A Nice Quick Read

Some of the folks who read this blog might like to look at the six page newsletter from the Liberal Catholic Apostolic Church. There is a small review of a 2002 book of collected pieces by the conservative postliberal George Lindbeck. It has the accurate, if retold, essential history of Old Catholicism within it. There are also some references to what has happened in Swindon and remarks on the background of a recruit to train within the LCAC. And, as a matter of accuracy, the editor Mhoira Lauer-Patterson is Bishop-elect at present until September when she joins Elizabeth, Sheila and Shelley in those little Churches that have drawn my interest.

I note that on Facebook Bishop Adrian Glover makes a simple point (as an answer to a question) that not everyone becomes bishop. There's this notion of looseness, and there are indeed permissive groups like the Young Rite. My own view (if of any importance) is that even clergy driven movements need lay people as committed supporters and Churches need congregations of some kind or other, even if they are regional gatherings and away-days.

I would describe myself as 'low liberal' and, anyway, a religious humanist. I did have a short period of appreciating a bit more Anglo-Catholicism, and the idea of symbolic worship is still important, but that emphasis has somewhat evacuated itself more recently along with the postmodern pretence (really) in appearing to believe things that I didn't.

I've moved a little way from postmodernism, in that for all science's focus on some things and not on others, and on revisions made (its strength), the fact that experiments are made that produce answers you do not want is a limiter to the notion of postmodern freedom and an apparent merging of the fictional and the factual. Even social science produces results one doesn't want, and there is no direct equivalence, say, with writing a novel (despite some overlaps, especially in Social Anthropology).

There is a liberalism derived from Catholicism, as indeed there is the esoteric, but I am not esoteric in outlook and my liberalism is more direct, more based on Enlightenment and, before that, the libertarian basis of the left wing of the Reformation and with its inevitable drive towards a religious humanism. I do go with the romanticism of the later nineteenth century, but even treat that critically. So I am friendly with the LCAC after its rebirth but, on reflection, wouldn't join up either lay or seek any other.