance. It can take a long time for a story to appear. This may be related to the animation that serves up one story at a time. This animation is cute, but the price paid for it may be too high. Anyway, when one clicks on a link—on a Continue link, say—to see a complete story, it may take a long time for the story to appear. I did this on a story last night, and, by morning, the story had still not shown up. Sometimes the story seems to appear and disappear in an instant. Sometimes a mouse click can reproduce this behavior. I tried viewing “Right Now Jesus Can’t Breathe” and clicked my mouse in a space that should have contained the story. To my amazement, a picture showed up. It was a picture in the (invisible) story, suggesting that the story was there but not there. (Can you say Schrödinger’s cat?) Anyway, I discovered that, if you are waiting for a story to appear, scrolling down a few lines can make it visible. This behavior is a serious bug, but knowing the workaround makes the site at least usable.

The old Episcopal Café presented as a collection of blogs. To the casual observer, the new site seems to have the same organization, with several blogs having been collected in something called “The Magazine.” If you were to think the new organization a minor variation of the old, however, you would be wrong. The old blogs have actually disappeared. All stories are now organized into categories (e.g., The Lead) and further characterized with tags (e.g., News reports or legal).

Even if you understand the use of categories and tags, navigation can be confusing. Clicking on “The Lead” in the banner or the sidebar (under “Categories”) will bring up only stories in that category. Scrolling down makes more and more stories appear until, at the bottom of the page, you can select the next page of older stories or go to the last page. The good news here is that all the stories from the old site are still available. (But see below.)

What is confusing is this: At the bottom of each story are arrows to take the reader to the previous or next story. What is not immediately obvious, however, is that clicking on one of these arrows may take you to a story in a different category. What would be helpful would be up and down arrows to take you to the next and previous stories in the same category.

Finally, there is the problem of finding a story if you only know the title or the old URL. There is no search function provided for the site, so searching by title is impossible. Eventually, Google will, no doubt, fully index the site, but this is unhelpful now. A Google search may yield an old URL, but, alas, the new page addresses are different. If you know the title (or something close to the title) but can’t remember whether it was in The Lead or Daily Episcopalian, good luck! Actually, if you can find the old URL through Google, you can narrow your search.

I am the principal editor of the news blog Pittsburgh Update, which summaries Anglican news of particular interest to people of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Update has frequently linked to stories at the Café, usually stories in The Lead. Many of these links are now broken.

What I have discovered is that, if you have a link to the old site, it may actually work, or you may be able to figure out what the new link is. For example, here is an old link:

http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/anglican_communion/its_the_end_of_the_world_as_we.html

The title of the story is “It’s the end of the world as we know it.” On the new site, the blog name and the tag (in this case, “lead/anglican_communion/” are dropped. Also, the “.html” at the end gets stripped off. This actual URL is

http://www.episcopalcafe.com/its_the_end_of_the_world_as_we_know_it/

but the old one works, too! I don’t know why some pages are redirected but others are not. In any case, the part of the old URL that derives from the story title is usually pretty similar, but often not identical, to the corresponding part of the new URL. Consider the story “Clergy call out Ft. Lauderdale mayor on false feeding site claims,” whose old URL is

http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/news_reports/clergy_call_out_ft_lauderdale_2.html

Both this URL and the URL found by removing the blog, tag, and HTML suffix give a page-not-found error. The proper new URL is

http://www.episcopalcafe.com/clergy_call_out_ft_lauderdale_mayor_on_false_feeding_site_claims/

Go figure.

One strategy that can be used to find a page is to filter by tag. From the old URL, we know that our Fort Lauderdale story has the tag “news reports.” This tag can be found under “Tags” in the sidebar, where individual tags are links. Clicking on “News reports” takes the reader to

http://episcopalcafe.com/tag/news-reports/

which displays stories with that tag. Without a date, however, the reader may have to embark on a long linear search.Good luck with that.

Most of the problems of finding old stories could be solved by including a search box on the site. This would not be the most convenient way to find an old story from a title or URL, but it would work in a pinch.

