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  • Vanderbilt Professor: Homosexuality Punishable by Death Under Islamic Law

    Former State Senator David Fowler of the Family Action Council of Tennessee reports this:

    At the end of last month, the Muslim Students Association at Vanderbilt University hosted an event sponsored by the university’s Project Dialogue committee. The topic was “Common Ground: Being Muslim in the Military.”

    One of the panelists, Awadh A. Binhazim, is an unpaid adjunct professor of Islam at Vanderbilt’s Divinity School (according to the university’s webpage) and serves as the chaplain for Muslim students at the university. During the question and answer time, a student member of Vanderbilt’s chapter of Youth for Western Civilization asked the question: “Under Islamic law is it punishable by death if you are homosexual?”

    The answer was, “Yes. It is punishable by death.” Moreover, at the beginning of the exchange about Islamic teaching regarding the death penalty for homosexual activity, the professor said, “I don’t have a choice as a Muslim to accept or reject teachings. I go with what Islam teaches.”

    The video of this is below:

    David, being the Christian that he is, wonders this:

    A couple of the major newspapers in Tennessee treat opposition to the homosexual political agenda as demonstrative of “intolerance,” “divisiveness,” and “homophobia.” Conservative opposition to that agenda is effectively seen and portrayed as damnable and, of course, newsworthy. But their treatment of a recent situation in Nashville lays bare the bias of traditional news media … not to mention the irrationality of those who saw nothing about which to be concerned…

    Now you would think this would be alarming. Out and About, a Nashville-based news publication of interest primarily to the homosexual community, wrote an article about it as did Nashville’s City Paper. But both articles seemed to be more concerned about the Professor’s relationship with Vanderbilt and whether the University should be “tagged” with the Professor’s comments than it was about the comment itself.

    And while I could have missed it, I never saw an editorial in any major newspaper in Tennessee editorializing about the subject. I have no doubt that had I said that practicing homosexuals deserved the death penalty, I would have been lampooned and editorialized all across the state, maybe even the country, ironically when such a comment would be clearly contrary to the teaching of virtually all Christian denominations in the world today.

    But this professor’s statement is not contrary to current Muslim teachings, to Islamic law. In fact, in Saudi Arabia and Iran several thousands of homosexuals have been put to death because they follow Islamic law on this point.

    Well David, it may seem irrational to you, but as I note in Strange Bedfellows: Liberals and Muslims, there is method to the left’s madness.  Not very sensible method, but method there is.

  • The Importance of the Blood

    This 2005 piece, from David “Spengler” Goldman, is as succinct of an explanation of the importance of blood in spiritual life as I’ve seen:

    All religion is about life, that is, about life eternal. Humankind cannot bear mortality without the hope of immortality, and for this men will sacrifice their physical existence without hesitation. That is true of paganism as much as it is true of revealed religion. The young men of the tribe march to war to protect the existence of the tribe, confident that the perpetuation of their blood and their memory will compensate them for their death in battle. But the expansion of the great empires of Macedonia and Rome made the tribes themselves sentient of their mortality; that is the dawn of history, namely of the knowledge that every nation has a history, and that this history must have an end. As Franz Rosenzweig (1886 – 1929 – one of the most influential modern Jewish religious thinkers) wrote:

    Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed towards a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers have lost their living power.

    The pagans of the pre-historic world found immortality in the gods and totems of their tribe; when history intruded upon their lives on horseback, the power of the old gods vanished like smoke, and the immortality of the individual faded before the prospect of a great extinction of peoples. Among all the tribes of the world from  the Indus to the Pillars of Hercules, only one claimed the eternity of its bloodline under a covenant with a universal God, namely the Jews.

    The blood of the pagan was his life; to achieve a life outside of the blood of his tribe, the pagan had to acquire a new blood. It is meaningless to promise men life in the Kingdom of Heaven without a corresponding life in this world; Christianity represents a new people of God, with an existence in this life. That is why Christianity requires that the individual undergo a new birth. To become a Christian, every child who comes into the world must undergo a second birth, to become by blood a new member of the Tribe of Abraham. Protestants who practice baptism through total immersion in water simply reproduce the ancient Jewish ritual of conversion, which requires that the convert pass through water, just as he did in leaving his mother’s womb, to undergo a new birth that makes him a physical descendant of Abraham. Through baptism, Christians believe that they become Abraham’s progeny.

