Word: stockwood
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even by the unfettered standards of Britain's Anglican hierarchy, the Bishop of Southwark is known as a bold and outspoken churchman. In addition to sponsoring a host of adventurous urban missions, the Rt. Rev. Mervyn Stockwood has over the years defended homosexuals, denounced Anglican policy on divorce as cowardly, told ribald stories in public and revealed the drinking habits of his fellow clerics in a book called The Compleat Imbiber...
Seances and Psi. Stockwood is not the only Anglican clergyman to dabble in telepathy, seances and other "psi" phenomena. He happens to be vice president of a group called the Churches Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies, whose patrons include 20 bishops of the Anglican Communion. One of the fellowship's basic concerns is with what it considers a "highly agnostic" trend: the diminution of belief in the traditional Christian doctrine of life after death. Not only does such skepticism deny comfort to the kin of the dead, says the fellowship, but it raises profound questions about "what...
...consider spiritualism an outright violation of the Biblical injunctions against the occult. If a Christian seeks from spiritualism what he cannot find in his own faith, warns an article in the Anglican quarterly, Modern Churchman, he is not "far from the sin of Lucifer-the sin of pride." Nonetheless, Stockwood claims that his pieces in the Times produced hundreds of letters from believers who are convinced that they too have had ghostly visitors...
...year ago, Stockwood opened a diocesan training center where laymen meet for intensive study and lectures on the relevance of faith to modern life, from the morality of expense-account living to the morality of strike tactics. Stockwood is encouraging putting off baptism until a child has some grasp of its meaning, and also favors "full-rite visitations," in which baptism, confirmation and First Communion are all administered to the same recipient on the same...
Some Anglicans, deploring "South Bank religion," argue that the Southwark clerics are making Christianity so timely that it ceases to be timeless. But Bishop Stockwood believes that time is running out. As he declared after his consecration as bishop: "I have nothing but contempt for a church that sets out to be eclectic, that just wants to draw to itself the holy holy Anglo-Catholics. I have every use for a church that sets out to draw all those living within its boundaries...