I hope this has helped people navigate the new Episcopal Café. Stay tuned; I’m sure things will get better.

Thanksgiving

It’s time for the annual posting of my poem “Thanksgiving,” which I wrote in 2002. (Details can be found on my Web site here.) May all my readers have a blessed and happy Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving

by Lionel Deimel

So many holidays for this and that— But most are just a time for recreation, Not opportunities for celebration Or contemplation of their origins. Who gives a thought to Martin Luther King? He’s on our minds his day like any other, When seldom do we think who is our brother Or bother reaching out to those in need. We see a baseball game on 4 July— We sing our anthem, watch the color guard; But Revolutionary thoughts are hard To mix with scorecard, chili dog, and beer. The labor on our minds on Labor Day Is but our own that we don’t have to do. We must instead to summer bid adieu With picnics for a special few, or bed. Ah, Christmas is a special time of dread— That deadline of the frantic shopping season Through which we march for half-forgotten reason That escapes us fully when the day has come. Thanksgiving, though, is different from the rest— We gather in our family and friends; We stuff the turkey and each person who attends, And, in the end, how can we not be thankful?

A Concise Summary of the GTS Debacle

Kim Bobo has written a concise summary of the disaster that is the situation at The General Seminary, a subject I have written about before. (See posts here, here, here, and here.) The title of the essay on the Religion Dispatches Web site is “GTS Situation Is Just a Typical Labor Dispute…But with Clergy,” which suggest the author’s viewpoint (with which I agree, by the way). I particularly appreciate this paragraph:

The Board of Directors [Trustees, actually]  had backed itself into a terrible corner and few of us like to admit we are wrong. This is especially true for many clergy and bishops who believe they are not only right but empowered by God in their rightness. (Ask any union organizer who has negotiated with a religious hospital.)

Anyway, I highly recommend the Bobo essay, which can be found here. The facts seem pretty much right, although there is no mention of the reconciliation process being managed by the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center.

Diocesan Convention 2014: An Outsider’s View

The annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh was held this past weekend, on November 7 & 8, at Trinity Cathedral. Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh (PEP) had a table in a room that hosted displays of many organizations with a connection to the diocese. PEP board member Beth Stifel attended the convention as a visitor. She was there primarily to talk to people who stopped by the PEP table, where we were promoting the November 14 screening of the documentary Inequality for All. In the essay below, Beth offers her thoughts as a non-deputy attendee.

This past weekend’s convention was the second over which Bishop Dorsey McConnell presided. There was no hype, no palpable anxiety, and little, if any, animosity in evidence. People were enjoying seeing one another. That’s what I noticed as an observer who was there to greet people at the PEP table, not to participate in the main business of the convention.

I spent most of my time in a room filled with displays from various organizations, and I felt as though I had been transported to a not-so-spiffy version of the mid-seventies. As I looked around, I thought about what a visitor would notice:

• A lot of us were white-haired.
• The exhibits seemed to be from the mid-seventies era and were not outstanding examples of the same.
• The room in which a lot of gathering was happening felt dim and dreary.

Where were the younger members of our congregations, who were nowhere to be seen?

Neither computers nor evidence of their use was apparent. PEP’s table was the only one offering a PowerPoint presentation. This is the twenty-first century, people! High school students in Pittsburgh were required to be computer literate in the mid-eighties! We certainly should care enough about our organizations to produce current and relevant displays using commonly available technology.

Near and dear to my heart, the Neighborhood Youth Outreach Program had a fairly nice poster. Where was the technology-based presentation illustrating the incredible things they do with song and dance? They will have one next year!

Every organization that had an exhibit probably has someone who can put together compelling video to promote the group. This isn’t rocket science. Such a presentation lets the community see what you’re doing and helps you communicate important information to your audience. I suggested to cathedral parishioners that a history of the cathedral might be great, perhaps in the form of a did-you-know presentation. We need accessible displays that say that the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh is committed, interested, welcoming, and really in the twenty-first century.

