Credit where Credit is due: observations from Anglican blogland

I want to point to several essays worth the read that come from, let us say, other quadrants than Preludium's normal comfort zone.

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Dan Martins over at Confessions of a Carioca has written a really fine essay on All Saints, published in The Living Church for November 1. Read it HERE.

The blog / website Covenant sometimes has articles that are demanding, disagreeable and with which I have considerable problems. (But then I have problems with lots of things.) But every once and a while there is an article that is positively challenging. Craig Uffman's "Sex as Grace" is one such article. Read it HERE. It puts sexual activity in a very different place, and while it speaks in terms of traditional marriage, the vocation he calls people to in marriage is, I think, wider in scope. He says,

"... Christian sex is always trinitarian sex, for God is both the creator, sustainer, and rightful aim of Christian couples: our “hooking up” is indissolubly connected with and subordinated to God’s purpose of reconciling the world. Sure there’s pleasure, but there is a distinction between the fleeting pleasure that leaves us feeling empty the morning after and the enduring kind that testifies to a fulness and flourishing that is possible only when the Spirit acts on us so that we are able to transcend ourselves. And that distinction makes all the difference. That’s why Christian sex is a means of grace."

Now I may have some troubles with the way he states this, but the understanding of sex as a means of grace is on target. We need to find more ways to talk about sex this way.

MIDDLE:

Meanwhile among those somewhat more closely aligned associates in Anglican blogland I note with pleasure that Peter Carrell from the Province known as ACANZP (which stands for Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia) has gotten a new post, namely as Diocese of Christchurch (NZ) Director of Education. Peter's blog is always thoughtful, interesting and filled with a wit worthy of the great down under. Read his blog HERE.

But not to leave out friends at closer quarters,

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And finally from Lionel Deimel's Web Log which almost always carries some very important and helpful information about the ongoing issues in Pittsburgh and the wider Church, his latest, "Questions for the Anglican Diocese." A must read if one is to get the players and the program clear.