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Other than arguments about the United States becoming entangled in Syria, and Miley Cyrus coming unwound at the MTV shindig, the big story the past few days here in Beltway land has been — thank God — the 50th anniversary of the “I Have A Dream” speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Lincoln Memorial.
So let’s say that The Telegraph prints a story from its Rome bureau about the interesting new statements by Pope Benedict XVI about events surrounding his historic decision to retire. The top of the story, logically enough, starts with Benedict’s own point of view:
Let us return, for a moment, to that interesting quote the other day from the former Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams. You may recall that he said, concerning public debates in the West about religion:
The media’s obsession with sexualityism is somehow getting even more pronounced. We have a backlog of stories to look at.
The largest Lutheran group in the United States is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I’m part of the next largest group, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. We really don’t have much in common, oddly enough. The ELCA just elected their first female presiding bishop. We retain male-only ordination. We have major differences in confessional subscription and requirements for our clergy and congregational membership. So for non-ELCA Lutherans, we flinch when we see headlines such as this one from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
I didn’t know much about the Rt. Rev. David Leighton — the 11th diocese of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland — before reading the recent Baltimore Sun news article about the funeral rites held in his honor.
It is my fallen nature that causes me to delight in stories about hypocrisy. We are all hypocrites if we use that term to mean we behave in ways contrary to the ideals we espouse. Technically that’s not what hypocrisy means. Rather it refers to claiming to believe something different than what one believes. Or as Wikipedia puts it “Hypocrisy is the state of pretending to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually have.” It involves deception.
There were quite a few logical journalistic questions to ask after my post about the teacher who was fired by a Catholic school in Glendora, Calif., after his very public same-sex marriage to his long-time partner.
Raise your hand if you think it would be acceptable for a Muslim school to fire a teacher who, after years in the classroom, went public with her commitment to Zionism?