    I present this for two reasons:

    1. Many of our ministers do not understand this simple explanation of the blood.  The importance of the blood for the remission of sins (cf Heb 9:22) is fairly straightforward, but beyond that things can get very fanciful from the pulpit.
    2. It is in part an answer to Houston attorney D.C. Toedt’s (the “Questioning Christian”) musings as to why the emphasis on the Body and Blood in the way we look at the Last Supper.

  • More Elitist Snob Advice: Make the Blue Beast Work for the People

    Walter Russell Mead hits the problem squarely on the head:

    Back before the global warming mess blew up, I wrote a post about the breakup of the ‘blue social model‘. Not to regurgitate the whole post, but the mid-twentieth century saw the US (like most advanced countries at the time) develop an economic and political system based on large and stable entities in the public, private and mixed sectors of the economy.

    The private sector was dominated by large, regulated and mostly unionised oligopolies and monopolies like the Big Three auto makers and the AT&T telephone monopoly. Government had a large and growing civil service protected cadre of professionals and bureaucrats and provided ever-increasing public services. The public schools and the universities were also built on the blue model: they provided lifetime employment to those who worked for them and were expected to provide more and better services each year. College education was expected to become more and more affordable for more and more people, with government subsidies making up the difference. Politics was a process of negotiation between large, organized interest groups: the Big Three auto makers and the UAW hammered out the division of the industry’s revenues at the bargaining table, but also negotiated through the political process to enhance the position of the industry as a whole and to shape government policy to the marginal benefit of either the unions or the companies…

    The breakdown of the blue model is the core problem of American society today and the key to the troubles of the Democratic party. Blue states really are blue; the ‘progressive imagination’ remains staunchly blue, and blue model interest groups like public school teachers, government employees, the remnants of the private union movement and the much healthier labour movement among public employees shape and mostly fund what Howard Dean famously called ‘the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.’

    There’s no doubt that the “blue model” was popular, even in “Red state” regions like the South.  (Just look around at institutions like TVA and all of the Corps of Engineers lakes for starters.)  The core problem with the “blue beast” once you get past issues like basic societal change is that the “keepers of the beast” aren’t what they used to be.

    As I’ve said over and over again, the “blue beast” is basically a patronage scheme.  Franklin Roosevelt and his colleagues understood that, to be enduring and popular, the beast had to benefit a broad number of people.  He had the advantage of a populace that was cheaper to buy off than it is now, but his plan worked.  The keepers of the beast were also, in general, closer to the people then they are now, so they were more responsive to the people’s desires.

    Today the keepers see the patronage scheme primarily as the direct beneficiaries: the public sector trade unions, the rest of the bureaucracy and all of the other paid hangers-on, which include the various “special” groups of the population which have come to depend on the government for either their financial well being, their legitimacy or both.  They talk about public service and benefit but their focus is themselves, which means that everyone else gets the short shrift.  They are led by elitist snobs (including the First Elitist Snob himself) who, by education and social association, are out of touch with most of American society.  They are too sophisticated to make that connection and yet too provincial to get past hoary American ideas such as bipartisanship and begin their European-style method of governing by the way they pass legislation.

    The result, right at the moment, is the Tea Party.

    One of Geraldo Rivera’s great remarks during the early stages of the Afghan war was that you couldn’t buy the loyalty of the Afghans, but you could rent it.  (Subsequent history there has proven him correct.)  Given the large Scots-Irish element in the Tea Party, that could apply to this movement as well, as it has in the past.  A permanent buy-off is too much to expect but, as long as a rental or lease can be kept up, the keepers of the beast could be in the driver’s seat for a long time to come.

    But the current keepers of the beast aren’t up to putting together a lease agreement with the American people.  Until they bring themselves to that point–and current trends don’t bode well for that happening–we’re going to have problems, especially since the government’s ability to dispense patronage diminishes as its debt increases and dollar hegemony recedes.