The room housing the displays was dirty. The carpet was filthy. The table covers had seen many better days. It felt a lot like the grandfather’s house where the furniture hasn’t changed in 40 years and dusting rarely happens.

I’m not sure that, if I didn’t know the people there, I’d even want to find out about the groups represented. I happened to know that the people at the displays were smart, interesting, and fun. Not knowing that, I could easily have walked in, looked around briefly, and left.

There are simple things we could choose to do that would make us feel better about ourselves and would let visitors know that we respect ourselves and want to be relevant.

The room itself needs some work to make it more pleasant. I’m not sure about the cost, but fresh and clean, with better table covers, would go a long way. A new floor covering would be wonderful. A paint job would change the whole feeling of the room. (The recent transformation of Brooks Hall at St. Andrew’s, Highland Park, shows how a little redecorating can work wonders.) Such changes would cost money, of course, but they would let visitors know that Trinity Cathedral is a friendly, welcoming place. It is, after all, the center of our diocese and the bishop’s seat. We can and need to do better.

I firmly believe the gospel is relevant in our time. Communicating with people under 45, however, demands that we demonstrate that we live in the twenty-first century. Otherwise, there will be no one for us to talk to.

Bill Maher Had It Right

Before yesterday’s elections, Bill Maher, on his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, excoriated Democratic candidates for not embracing Barack Obama and his real accomplishments. Sensing the unpopularity of the country’s first black president, Democratic candidates pretty much agreed with their Republican opponents that the Obama presidency has been a disaster.

No one can prove that adopting the strategy urged by Maher would have produced results more favorable to the Democratic Party on election day 2014, of course, but it is hard to imagine that things could have been any worse. At the very least, Democratic candidates standing up for the Democratic Party and a Democratic President could have played an educational role for the country: It is not a universally acknowledged fact that Barack Obama has been a terrible president. As played out on the ground, however, the notion that Obama is a feckless and incompetent president was reinforced not only by Republicans, but by Democrats as well.

With both Republicans and Democrats viewing a Democratic presidency as a failure, why would anyone vote for a Democrat? Why not give the other party a chance to govern? Did the logic of this really escape Democratic Party strategists?

Bill Maher had it right.

Bill Maher (photo by Angela George)

Thoughts on the 2014 Elections

No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

—H.L. Mencken, 1926

In the run-up to yesterday’s elections, many voters complained  about the gridlock in Washington. So, of course, they voted in overwhelming numbers for the party that was responsible for the gridlock.

God help us!

 

PEP to Screen Inequality for All

The Board of Directors of Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh is concerned about growing income inequality in America. To promote concern for this trend, PEP, along with the Social Justice and Outreach Committee and the Commission on Race and Reconciliation of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh will be hosting a free screening of the Robert Reich documentary Inequality for All at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on November 14. A press release about the event is here. Click on the image below for the flyer for the event. Information about the documentary itself, including the movie trailer, can be found here.

PEP has a Facebook page for this event, from which the press release and flyer are also available. You can find that at http://goo.gl/A0pBwa.

Completing the Michaelmas Massacre

The firing of the eight faculty members of the General Theological Seminary was a shock. (See The GTS 8 and the Michaelmas Massacre.) Yesterday, the Board of Trustees completed their dirty work by affirming their faith in the dean and president of the seminary and failing to reinstate the GTS 8. (See, for example, this piece on The Lead.) My faith in the competence and compassion of the seminary’s Board of Trustees is completely shattered. I believe The Episcopal Church should somehow undo the damage the board has done, but this does not really seem possible.

I had planned to write something today expressing my outrage, but I fear I am too upset and demoralized to do so. (Do read the observations of Crusty Old Dean and A.K.M. Adam, however.) Instead, I offer a collection of words that come to mind describing the Board of Trustees and their action that has completed the Michaelmas Massacre:

Letter to GTS Board of Trustees

Members of the Board of Trustees of the General Theological Seminary and the GTS 8 will meet tomorrow in a discussion facilitated by former presiding bishop Frank Griswold. (See my earlier post and yesterday’s story from Episcopal News Service.) I have not been hopeful regarding this meeting, but the late addition of Bishop Griswold suggests that all parties at least realize how much is at stake. Events at GTS are being followed closely by many Episcopalians, including those with no direct connections to our oldest seminary.

