Godbeat

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Anglican Church of Canada offers new liturgies to bless Medically Assisted Dying

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Anglican Church of Canada offers new liturgies to bless Medically Assisted Dying

Gathered near the patient, the priest helps the worshipers prepare for Holy Communion, using a new liturgy prepared by the Anglican Church of Canada.

The text offers this introduction: "We gather today in a space that may be foreign to us. There are sounds, lights, and activity outside of this room that can distract and take us away from this space. But God meets us here, in this time and place, a thin-space that is sacred. We gather as friends and family [and health care professionals] with our hopes, our dreams, and our differences.

"While some of us may not always agree with the choices of others, we are united in our common love and compassion for [name]. May we know the presence of God as we pray together. … May God's purpose steady us."

The Divine Liturgy text openly discusses tensions that loom over this rite, since it is drawn from "Pastoral Liturgies at the Time of Death in Contexts of Medically Assisted Dying," approved in June by the denomination's Council of General Synod.

The document's preamble tells clergy: "Medical Assistance in Dying evokes strong and opposing views amongst some persons and communities, including amongst health care providers and amongst Anglican Christians. Some Christians, including clergy, find that MAiD violates their understanding of the ethical values to which Christians are called. …

"The Anglican Church of Canada is not of one voice on the topic, but leaders generally are in agreement that the Church has a duty of pastoral care to all. … Regardless of how people arrive at the decisions they do regarding their end-of-life plans, all persons should be able to call upon the pastoral ministry of the church at the time of their dying."

The Medical Assistance in Dying option was legalized in 2016 and many Canadians -- over age 18, eligible for public health care, with a grievous condition and mentally competent to grant consent -- have allowed medical professionals to end their lives. At the end of 2024, Health Canada officials reported 76,475 approved MAiD procedures.

The Anglican Church of Canada is a poignant church to develop these liturgies, since it has already lost 75% of its membership since the 1960s.

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New rites and painful old wrongs as tattoo culture spreads in modern America

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New rites and painful old wrongs as tattoo culture spreads in modern America

Struggling with the loss of her child, a mother asked Father Peter Jon Gillquist a question that pastors are hearing more often -- about getting a tattoo.

"When her child died," he explained, she "wanted to have the child's name tattooed across her heart. Why? Grief. She wanted to always carry the name of that child as close to her heart as she could possibly get … and bear it."

Getting, or keeping, a tattoo is "not a legalistic thing," he said, during a forum recorded at All Saints Orthodox Church, his parish in Bloomington, Indiana. "The question is, 'If you have a tattoo, why do you have a tattoo? What is it for?' "

Searchers find clashing answers online. Many believers quote Leviticus: "You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh … nor tattoo any marks on you." Others note this biblical instruction to the Corinthians: "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?"

Some believers, noted Gillquist, argue that since their body is a temple, they can decorate it. Others say tattoos are linked to paganism or, in the Roman world, represented punishment, torture or identity, such as markings on soldiers or slaves.

For some Christians, such as Egyptian Copts, tattoos -- inked on wrists -- are more than symbols. Cross tattoos tell persecutors: To remove these crosses you will have to cut our wrists.

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Baseball cap wars: Can the biblical rainbow coexist with a Pride Night rainbow?

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Baseball cap wars: Can the biblical rainbow coexist with a Pride Night rainbow?

After the great flood in the Book of Genesis, God offered a timeless symbol of hope.

The Bible says God promised: "I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever … the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life."

Nevertheless, clashing rainbow symbols recently created a storm in Major League Baseball when powers wielded by team owners clashed with the religious beliefs of players.

The big question: Can the biblical rainbow coexist on the same Pride Night baseball cap with the today's rainbow celebrating LGBTQ+ rights?

This controversy raised legitimate First Amendment issues, but also helped clarify the workplace rights of employers, said Hal Frampton, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom and director of the group's Center for Conscience Initiatives.

The clash between MLB leaders and several San Francisco Giants pitchers "was about both issues, really," he said, reached by telephone. "It was about not being discriminated against" in the workplace, especially if there were questions about whether an employer was "enforcing a rule consistently," or only enforcing it when there was "religious expression that was seen as troublesome" to employers.

The firestorm began when Giants starting pitcher Landen Roupp, along with relievers J.T. Brubaker and Ryan Walker, wrote Bible verse references -- variations on Genesis 9: 12-16 -- next to the rainbow logo on their Pride Night caps. Relief pitcher Sam Hentges chose to wear his standard black-and-orange Giants cap, without the rainbow logo.