  • Liberals and Libertarians Can't Get It Together

    A couple of weeks ago, in my article Strange Bedfellows: Liberals and Muslims I made the following statement:

    The left, by and large, is a statist movement. Their goals are ultimately achieved through supra-national organisations, the EU currently being the most successful. (The UN is somewhat more complicated because of the presence of Third World countries in the General Assembly, which have the bad taste sometimes to express their own views rather than those of their liberal patrons.) Nation states and NGO’s are their transitional organisations, especially the former, who have the power to tax. They furnish employment for their advocates and dispense patronage for their client groups. Their ability to promulgate laws is, for them, the preferred method of defining morality. If it’s legal, for the left, it’s moral, and illegal is immoral.

    This simple fact is underscored in Ed Kilgore’s (from the New Republic) post It’s You, Not Me on why liberals and libertarians are apart again these days, after a flirtatious relationship in 2006:

    Well, you can say goodbye to all that. The new Kirby/Boaz study reports that libertarian support for Democrats collapsed in 2008, despite many early favourable assessments of Barack Obama by libertarian commentators. Meanwhile, the economic crisis has raised the salience of issues on which libertarians and Dems most disagree. And there’s no question that during Obama’s first year—with the rise of the Tea Party movement and national debate over bailouts, deficits, and health care—libertarian hostility to the new administration has grown adamant and virtually universal.

    Intellectual antecedents notwithstanding, the simple fact is that the post-modern liberal looks to the state for the perfection of their agenda.  It’s that simple.  There are philosophical reasons for that, but the biggest one is patronage: without the state, most liberals don’t eat.  Libertarians have a fundamentally different idea, and papering it over with a common enemy (even one like the Religious Right which inspires such dread) doesn’t change anything.

  • It's Dump Time in Beijing

    As one commenter noted, wonder what took so long:

    Dollar-denominated risk assets, including asset-backed securities and corporates, are no longer wanted at the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), nor at China’s large commercial banks. The Chinese government has ordered its reserve managers to divest itself of riskier securities and hold only Treasuries and US agency debt with an implicit or explicit government guarantee. This already has been communicated to American securities dealers, according to market participants with direct knowledge of the events.

    Part of the problem is the the U.S. is too restrictive in allowing the Chinese and other holders of dollar denominated assets to convert them into equity holding, the economically logical result of excess borrowing with no clear path for repayment.  But the Chinese know that this is a sensitive issue, as the CNOOC/Unocal fiasco demonstrated five years ago.  So they must circumvent.  How much longer this has to go on depends on many things, but the more the U.S. borrows the sooner the day of reckoning comes.

  • Read This, Skip That. No, Maybe Read Both!

    My fellow South Floridian Gerald Posner has gotten himself into quite a pickle at the Daily Beast after accusations of plagiarism:

    Last Friday, Jack Shafer in Slate ran an article pinpointing five sentences from one of my stories in The Daily Beast, which I admitted met the definition of plagiarism and I accepted full responsibility for that error, an incident I called “accidental plagiarism.” On Monday, he had found other examples, and although I disagreed with some of his characterizations, I again accepted full accountability…

    This afternoon I received a call from Edward Felsenthal, the excellent managing editor of The Daily Beast. He informed me that as part of the Beast’s internal investigation, they had uncovered more instances in earlier articles of mine in which there the same problems of apparent plagiarism as the ones originally brought to life last Friday by Shafer. I instantly offered my resignation and Edward accepted.

    The Daily Beast’s motto is “Read This. Skip That.”  With plagiarism, you can read both and get the same thing, which means (in theory) that one is unnecessary.

    As a part time academic, I am always on the lookout for student work that has the look of “déja vu all over again.”  In that setting, plagiarism translates into a student getting a grade without learning what they’re supposed to.  I have to admit that, in this age of cut and paste, it’s a lot easier to do, but it doesn’t change the reality.

    In journalism and book writing, the biggest problem in plagiarism is twofold: it fails to acknowledge the source and it runs into copyright problems.  In the ancient world most historians were reticent about acknowledging their sources, weaving whatever sources they had into a narrative whose veracity isn’t always easy to check (the likes of Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus come to mind.)  It was the Christian Eusebius of Caesarea who started the trend by quoting acknowledged sources verbatim. This could be taken as somewhat lazy but, in some ways, set the standard for subsequent writers of all kinds.  (He also set the standard for a heavy, verbose writing style, but that’s for another post…)

    The Beast, however, should cut him some slack.  Don’t they have a column called “The Cheat Sheet?”