A post on the Facebook page of supporters of the GTS 8 pointed to a listing, albeit an incomplete one, of e-mail addresses of the Board of Trustees. Given the importance of tomorrow’s meeting to the future of GTS, and perhaps even to The Episcopal Church itself, I decided to write a letter to all those board members whose address I could find. My letter, sent today via e-mail, is below. I suspect that further comment is unnecessary.

Dear GTS Board Member,

Tomorrow is a critical day for the General Theological Seminary, and I hope that Episcopalians everywhere will receive good news emanating from the meeting with the eight dismissed GTS faculty members and members of the Board of Trustees.

For a dozen years, I have been fighting for and defending The Episcopal Church in a diocese that ultimately split, ostensibly over theological issues, but probably more over issues of power and control. I believed that my church was committed to the least in society, to justice, compassion, and to listening to all voices—in short, to following the path of Jesus.

When I heard of the work stoppage at GTS, I became concerned that something was terribly wrong at the church’s oldest and most revered seminary. My distress increased when the allegations against President Dunkle were disclosed. When I learned that the Board of Trustees had “accepted the resignations” of the eight faculty members, I was at first incredulous.

My attitude quickly turned to anger and frustration. Anger at a board that hired a dean and president with few appropriate credentials to head an academic institution, a board that seemed not to understand how institutions of higher learning operate, and a board that, on learning of a crisis at the institution they oversee, chose to deal with the situation by shooting the messengers. This is not following the lead of our Lord and Savior.

I am frustrated that a major institution associated with the church I love has been responsible for much bad press and for seemingly communicating the message that power and authority are more important that reconciliation and respect for every human being. The crisis at GTS and its inept handling has done immeasurable damage to the reputation of The Episcopal Church and, many are coming to believe, to the future prospects of the seminary.

I implore you, as a member of the Board of Trustees, to do everything you can to rescue GTS from what seems like certain disaster by immediately reinstating the “resigned” faculty members and relieving President Dunkle of his duties until such time as matters can be sorted out. No matter what you do, it will be difficult to convince bishops that they want to send seminarians to GTS any time soon. If the goal of the Board of Trustees is to shut down the school, declare that objective and pursue it in an orderly manner. If your intention is that GTS should survive this crisis, then the time for listening, understanding, and reconciliation is at hand.

My prayers are with you and with all the members of the GTS community.

Yours in Christ,
Lionel Deimel
etc., etc.

A Political Ad That Tells It as It Is

Political ads that shade the truth or pull punches are tiresome. Here’s an ad that does neither. It comes from the Agenda Project. (Details are here.)

Freedom of Speech at Yale and the Jewish State

Tablet Magazine has published a fascinating interview with the Rev. Bruce Shipman, the Episcopal Yale chaplain who was forced to resign after The New York Times printed a letter from him suggesting that Israel’s behavior toward Palestinians had encouraged attacks on Jewish assets in Europe. The Shipman incident reflects badly on freedom of speech at Yale, but that isn’t what I want to write about today. (Do read the interview, however, but remember that Tablet is a Jewish publication, and the interviewer has a conspicuous bias.)

Shipman explains that he visited the West Bank over spring break and was “deeply troubled” by the way Israelis favored settlers over Palestinians. I was struck by his conclusion: “It is almost too late for a two-state solution.”

Indeed, Israel continues to create facts on the ground that are slowly eating away at territory  Palestinians can call home. The current Israeli administration is clearly intent on claiming all of Palestine for the Jewish state. If it succeeds, however, it will have to abandon any notion that it is a democratic state if it is to remain a Jewish state.