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Memory eternal: Wichita's smiling bookstore hero is gone, but his dream lives on

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Memory eternal: Wichita's smiling bookstore hero is gone, but his dream lives on

Theologians will travel far and wide searching for the perfect book, but few would think to shop near the Flint Hills of Eastern Kansas. 

Metropolitan Saba Esper, leader of the Antiochian Orthodox archdiocese in North America, was searching for a rare book by Oliver Clément of Paris -- the translation of a complex work written in French. While in Wichita two years ago, he went to Eighth Day Books to consult with owner Warren Farha.

"He smiled with his familiar joy, went to a far corner of the bookstore, and brought it to me. I could hardly imagine that he would have it -- yet there it was, in English," said the archbishop, in a letter read to mourners who filled the Cathedral of St. George for the May 26 funeral rites for Farha.

Metropolitan Saba, originally from Syria, first encountered Farha during a 1995 trip to America that included a lengthy stay in Wichita.

"I was struck by his bright and cheerful face, which seemed to tell you that he came to you from a world purer and more radiant than the one in which we live," he added. "His warm smile, his spontaneous innocence, his quiet voice, and his remarkable calm -- these were all signs of God's presence within him and indications of a light descending upon him from on high."

Farha was more than an entrepreneur who built what the New York Times once described as a touchstone that "serves as a secret handshake among Christian book lovers, and its following reaches far beyond the heartland city it serves." It became a hub for conferences and projects with traditional Catholics, Lutherans and the Orthodox.

In an age of cookie-cutter chains and Internet stores, Eighth Day Books only sells books that its team truly wants visitors to read. The shelves are packed and floors stacked with around 46,000 books on its three stories and in the "Hobbit Hole" basement for children.

Farha was constantly asked if he was running a "Christian bookstore."

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Concerning God, UFOs, angels, demons and centuries of mystery

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Concerning God, UFOs, angels, demons and centuries of mystery

For centuries, stargazers of many kinds have debated the meaning of unidentified objects in the heavens and encounters with mysterious beings on earth.

"Each new discovery, even every new theory, is held at first to have the most wide-reaching theological and philosophical consequences. It is seized by unbelievers as the basis for a new attack on Christianity," noted Oxford don C.S. Lewis, in a 1958 essay, "Will We Lose God in Outer Space?" This was years after the Christian apologist finished his science-fiction trilogy that imagined contacts between humanity and extraterrestrials. 

After the "novelty has been chewed over by real theologians, real scientists and real philosophers, both sides find themselves pretty much where they were before," Lewis added. The big question remains: Are there other beings with "what we call 'rational souls'?"

In 2014, the Jesuit brother Guy Consolmagno wrote a book with this title, "Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?" He stated, with "whatever authority I have as a scientist and as one of the 'Official Astronomers' at the Vatican Observatory: Neither I, nor anyone I know, has any evidence that extraterrestrials exist."

The latest media storm was triggered by this Truth Social post by President Donald Trump: "Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters. GOD BLESS AMERICA!"

The first release included 170-plus files, beginning in the 1940s, ranging from encounters reported by farmers to videos filmed by U.S. military pilots.

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Soaring Orthodox crosses at monastery in a holler in the mountains of West Virginia

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Soaring Orthodox crosses at monastery in a holler in the mountains of West Virginia

There is nothing unusual about turning a corner in West Virginia's maze of rough mountain roads and seeing churches with plain white walls and big porches.

But the new sanctuary at the Hermitage of the Holy Cross -- 10 miles of twists and turns into a holler outside the town of Wayne -- offers a variation on that vision. Its green-metal roof has domes resembling medieval Russian helmets, topped with golden cupolas and soaring Slavic crosses.

"When you go to the monastery you begin to think that you're driving off the edge of the world, but then you come around the bend and they've built this whole civilization up there," said Andrew Gould, the Orthodox artist from Charleston, South Carolina, who designed this church for a compound of log-cabins and rustic buildings.

The goal was to blend Orthodox tradition and the simplicity of the local culture.

"We needed people to see this building and immediately say, 'That's a church. That's a beautiful church.' It is always my goal to design churches that are linked to Orthodox traditions but still look like churches to people here in America, even in Appalachia," he said.

