The Christian Century

After the evening service on Ash Wednesday, I was led off for coffee and conversation by a group of seminary students who wanted to air their frustrations about the recent meeting of Anglican primates. The primates had issued a call for the Episcopal Church in the U.S. to declare that it will not authorize same-sex blessings and will not elect another openly gay bishop.

Pleading for patience from her church’s restive majority, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori urged the Episcopal Church to refrain from ordaining gay bishops and blessing same-sex unions “for a season,” so it can contribute further to the drafting of a covenant among the world’s 77 million Anglicans.

Dozens of church representatives of a movement of people unhappy inside the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have voted unanimously to pursue possible refuge within the conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which proposes to establish a temporary, nongeographic presbytery for dissident PCUSA congregations.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America may be asked to change a ban on practicing gay and lesbian clergy after a disciplinary committee voted to remove an openly gay pastor but suggested that the church find a way to reinstate him.

Most of the “key constituents” in centrist Conservative Judaism would support gay and lesbian rabbis, according to an e-mail- and Web-based survey commissioned by the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Anglican leaders from around the world have told the Episcopal Church’s bishops they must declare unequivocally that they will not authorize same-sex blessings and that no one living in a same-sex union will be made a bishop.

The Roman Catholic Church has lost the fight to opt out of new laws in England and Wales banning discrimination against gay couples, throwing its adoption agencies into a bind.

The United Methodist Church’s highest court has decided not to reconsider a case in which it permitted a Virginia pastor to prevent an openly gay man from joining his church.

In two rulings last fall, the court sided with pastor Ed Johnson of South Hill, Virginia, who refused to admit an openly gay man as a church member and was subsequently ousted by his peers.

The United Methodist father and daughter—he a seminary professor and she one-half of the Grammy-winning folk rock Indigo Girls—performed and shared experiences in a featured appearance at the denomination’s quadrennial Women’s Assembly this month in Anaheim, California.

Key U.S. Catholic bishops told 55 Catholic Democrats in the House that there is no wiggle room in church teaching on abortion, and that they are duty-bound to work against “the destruction of unborn human life.” The statement March 10 by three top leaders of the U.S.