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©1999 The Society of Archbishop Justus, Ltd

Hallo again to all.

The idea that there are only two sides to a dispute is probably old-fashioned, but it's a lot easier to say "both sides" than "all of the factions." In the ongoing dispute over the ordination and consecration of women, there are people who think it is a good idea and there are people who think it is a bad idea. We refer to these as "the two sides." This week in Philadelphia there were remembrances of the 1974 ordination of 11 women in the US Episcopal Church, and the Rt Revd Barbara Harris, Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts, preached at a well-publicized event. Both sides in this dispute are distributing a transcript of what she said as evidence that they are right and the other side is wrong. If nothing else, this says that her words are powerful, and thus you should read them. In the News Centre, of course.

We at Anglicans Online take pleasure in our attempts not to attack or condemn very much. Oh, we make fun of certain things, and we have our running jokes, but we try hard not to attack people or ideas, or to monger hate. We do pay attention to the existence of conflicts, though, and we try to focus on those who are not mongering hate, and not to pay much attention to those who sound hateful. We have been reading through the transcripts of all of the Lambeth conference resolutions, all of the way back to the beginning, and we are going to start a new "guess the conflict" feature of Anglicans Online. For example, at the second Lambeth conference in 1888, there was great conflict: the use of what item was described in the conference resolutions as "unwarranted by Our Lord and an unauthorised departure from the custom of the Catholic Church?" Answer next week.

There is a never-ending flow of new parish web sites and new diocesan web sites. We try to list all of them as soon as they are done, but no sooner. An amazing number of parish web sites have grievously terrible names. We don't mind at all a name like http://www.inlink.com/~sttim/; it does the job, isn't pretentious, and encodes the name of the parish (St Timothy). When we see names like http://www.church-holy-cross.org/ we flinch a little; it might seem like a good name, but it carries no more information; nobody will ever remember how to type it, and it rather pre-empts the other 10,000 churches of the Holy Cross around the world.

And long pretentious names ending in ".com" make us weep. We won't name any names, but you won't have any trouble finding Anglican churches with such names if you look around, say, the Diocese of Chicago. Whose web site is in your News Centre Editor's opinion the best diocesan web site in the world. But the reason I bring this up is to exclaim happiness at how two Australian parishes have handled the "what church is this?" issue. St Columb's church in Hawthorn (near Melbourne, in the Diocese of Melbourne) has the name http://www.stcolumbs.org.au/, but they have allowed St Columb's church in West Ryde (Diocese of Sydney) to share their URL as http://www.stcolumbs.org.au/westryde/ . We like this a lot; it is sharing at its finest, and we want to congratulate both parish webmasters for making it work.

See you next week.

 
Cynthia McFarland
cmcf@justus.anglican.org
 
Brian Reid
reid@justus.anglican.org

Last updated: 1 August 1999
URL: http://anglicansonline.org