Week of January 18 – 24
“I’ll work the Ravens into my sermon, even though there’s a lot going on. There’s the [presidential] inauguration and Martin Luther King Jr. Day – plus, I need to work Jesus in there, too.”
– Rev. Kristin Dubsky, assistant pastor of Christ Lutheran Church
in Baltimore, as quoted in the Baltimore Sun.
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Week of February 22 – 28
“Sin has little, if anything, to do with being bad. It has everything to do, as far as I can tell, with being blind to our own goodness.”
– The Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester, elected Saturday as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan. In addition to being an Episcopal priest, Thew Forrester holds a Buddhist lay ordination.
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Week of March 22 – 29
“To paraphrase Bill Moyers, in every community there are thousands of Gods, because of our differences in perceptions. Until religious institutions understand this and change to become inclusive of these thousands of God, they will continue to die. However, as a physician witnessing people dying every day, I can tell you that faith is very much alive.”
– Rev. Dr. Anne C. Brower, Senior Chaplain and director of the healing ministry at the Washington National Cathedral, in the “On Faith” blog of the Washington Post.
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Week of March 29 – April 04
“Discussing your values with your teenagers will help them to form their own. Remember, though, that trying to convince them of what’s right and wrong may discourage them from being open.”
– A quote from the English government produced brochure ‘Talking to Your Teenager About Sex and Relationships.’ The brochure is to be distributed in pharmacies nationwide starting in April.
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Week of April 12 – 18
“I know love is being reciprocated.”
– Erika Eiffel, who has “married” the Eiffel Tower. Eiffel is a practitioner of objectum sexuality, a person who falls in love with inanimate objects.
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Week of May 17 – 23
“It very much depends on the interpretation you put on it.”
– Former Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway, when asked how he still presides at communion when unconvinced about the divinity of Jesus. Holloway, who still serves in the Scottish Episcopal Church, has abandoned his belief in God and the afterlife, and is now known as a “Christian agnostic”.
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Week of June 14 – 20
“[it] most certainly illustrates pederasty as not having a negative value in Jesus’s thought… Since pederastic relationships were so common and accepted in the ancient world of Jesus, it is likely that, as the story indicates, Jesus himself had no problem with the practice of pederasty.”
– Dr. William Stayton, Assistant Director of the Center for Excellence in Sexual Health (CESH), which has volunteered to secure funding for the Anglican Communion Office’s “Indaba” project–a “listening process” that seeks to find a consensus on matters of scriptural authority, sexuality, and theology.
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Week of July 5 – 11
“Here, we believe you achieve salvation by doing social justice.”
– Constance Guice-Mills, a member of Manhattan’s liberal Riverside Church, whose senior pastor, Rev. Dr. Brad R. Braxton, recently resigned due to theological disputes within the congregation, among them that Braxton preached the exclusivity of Christ and personal salvation.
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Week of September 27 – October 3
“Paradoxically, we have grown smaller as a denomination at precisely the time we are learning more and more about how to be faithful and vital in the waning years of Christendom. I’ve described this as the transition from ‘respectable religion’ to ‘evangelical faith.'”
– Rev. John H. Thomas, Retiring President and General Minister of the United Church of Christ, reflecting upon his term in office, during which the progressive denomination has experienced near-cataclysmic decline.
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Week of November 1 – November 7
“It’s a choice between removing that page and throwing away the whole Bible.”
– Sir Ian McKellen, admitting that whenever he stays at a hotel, he tears out the page in the Bible containing Leviticus 18. (He has a collection of such pages that he hangs up in his bathroom as “a curiosity.”)
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Week of November 29 – December 5
“You not only have a constitutional right for abortion, but you have a God-given right.”
– Rev. Carlton Veazy of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), Speaking at a pro-abortion event on Capitol Hill that opposed restrictions on government-funded abortions in the House of Representatives-passed health care legislation.
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