The best outcome is probably a single, secular state in Palestine that guarantees religious freedom. If Jews want a safe haven, this may well be their best option.

(See also my earlier post, “Thoughts on the Future of Israel.”)

A Network Proposal (Is This What TREC Has in Mind?)

As readers will perhaps remember, I was unimpressed with the study paper on networks from the Task Force for Reimagining the Episcopal Church (TREC). (See “Evaluating the TREC Study Paper on Networks.”) I was reminded of the incoherent treatment of the subject in TREC’s first study paper while reading an essay yesterday published by Marshall Scott. His blog post is “The Chaplain on the TREC: What I’d Like to Hear.” Apparently Scott couldn’t figure out what TREC was getting at, either. In his discussion, he points out that there are many kinds of networks, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and he argues that the church needs to have a discussion about networks before next year’s General Convention. “I do think, though,” he writes, “that if we don’t have the conversation about our expectations of networks we’ll discover that those concerns get shaped not by our ministries but by the needs of the tools themselves.”

Although networks can inspire and provoke, build and maintain relationships, and help develop leaders—see the recent TREC letter—their use is not free. Staying connected takes time and energy, and one can easily feel overwhelmed by information (or simply chatter).

Since I have no idea what TREC has in mind and am not confident that TREC even has a clear idea of how networks could serve the church, allow me to propose a possibly helpful mechanism. It would be useful for parishes to know what parishes elsewhere are doing, to know what seems to work to advance mission. Sometimes, Episcopal News Service is helpful here. Early news reports of “ashes to go,” imposing ashes on passing pedestrians on Ash Wednesday, seem to have inspired the proliferation of the practice throughout the church. Whatever the spiritual merits of this practice, it has certainly led to some very good publicity for The Episcopal Church.

What would be very helpful, I think, is a network that collected reports of the experience of individual parishes, not only their successes, but also their failures. Although it is helpful to try to reproduce the successful mission initiatives from elsewhere, it is equally important to avoid the mistakes of others or to at least find a way to turn failure into success.

A network of the sort I am suggesting has several requirements. First, churches have to be willing to describe their activities and their results. This includes admitting to abject failures. (Good batters fail at the plate two-thirds of the time. I doubt that churches do any better.) It will be necessary not only to describe big “programs,” but also small initiatives. (We put envelopes for Episcopal Relief and Development at the back of the nave and encouraged worshipers to pick on up and use it.) Fortunately, Episcopalians seem to be good at collecting and reporting statistics. (Consider our parochial reports.)  Entries should include:

1. What was done and why
2. What was expected
3. What actually happened
4. Whether the practice will continue
5. Who to contact to learn more
6. Keywords describing the activity

That last item, keywords, is critical. No one is going to read through thousands of entries to find out if anyone has tried something that a parish is considering doing. There must be a classification system and a database that can easily be queried to learn of related experiences and identify needed expertise.

I am not completely confident that such a network could become a significant asset to support the mission of The Episcopal Church. It would have a steep learning curve and might need people whose job it is to clarify and tweak keywords to make entered information useful. The idea does, I think, have potential to be a game changer.

Is there a diocese that would like to pilot such a network?

Voter ID Laws

Voter ID laws are again in the news today. This issue is becoming tiresome, since rational people know very well that the movement to require positive identification at the polls is nothing more than a Republican strategy to deny the vote to people assumed likely to favor Democrats. This becomes particularly obvious when one realizes that many voter ID laws severely restrict what identification is acceptable, disallowing student IDs, for example.

We have heard all too often the sanctimonious rationalizations of voter ID proponents to the effect that requiring IDs at the polls is necessary to preserve the integrity of our elections. This is nonsense.

It’s time to admit to ourselves that our elections are not perfect. Recounts seldom yield vote counts identical to the original tabulations. Voting machines malfunction. Ballots are poorly designed and mislead voters into casting votes other than as they intended. Ballots are marked ambiguously. And, although vote tampering is less prevalent than formerly, it is still possible through any number of mechanisms.

