Eilis O’Hanlon writes in the [Irish] Sunday Independent about Switchers’ schism a divine Irish mystery.
Peter Ormerod writes for The Guardian that Leftwing Christians need to have a louder voice.
The BBC World Service programme More or Less asks “Have 100,000 Christians died [per year for the last decade] as martyrs?” Listen online or download a podcast.
Craig A Satterlee asks Why Do You Sit Where You Do? at Alban.
Andrew Brown writes in The Guardian that Judges can sidestep religion, but they can’t avoid morality.
Gillan Scott of God & Politics in the UK asks Is a muscular defence of our national Judaeo-Christian heritage needed?
Jonathan Clatworthy gave this talk at St Bride’s in Liverpool this week: Honest to God: 50 years on, has the Church still got its head in the sand? He has also written briefly for Modern Church.
The Irish Independent piece is a comment on a controversy which began with the Archbishop’s presidential address to our diocesan synods. you can read it here: http://dublin.anglican.org/news/2013/10/Archbishop-Delivers-Presidential-Address-to-Dublin-and-Glendalough-Synods.php
The controversy has continued in the pages of the Irish Times – including front page articles – where the term ‘Polyester Protestant’ was first used in print.
Craig A Satterlee – how about instead of sitting the congregation stood. And the pastor sat. Oh wait, that was the case – some time ago.
What does “polyester Protestant” actually mean? Is it that converts from Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism are the sort of people who wear man-made fibres rather than natural materials, and are therefore thought to be downmarket?
This is the only explanation I can think of, since I can’t imagine it applies to cheap polyester chasubles, which Roman Catholics might wear but wouldn’t be worn in the Church of Ireland because they don’t wear chasubles at all. But as an explanation it seems very far-fetched.
Since ‘Polyester Protestant’ seems to have been a term that none of my colleagues had heard it’s meaning is unclear. I think it’s supposed to imply ‘not real’ in some way. They aren’t ‘one of us’. (Since I would not normally describe myself as a Protestant it’s all a bit mystifying to me, but then I’m English and a blow in.)
Dear Veuster. If I may be so naughty, the idiom refers to people who are so low-church and wear vestments or clerical garb so rarely that when they do, they buy them on the cheap and catch fire if they position themselves to close to a source of heat. Libellous of course, but that’s the origin.