  • Hubris and Coastal Development

    As sort of a follow-up to my post on climate change and sea level rise, I’d like to present this from another U.S. military document, in this case Coastal Geology.  From the first chapter:

    a. Since man has ventured to the sea, he has been fascinated by the endless variety of geomorphic landforms and biological habitats that present themselves at the coast. With the exception of high altitude alpine, a full spectrum of environments is found around the world’s coastlines. These range from icy Arctic shores to rocky faulted coasts to temperate sandy barriers to tropical mangrove thickets, with a myriad of intermediate and mixed forms. Man has gone to the sea for food, for commerce, for war, and for beauty. He has built his homes and cities at the coast. He has also been hurt by the sea, terrorized by its occasional violence, and baffled by the changes that the sea has wrought on the land in remarkably short time spans. In hours, beaches disappear; in days, new inlets are cut; in a generation, cliffs crumble. His coastal works have often been buried in sand, swept away, or pounded into rubble, frustrating his most worthy engineering efforts. Why? What controls these mighty forces of change?

    b. The answers have been elusive. Nevertheless, over the centuries, man has attempted to manage the power of the sea. With a disregard for the realities of nature and a surfeit of hubris, he has built ever more massive structures to protect cities placed in ever more precarious locations. Unfortunately, many of these coastal works have been constructed with little attention to the overall physical setting in which they were placed, with little respect for the delicate balances of sediment supply, water quality, and biological habitat that are intimate elements of the coastal environment.

    The manual goes on to define hubris as follows:

    Hubris, a Greek term which cannot be fully translated, represents an attitude of overweening pride or arrogance – the end result of a search for self-assertion that challenges everything and defies everyone.

    Such a bold expression of philosophy is uncharacteristic of a technical document such as this one, and deserves some explanation.

    The idea of pride being a human sin was fairly common in the ancient world.  Neither Christianity nor Judaism had to justify their aversion to pride as the worst of human sins.  Humility as the standard for human behaviour has been a mark of Christian civilisations, although it’s been honoured in the breach many times.

    In the modern and post-modern world, humility has been interpreted as a sign of weakness, and overweening arrogance and pride as accepted conduct have taken the place of the modesty of the past.  We see it everywhere: in our government, in those who are coming up and those who are going out.  Sad to say it’s even crept into our churches; one pastor was heard to discourage his members from reacting modestly to a compliment to their outfit.

    Part of this is the result of the advancement of science and technology.  Our perception of what we are really capable of outruns our ability (or willingness) to do the work.  The most persistent offenders of this are the Marxist states, who believe that man’s advance in science gives them unbridled license to run over nature in egregious ways (an example of this with tragic backwash is here.)

    In the case of coastal development, these areas are not only very geologically diverse, but inherently unstable.  The meeting place of the sea and land, they are subject to the forces of the ocean, which is capable of recrafting the land mass it crashes into with relative ease.  Traditionally the response has been to build as far back from the coasts as possible while allowing for easy sea navigation.  How far back is back depends upon the nature of the coastline.  In the U.S., the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic Coast from northern Florida to southern New Jersey, with a few breaks, have been especially vulnerable, largely because the slope of the ground on both sides of the waterfront is gentle.  That makes the division between land and sea more problematic and at the same time raises the wave height of storm surges.  If we consider cities such as Houston, New Orleans, Jacksonville, Baltimore and Philadelphia, we get an idea of how this works.

    New Orleans, of course, brings up the subject of Katrina.  This is an example of how man’s activity has in part defeated the natural barriers that protected the low lying city.  The French wisely sited the place well inland and the city began in what is now called the “Vieux Carré,” the highest point in the area.  But New Orleans spread to lower areas, the re channelisation of the water flow diverted silt from the Delta and thus caused extensive subsidence, and last but not least massive projects such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (“MR-GO”) gave storm surges a watery highway into the heart of the city.  All of this is coupled with the simple fact that the Mississippi River is trying to change its main outlet (and thus the location of its silting) over to below Morgan City.  The result was flooding, not only during Katrina in 2005, but also during Betsy in 1965.

    In spite of these simple facts, today our love of living and working near the coasts pushes us to extensively develop these area, not only altering the ecosystem (as the monograph notes) but also putting populations at risk during cataclysmic events and long-term trends such as sea level changes and changes in the level of the coastline itself.

    Hubris, indeed.

