Letters from 4 to 10 February 2008
Like all letters
to the editor everywhere, these letters are the opinions of the writers
and not Anglicans Online. We publish letters that we think will be
of interest to our readers, whether we agree with them or not. If
you'd like to write a letter of your own, click here.
Rendered speechless
The editorial writer laments the death of Chief Marie Smith Jones,
the last Eyak speaker and cries crocodile tears about the demise of a variety of "Anglican idioms" from "Biretta Belt Anglo-Catholicism" to "Virginia
Churchmanship."
For the past 30 years the Episcopal Church has worked as hard as it
could to destroy these idioms and to squeeze out all alternatives to the industry standard it promoted. The Church effectively
destroyed my religious idiom and my religion. It turned living liturgy--the Coverdale psalms and the liturgy of the 1928 Prayer
Book--into an arcane museum piece. Now that the Church has effectively killed that idiom you make pious noises about about "losses
in our vocabulary." Give me a break. Oh yes I forgot--liturgical revision and the stinking new Prayer Book were supposed to bring
in the Young People and promote church growth. Has it?
The crusading liturgical puritans who took away that gorgeous Elizabethan
language and all the good stuff that gave us a buzz at church forced us to mouth inane pieties about "justice, freedom and peace" and
made religion dull, didactic, and emotionally flat. It's no wonder that anyone looking for mysticism or aesthetic experience
wouldn't spit at the Church or that those who are after the thrill of transcendence declare themselves "spiritual but not religious."
H. E. Baber
University of San Diego
San Diego, CA
baber@sandiego.edu
4 February 2008
Get a grip
Oh, good heavens. I, too, am sorry that the last speaker of whatever
language has gone to Heaven, but give it a break! How many Aramaic speakers of Jesus' argot survive? Are we all into retrograde
hysteria? Someone back then said, "Behold, I do a new thing."
My grandfather spend most of his adult life working with Navajos.
Just in case anyone is nostalgic about Navajos (the largest single group of native Americans extant), we should know and remember
that many Navajos still practice exposure for unwanted daughters -- or sons, for that matter -- in spite of Christianity, Western
Values, and all that. No matter what the Tribal Council or the Indian Affairs Bureau tells you, it's true. I don't like it much
myself, but it ain't my culture.
None of these natives of the American continent (or perhaps immigrants
from Asia), along with Europeans, Asians, Africans, Antepodeans, and whichever other places human life has existed, if we are
truly Orthodox in our thinking, is any better or worse than we.
I am of a familiar species called orphanos cosmicos. All my human
family is dead. Should I weep and groan about their disappearance? Hey, some of them knew stuff that even you don't know.
Please, please, get a grip and understand the difference between evolution
and sentimentalism.
For Christ's sake.
Peter Winterble
Buenos Aires, Argentina
peter@winterble.com
4 February 2008
Not every idiom is dead
My late teacher, mentor and close friend, Reginald Fuller, passed
on his ante-Tractarian Highchurchmanship to many of his disciples, among them myself.
Despair not: Hobartian Churchmen (and -women) live!
"Evangelical Truth and Apostolic Order" (John Henry Hobart)
Pierre Whalon
Bishop, Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe
Paris, France...Province II
4 February 2008
Earlier letters
We launched our 'Letters
to AO' section on 11 May 2003. All published letters are in our
archives.
|
