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Hallo again to all. We welcome two new online magazines this week, Ex Animo and The Christ Path, both very different and both offering substantive content and resources. Make a cup of tea of coffee and browse--and possibly contribute. Thanks to the work of a parish priest in Canada, several key older documents of the Anglican and Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) are online. The Gift of Authority is the most recent statement of that influential body. Two new web sites are impressive in their appearance and their content: LOFT (formerly Anglican Homes of the Diocese of Toronto), which serves the homeless and the Parishes of Overmonnow with Mitchel Troy and Wonastowa, a web site for several churches in Wales. Both are best be viewed with a recent Web browser (4.0 or greater). We like the sites because, in addition to their clever HTML, they also contain good information. (Too often on the Web clever HTML disguises a lack of content.) Wonder what it takes to get young people to care about church? Read what a young person in the Episcopal Church in the USA member has to say: '[B]ecause I love my church, I feel ... that Christian institutions need to do some really serious listening to and learning from the postmodern, post-Enlightenment generations'. This web site might be a place to start. As usual there are several new parish sites and the first appearance of the Diocese of Fond Du Lac (in the state of Wisconsin, USA) on the Web. We gather all these up for you in our New This Week section. Our News Centre these last few weeks covers issues that have, alas, the potential to threaten the unity of the Anglican Communion. We think it timely to publish a brief reflection by a priest in the Episcopal Church USA about why schism is always worse than heresy. The story of missionary priests in England and Europe converting people by cleverly combining Christian holidays with existing pre-Christian holidays is fairly well known. You have probably read stories about Druids and Christmas trees, Christmas day and the winter solstice, and so forth. These all came, we are told, from missionaries wanting not to discard the cultural traditions of the people they were converting to Christianity. Anglicans Online is published from computers in California, which is both physically and culturally close to Mexico. The pre-Christian Aztec civilizations in Mexico and other Central American countries believed that the souls of the dead return each year to visit with their living relatives. Mexico is now a fiercely Christian country (though hardly Anglican) and El Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, is now our Christian All Souls' day. Mexico Online, David Rosales, the South Central Regional Technology in Education Consortium, the University of Texas at El Paso and the Arizona Republic newspaper all have interesting web sites devoted to this delightful holiday that is in 1999 every bit as Christian as December 25. We probably aren't going to link these sites into Anglicans Online's resource collection because they are not really Anglican sites, but we think you will enjoy them as much as we do. The "Angli" in our name does not mandate that our culture be "Anglo" even though many of us are indeed Anglophiles. If you have time to visit only one of these sites, we recommend that of the Arizona Republic. See you next week.
Last
updated: 31 October 1999 |
