Women Priests (Roman), Women Bishops (COE), and the Death of Liberal Christianity.

Coverage of these issues has been all over the news, first there is this Peter Stanford article in the Observer about the rise of women priests in the Roman Catholic Church. (A Catholic nun friend here in LA was telling me, just the other day, of her recent attendance at the ordination of a woman to the priesthood.)

The pressure for women to be given something more to do in church than flower-arranging is building from both within Catholicism - 70 more American women are preparing for ordination as Catholic priests, 120 in total worldwide - and from outside because of the example of what is happening in Anglicanism.

And then there is this Ruth Glendell piece which includes these choice paragraphs:

Some good churchmen (and women) from the tiny minority that still believe God has a special relationship with men, will insist that their convictions have nothing to do with sexism, and that their arguments are drawn from the classic three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition and Reason.

...scripture does not address ordination as we now have it, it is inconclusive on what, if any, special or restricted roles women should have. Those who claim that neither Jesus nor Paul spoke out against the low status of women in their time, fail to recognise that they also did not speak out against slavery either.

Theo Hobson has an interesting analysis of the current place of liberals within the Anglican Church. Is liberal Anglicanism impossible? Where do liberals go from here? He says:

A major rethink is needed. They must ask whether they really want to be good Catholics after all, and if Catholicism entails the preference of ecclesiastical authority to conscience. Perhaps some will ask whether the concept of church is intrinsically authoritarian. This could be an exciting time for theology. Perhaps Williams' Abrahamic impression has unwittingly sown the seeds of a much-needed revival of liberal theology.

Finally there is this opinion column in the LA Times by Charlotte Allen, Catholicism editor for Belieftnet, claiming the death of the liberal church.