Word: sponges
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Excerpts from a tract by a staunch atheist? On the contrary, those are assertions offered by a bishop of America's Episcopal Church, John Spong of Newark, in his new book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (Harper San Francisco, $16.95). Spong's unorthodoxy is of long standing, but it has now reached epic proportions. His previous book, Living in Sin?, assailed Christian dos and don'ts on sex and asserted that nonmarital sex can be holy under some circumstances. After the work appeared in 1988, Spong ordained a sexually active gay priest, inspiring the Episcopal House of Bishops to "disassociate...
...provocative prelate also has Roman Catholics fuming. A task force in his Newark diocese has just declared that Catholicism's view of women is "so insulting, so retrograde that we can respond only by saying that women should, for the sake of their own humanity, leave that communion." Spong handpicked the panel, and offers no particular criticism of its assertions, though he says he might have employed milder language. Newark's Catholic Archbishop, Theodore McCarrick, has decried the "offensive attacks" on Catholicism...
Williams apologized for belittling Mother Teresa but stuck by his anti- monogamy stand. He plans to defy the bishop's request to cease all priestly activities until the case is settled. Says he: "If ((Spong)) wants to spend another quarter-million dollars, he can take me to trial." And speaking of trials, conservative Episcopalians are planning to file charges against Bishop Spong himself for ordaining an active...
...took two years of screening before New Jersey's controversial Bishop John Spong approved J. Robert Williams, 34, as the first Episcopal man to be ordained a priest while openly living in a gay relationship. It took six weeks for the bishop to decide the ordination was a big mistake. Williams has now been forced out of his job at a gay ministry while the diocese investigates whether he misrepresented his moral beliefs...
...what we're doing and we're not." Having thus dismissed the traditional concept of Christian marriage, Williams told a questioner in rather crude terms that Mother Teresa of Calcutta would be better off if she had had sex. All that was too much even for Bishop Spong, who also wants to overturn Judeo-Christian sexual limitations but encourages "committed" relationships, gay or straight, with lifelong monogamy as the ideal...