The church can hold 50 monks and 150 worshippers -- but the giant, wraparound porch can welcome twice that for feast-day celebrations and special events, especially on rainy mountain days.

"The porch was something we had in the plans, but it is serving a purpose greater than what we intended. It was something God intended," said Abbot Gabriel, 39, a native of Appalachia who converted to Orthodoxy in 2007 and became a novice in 2011.

"The locals have become more and more comfortable with our presence" even if some may not enter the sanctuary, he said. "But gathering on a big porch for food and fellowship, that's different. That's what the locals do. That's mountain hospitality."

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Another year on the religion beat: The great Russell Shaw on secrecy in Catholic life

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Another year on the religion beat: The great Russell Shaw on secrecy in Catholic life

In the spring of 1972, Catholic bishops gathered in Atlanta for an historic event -- their first gathering under a policy that would allow journalists inside the doors of their meetings.

Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia, the conference president, promised to honor the policy approved by the bishops, which did allow many sensitive topics to be discussed during closed executive sessions.

"Cardinal Krol managed to get his own back, after his own fashion," wrote journalist Russell Shaw, in his book "Nothing to Hide: Secrecy, Communication and Communion in the Catholic Church." He served, with different titles, as press aide for the bishops from 1969-1987 and wrote more than 20 books and thousands of articles for Catholic and mainstream publications.

"At the start of the meeting, after the bishops had prayed and taken care of preliminaries, the cardinal rose to speak. He spoke rapidly and at length -- in Latin! Nervous coughing and shuffling of papers could be heard from the press section."

Eventually the cardinal faced the journalists, with what Shaw called a "wicked grin." Krol quipped: "We told you we'd let you in. We didn't tell you what language we'd speak."

Krol was a conservative, but progressives have used similar tactics. I once asked Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, after tense debates about the morality of nuclear weapons, if several bishops -- by switching to Latin at key moments -- had "launched a preemptive strike" on newspaper headline writers. He smiled and said, "Yes."

This past week marked the start of my 38th year writing this "On Religion" column, and I spent 20 years leading GetReligion.org, a website that critiqued mainstream coverage of religion news. Over the decades, I had many encounters with Shaw and his January death, at age 90, reminded me that choices made by powerful clergy, as well as newsroom managers, often determine what news makes it into print.

One story loomed over Shaw's career more than any other -- decades of hidden and then public scandals about the sexual abuse of children, teens and adults by Catholic clergy.

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Memory eternal: For my brother Don Mattingly, a pioneer in youth ministry

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Memory eternal: For my brother Don Mattingly, a pioneer in youth ministry

The Dictionary.com definition for "centrifuge" offers this: "An apparatus that rotates at high speed and by centrifugal force separates substances of different densities, as milk and cream."

It was a strange name, in the late 1970s, for a Southern Baptist Convention youth leadership project. But there was logic to it, according to the man behind the idea -- my brother Don Mattingly.

Centrifuge camps "would spin kids out into their futures, that's what Don always said. Out into ministries. Out into careers they wouldn't have thought of before. Out into projects back home, helping people," said Joe Palmer, the second Centrifuge leader. "It's not all playing volleyball, basketball and games. … They're learning about the rest of their lives."

For my older brother -- who died on March 18 -- the centrifuge of change in young lives was a major theme during his decades as a leader on the national SBC staff, at Baylor University and in countless youth-education events across America.

As the world whirled faster and faster, Don argued that religious leaders needed to create ministries that could spin young people in positive ways, helping them discover what mattered in their hearts, minds and souls.

Centrifuge began in 1979 in Glorieta, New Mexico, quickly attracting flocks of campers, with many Bible studies held in stairwells due to lack of space. This summer, during a "Fuge" (the nickname that stuck) somewhere in America, the network will register the 2 millionth participant in these unique camps.

At the heart of my brother's vision was a track system of classes and forums in which teens heard young leaders -- often seminary or graduate students -- address a variety of potential vocations. Fuge camps still offer tracks on sports, "STEM" careers, sign language, drama, "Random acts of service," music, "spiritual gifts" and more. "MFuge" camps cover work in local, national and global missions.

This was one of my brother's big ideas, as he planned and worked, while earning a religious education doctorate along the way: Young people needed to know that God can call them to work in pulpits or in classrooms, in missions or in coaching, in arts or hard sciences. The church should help them consider their options.