I have just issued the following statement:
“I am delighted to hear that the Anglican Church in Brazil has just changed its marriage canon to allow same-sex couples to get married. As we have rejoiced in St Mary’s Cathedral Glasgow in recent months with couples who have waited years to be married in church, so we rejoice with couples doing the same thing in Brazil.
“All God’s children are equally beloved. We rejoice as greater equality comes to another part of the Anglican Communion”
As one who grew up(?) in churches leaning toward the view “it’s a tough story for a tough world, how else would God be just?” in varying degrees, I agree the face-value-narrative understanding of the story is repellant.
One thing stood out for the first time during Sunday’s reading: the plurality in Abraham’s line – “…and we will return to you”. I’ve been idly wondering about that since.
It doesn’t make the story wholly acceptable as Abraham still ploughs on ever closer.
But if one’s goal is to find a “by faith, Abraham” in there, better to say it’s the prior confidence that things will somehow work out well (which I thought was how Hebrews was trying to define it), than to locate the commendable quality in violence (which, by rabbiting on about resurrection, Hebrews does).
In the absence of other clear & wholly mitigating contexts in which to place the story, certainly it’s simplest, easiest and probably best to file it under “that’s how they saw God back then” and move swiftly on.
Oofft.
We’ve been clearing some old documents out of the dank crypt this week and one or two interesting things have emerged. Not least a couple of photographs from 1962. We forget now that we photograph anything and everything all the time that in previous decades a photo was relatively rare. This one was taken at…
This review also appears on the Opera Britannia website Rating: Taking Alban Berg’s Lulu as a starting point, Scottish Opera at the Edinburgh International Festival present American Lulu – a new re-envisioned interpretation of this piece by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, who re-orchestrates Berg’s original, attempts to set it within the context of the Civil Rights movement in America and provides a conclusion to compensate…
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