  • Washington Gets Small Business, It Just Doesn't Like It

    Caroline Baum at Bloomberg tries to put on a “rational” face on this problem:

    “Washington doesn’t get it.”

    That generic statement is tripping off the tongues of populists and Tea Partiers, business groups and bankers alike. In short, the public is peeved at the politicians.

    I heard it this week from William Dunkelberg, chief economist of the National Federation of Independent Business, who used his group’s latest survey to opine on Washington’s deaf ear for helping small business.

    The president and Congress “pay lip service to the fact that small business generates half of private-sector GDP and employs 60 percent or more of private-sector workers,” Dunkelberg says. As far as Washington’s efforts to help this sector of the economy, “instead of stimulus, give consumers a tax cut,” he says.

    But her second paragraph reveals the problem: small business people are disproportionately represented with populists and Tea Partiers, currently the strongest power challengers the current Administration has.  As I noted last month:

    Barack Obama needs to basically break the back of small business to insure a permanent Democrat majority.  That’s because most small business people are Republicans; to pull the rug of funding out from under them would go a long way to ending effective opposition to his party.  It’s an interesting choice between the prosperity of the country and the perpetuation of your political power but, hey, look around and see how other places have made that choice.

    If you want to see a liberal really be transformed out of statist liberalism, just make them run a small business.  (That’s what happened with George McGovern.)  Obviously the current administration can’t afford for that to happen too often.  Until get people in power who are open minded in fact rather than just theory, small business is going to get the short end of the stick.

  • Climate Change and Sea Level Rise

    This interesting discussion from the Coastal Engineering Manual, which pre-dates the blow-up over “Climategate,” “Glaciergate,” and all of the other “gates” that the science has experienced lately:

    Before engineering and management can be considered, a fundamental question must be asked:  Is  sea level still rising?  During the last decade, the media has “discovered” global warming, and many politicians and members of the public are convinced that greenhouse gases are responsible for rising sea level and the increased frequency of flooding that occurs along the coast during storms.  Most scientists accept the findings that the concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere have increased greatly in the last century, largely due to industrial and automobile emissions.  However, the link between increased gas in the atmosphere and changing sea level is much more difficult to model and verify.  Wunsch (1996) has pointed out how difficult it is to separate myth from fact in the politically and emotionally charged issues of climate change and the oceans. The Environmental Protection Agency created a sensation in 1983 when it published a report linking atmospheric carbon dioxide to a predicted sea level rise of between 0.6 and 3.5 m (Hoffman, Keyes, and Titus 1983).  Since then, predictions of the eustatic rise have been falling, and some recent evidence suggests that the rate may slow or even that eustatic sea level may drop in the future (Houston 1993).

    (b) Possibly more reliable information on Holocene sea level changes can be derived from archaeological sites, wave-cut terraces, or organic material.  For example, Stone and Morgan (1993) calculated an average rise of 2.4 mm/year from radiocarbon-dated peat samples from Santa Rosa Island, on the tectonically stable Florida Gulf coast.  However, Tanner (1989) states that difficulties arise using all of these methods, and that calculated dates and rates may not be directly comparable.

    (c) Based on an exhaustive study of tide records from around the world, Emery and Aubrey (1991) have concluded that it is not possible to assess if a eustatic rise is continuing because, while many gauges do record a recent rise in relative sea level, an equal number record a fall.  Emery and Aubrey state (p. ix):

    In essence, we have concluded that ‘noise’ in the records produced by tectonic movements and both meteorological and oceanographic factors so obscures any signal of eustatic rise of sea level that the tide gauge records are more useful for learning about plate tectonics than about effects of the greenhouse heating of the atmosphere, glaciers, and ocean water.

    They also state (p. 176):

    This conclusion should be no surprise to geologists, but it may be unexpected by those climatologists and laymen who have been biased too strongly by the public’s perception of the greenhouse effect on the environment….Most coastal instability can be attributed to tectonism and documented human activities without invoking the spectre of greenhouse-warming climate or collapse of continental ice sheets.

    (d) In summary, despite the research and attention devoted to the topic, the evidence about worldwide, eustatic sea level rise is inconclusive.  Estimates of the rate of rise range from 0 to 3 mm/year, but some researchers maintain that it is not possible to discover a statistically reliable rate using tide gauge records. In late Holocene time, sea level history was much more complicated than has generally been supposed (Tanner 1989), suggesting that there are many perturbations superimposed on “average” sea level curves. Regardless, the topic is sure to remain highly controversial.

