November 6, 2002

For years church leaders have been looking for ways of conducting church business other than by parliamentary procedure. The politics of voting resolutions up or down, and the practice of following the routines of Robert’s Rules of Order, tends to divide people into winners and losers. Is there another way?

The Central Committee of the World Council of Churches decided that there is. It resolved in September to implement a set of rules to govern the organization by consensus. The aim is to seek “the common mind of a meeting without deciding issues by means of voting.”

Dear Congregation of the St. Pachomius Byzantine Orthodox Church: Pursuant to our contractual agreement dated August 1 of this year, I have completed my evaluation of your church. I have, as you requested, assessed your worship as to its compatibility with contemporary sensibilities. I have researched the tradition of your own congregation and also studied the Leading Indicators of Spiritual Trends (LIST). The report is organized in six categories.

Though it is hard to imagine the situation in Colombia getting much worse, church leaders and human rights groups are warning that the violence is in fact increasing, and that a “dirty war” like the one in El Salvador in the 1980s and in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s is likely to erupt.

From Baptist to Presbyterian to Orthodox—that’s hardly a conventional trajectory for an American Christian. Even less usual, perhaps, than claiming to be a Christian poet, or being summarily unhired from a Christian university because a single poem was deemed unsuitable by the administration. But Scott Cairns has never managed to be typical.

While driving home after viewing Bowling for Columbine, I tuned into a radio discussion about the Washington, D.C., sniper. The exchange centered on whether the sniper was a "serial" or "spree" killer." Only in America, I thought, does the public knowledgeably categorize mass-murderers.

On January 30, 1972, the Civil Rights Association of Derry organized what was meant to be a peaceful march protesting the British violation of civil liberties in Northern Ireland. The protest was led by Parliament member Ivan Cooper, who wanted the march not only to express nationalist feelings but to prove to England that those sentiments could be expressed without bloodshed. (He was an admirer of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.