Bishop Dan Martins writes at Confessions of a Carioca regarding ecclesial conflict, rupture, and reconciliation:
I am also resolutely a member of the Episcopal Church, and by the providential sufferance of Almighty God, a bishop therein. I attempt to lead and care for a diocese, and I attempt to dutifully take my share in “the councils of the church,” per my ordination vows. And as I go about my life and work, I rub shoulders with, and pray with, and collaborate with, and eat and drink and laugh and cry with, and sometimes make common cause with, Episcopalians whose words and actions with respect to the moral theology of sexuality I find to be gravely and tragically mistaken, who consciously, albeit without malevolent intent, abet the infestation of our ecclesial “system” with the equivalent of a malicious virus injected into the internet, a virus that will eventually cause massive harm and end up killing its host.
There are many — probably from within TEC, though most of the ones I have in mind are outside it — who would pose the stark question: Why?
Read it all. We note that Tony Clavier offers a slightly different perspective on reconciliation and division at Shreds and Patches.
The Rev. Zachary Guiliano, PhD is a Guest Writer. He is rector of Emmanuel Memorial Episcopal Church, Champaign, Illinois. Previous appointments include Priest Vicar of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford and Chaplain of St. Edmund's Hall, Oxford. His 2021 book The Homiliary of Paul the Deacon won the 2023 Book Prize of the Ecclesiastical History Society.