    The papers cited here are as follows:

    • Wunsch, C.  1996.  Doherty Lecture: “The Ocean and Climate – Separating Myth from Fact,” Marine Technical Society Journal, Vol 30, No. 2, pp 65-68.
    • Hoffman, J. S., Keyes, D., and Titus, J. G.  1983.  “Projecting Future Sea Level Rise; Methodology, Estimates to the Year 2100, and Research Needs,” Report 230-09-007, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC.
    • Houston, J. R.  1993.  “Responding to Uncertainties in Sea Level Rise,” The State of Art of Beach Nourishment, Proceedings of the 1993 National Conference on Beach Preservation Technology, The Florida Shore & Beach Preservation Association, Tallahassee, FL, pp 358-372.
    • Stone, G. W., and Morgan, J. P.  1993.  “Implications for a Constant Rate of Relative Sea-Level Rise During the Last Millennium Along the Northern Gulf of Mexico:  Santa Rosa Island, Florida,”  Shore and Beach, Vol 61, No. 4, pp 24-27.
    • Tanner, W. F.  1989.  “New Light on Mean Sea Level Change,”  Coastal Research, Vol 8, No. 4, pp 12-16.
    • Emery, K. O., and Aubrey, D. G.  1991.  Sea Levels, Land Levels, and Tide Gauges, Springer-Verlag, New York, NY.

    Evidently Al Gore didn’t make the Coastal Engineering Manual bedtime (or pot) reading.

  • Forcing the Church of England's Hand on Homosexuals

    Back in March 2007 I noted the following:

    The best practical argument for disestablishment, however, is that it would give more freedom to the church to set its own agenda.

    We’ve already noted that there has been talk about Parliament forcing the CofE to admit women bishops.  In the gay-crazy mood the UK is in these days, we’re honestly surprised that the government allowed Rowan Williams to humour the Global South the way he did in Dar-es-Salaam.  The main reason why they haven’t is that the CofE isn’t a very significant part of Britain’s landscape any more except for its empty church buildings.  And there’s always the National Trust for those in a crunch.

    But we know that, with the homosexuals, there’s not an insignificant enough opponent they won’t try to crush sooner or later.

    Well now we have this:

    Tory leader David Cameron has launched an astonishing attack on the Church of England over its attitudes to homosexuality. In an interview with the gay magazine Attitude, Cameron tells award-winning journalist Johann Hari that ‘our Lord Jesus’ would back equality and gay rights if he were around today. He says he doesn’t want to get into a row with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. ‘But I think the Church has to do some of the things that the Conservative Party has been through – sorting this issue out and recognising that full equality is a bottom line full essential.’ He also introduces a new phrase to the English language, one that might be current in High Tory circles but not one I’ve heard before, in reference to Muslim women: ‘Blowing the hijab off them.’

    I don’t think that the Tories’ gay supporters are going to sit by and allow Cameron avoid getting “into a row” with Rowan Williams.

    The CoE’s position as an established church has always made it vulnerable to state interference and control of the kind that Cameron is implicitly threatening.  That’s why North American Anglicans’ endless desire to find validation by the CoE (along with getting into an Anglican Covenant, with the CoE as the natural centre) is misguided and will end in disaster.

    One Anglican friend noted to me that she thought they should move the Communion to Africa.  In spite of the Ugandans’ rough times lately, that still looks like a good idea.  But I advocated that, too, in times past, and not just for Anglicans either:

    The Archbishops of Canterbury and York participated in a much publicised “guilt march” across the UK about the evil of slavery.

    But there’s an easier and more substantial way to even the score: just let the Africans and their allies, including the descendants of slaves in the West Indies, take the lead in the Communion.

    We find, however, that, Western church leaders–liberal and conservative alike–are reluctant to bow to the obvious and allow the centre of power of Christianity to shift where its people are.  The liberals are especially adverse to this process, as they are further from the Africans’ idea than their conservative counterparts.

    The desperation of conservative parishes in TEC, however, has them affiliating with provinces such as Uganda and Nigeria, along with others.  They have gone past guilt.  It is time that the rest of us follow suit.

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