In-person voter fraud, the problem that voter ID laws are ostensibly intended to foil, is either exceedingly rare, or we are unbelievably bad at detecting it. It is difficult to document any instances at all, and it is incomprehensible that it has ever swung an election. If one really wanted to steal an election, having people cast votes on behalf of others is an incredibly inefficient and stupid way to go about it. It would be the equivalent of draining a lake one thimble at a time. The integrity of our elections would be better enhanced by developing better methods of voting (including better voting machines), better ways of reporting vote tallies, and stationing more election judges at the polls.

There is no reason to believe that a law requiring positive ID to vote will prevent fraudulent voting by more than a handful of people. On the other hand, many people who lack an approved ID will simply stay home on election day or will cast a provisional ballot that probably will never be counted. In a given state, there are likely to be tens of thousands of people—perhaps hundreds of thousands of people—disenfranchised thereby. These people are disproportionately poor, nonwhite, or elderly.  They represent a natural constituency of the Democratic Party.

It is helpful to think of voter ID laws by using an analogy to medical testing. When a person appears at a polling place, a test is performed to determine whether that person is qualified to vote. Usually, the test is simply a matter of comparing the person’s self-declared name against a voter list. Voter ID laws require particular forms of identification in order to establish a name that can be compared to the voter list. If we think of allowing a person to vote as a positive test, then voter ID laws seek to prevent false positives. Rejecting an otherwise qualified voter for lack of a specific form of identification becomes a false negative.

A voter ID law eliminates—tries to eliminate, at any rate—false positives at the cost of creating false negatives. No honest observer believes that there are now many false positive test—perhaps a handful in any election. How many false negatives—that is, how many fully qualified voters—have to be disenfranchised to present the handful of false positives? As an example, a judge has just ruled that Wisconsin cannot employ its new voter ID law in November’s election. It has been reported that this affects 300,000 Wisconsin voters who would otherwise be disenfranchised. Is it really worth taking the vote away from, say 60,000 citizens to stop one individual pretending to be someone else. If you’re a Republican, I suppose this does indeed seem like a reasonable tradeoff. In fact, voter ID laws are not really intended to present false positives. They are intended to create large numbers of false negatives.

Curve-stitch Cover Art

Much to my delight, I received a large envelope from Australia yesterday. It contained copies of the latest issue of Vinculum a journal of the Mathematical Association of Victoria  aimed at mathematics teachers. The cover art is my curve-stitch isometric cube design. I had lost track of the publican date, so the arrival of the envelope came as a pleasant surprise.

Journal editor Roger Walter requested permission to use my design, as his “From the Editor” column in the current issue is largely about curve stitching.

I suspect that most readers have no idea what a vinculum is, by the way. I certainly didn’t when I received my first e-mail message from Roger. (Dictionary.com notes that “[f]ew English speakers likely know this word.”) A vinculum can be a bond or tie. In mathematical notation, it is a horizontal line used to group expressions in some way. The horizontal line in a fraction, for example, is a vinculum. (See Wikipedia for more details.)

You can learn about curve stitching and see more of my curve-stitch designs on my Web site here.

The Vinculum cover is shown below. Click on the image for a larger view.

Prayer for GTS

Our prayer book is a wonderful source of prayers for almost any occasion. (Curiously, however, it includes no prayer for the celebration of a wedding anniversary.  Is there some theological point to that omission?) On the GTS8 Safe Space Facebook page, Sally Johnson, of Columbia, South Carolina, called attention to this prayer on page 824 of the Book of Common Prayer:

28. In Times of Conflict

O God, you have bound us together in a common life. Help us, in the midst of our struggles for justice and truth, to confront one another without hatred or bitterness, and to work together with mutual forbearance and respect; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

It is certainly appropriate for Episcopalians in light of the chaos at General Seminary and is particularly appropriate for the GTS community, including GTS graduates and the Board of Trustees. It is perhaps particularly relevant to the Board of Trustees, who, after all, are responsible for the Michaelmas Massacre.