Photo of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, courtesy of Episcopal News Service

I got that question a lot this summer from friends and family who aren’t Episcopalians and who are bemused by the stuff they read about my church in the national press.  So here is my brief, idiosyncratic, and much too general take on “what’s happening.”

Every three years the Episcopal Church gathers for General Convention.  General Convention is our governing body; we don’t have an archbishop or pope who decides things for us, but instead work in a complicated, messy, democratic way to get the business of the church done, and even to decide what our business really is.  Our bicameral legislative body is noticeably similar in structure to the U.S. Congress, which is no surprise because it developed alongside it, under the guidance of some of the same “founding fathers.”  It’s big, though, with over 800 people (lay and…

Post-Dispatch religion reporter Tim Townsend mentioned
Catholic teaching on ordination i.e., the male-only priesthood, in his Saturday, May 31 column.

The Vatican has stated, not for the first time, that the topic is closed.

But there are still folks out there — you perhaps — who don’t understand the reasoning behind the church’s teaching or who think they understand and don’t approve of the reasoning.

The women’s ordination issue doesn’t have the same cachet it once did, and for good reason:

Back in the ’60’s it was a hot, new topic and it grew in intensity during the seventies and eighties when radical secular feminists — who had no use for Christ or the Catholic Church or for the sanctity of unborn human life, for that matter — took up the cry. Some men and women inside the church were swayed as well. For a highly detailed look at this recent history of the R.C. church and…