Free Republic

With apologies to C.S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, The Screwtape Letters It's hard to fathom, even by our standards of non-compliance with the Other Side, what a marvelous catch this John Shelby Spong fellow has turned out to be. I doubt we could have created a more perfect model of apostasy and heresy all wrapped up in one man. For more than four decades, he has steadfastly aided and abetted our cause of disbelief. Atheists and skeptics are obvious sinners, but they are not a patch on a man who wears the cloth of his religion while defaming and declaiming...

JOHN SHELBY SPONG, whose books have sold more than a million copies, was Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark for 24 years. His admirers acclaim him as a teaching bishop who makes contemporary theology accessible to the ordinary layperson. A longtime champion of progressive Christianit y, Spong is a visionary voice in the religious communit y, calling people to step beyond boundaries of tribe, prejudice, gender and even religion to create a new humanit y. He is a committed Christian who has spent a lifetime studying the Bible and whose life has been deeply shaped by it. Now he...

The Next Christendom The Coming of Global Christianity By Philip Jenkins Oxford Univ. Press. 270p $28 A few years ago, the Episcopal bishop of Newark, John Shelby Spong, penned a book entitled Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Spong argued that Christianity would inevitably decline unless it abandoned much of its traditional belief system. A few decades hence we may regard Spong’s prediction with the same bemusement with which we regard the predictions of those who believed that the United States was fated to be eclipsed by Japan as the world’s reigning economic superpower. This is the contention of Philip...

The evidence that being gay is not a choice undermines the arguments of homophobes, writes John Shelby Spong. It was Professor Sarah Coakley, an Anglican theologian at Harvard University, who described the church as being something like a swimming pool. "Most of the noise," she said, "comes from the shallow end." That is exactly my sense when I listen to the debate over the issue of homosexuality taking place today in the Christian Church in general and within my Anglican communion in particular. The noise, and it is very loud, comes from those who define this issue as a moral...

Gay activists, feeling invincible with all of their victories, held a summit at the United Nations, in which the next phase of their conquest of the culture's moral code was announced. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission listed the remaining laws that it wants changed, including "age of consent" laws. That is to say, the laws against pedophiles, apparently the next group to come out of the closet and to insist on the legality and the morality of their sexual preference. At the meeting, as reported by the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, Paula Ettelbrick, executive director...

The feeling is quite surreal. It is like being carried inexorably against your will. It elicits a sense of powerlessness. I search to find the words to utter a protest. They do not come easily. That is what I am experiencing as I watch my nation rush headlong toward war. My “disease” does not arise from a favorable view of Iraq. I am not unaware of the criminal behavior of Saddam Hussein. It comes, rather, from my great love for America and the ideals that I associate with this nation. So I have to state that none of the arguments...