A couple of things this dreary Monday morning:

Gene Robinson was consecrated yesterday over in Durham, NH, and this likely marks the beginning of the end of the American Episcopal Church as we know it. Some are even announcing that the Robinson scandal will be the most serious crisis in the Anglican Church since the American Revolution. Condemnations are already rolling in from Canterbury and Africa, and well as across the US and Canada. Robinson has his miter, but he will lose the church to which it belongs.

The most eloquent voice in Durham was a parishioner named Meredith Harwood, who read out a very thoughtful statement objecting to the consecration. She said, in part: It will tear us apart at our deepest level. This is foundational tearing, the most painful rupturing which human beings can experience. Jesus prayed for his followers to be one. The Anglican Communion is a sacred gift which has been entrusted to us. How dare this diocese rend asunder that which God has joined together! This is also the cowardly and conforming act of a church that has capitulated to elite culture. Many superficially appealing voices are telling us, "express yourselves."

But Jesus brought a gospel of salvation and transformation, not a watered down message of affirmation. Of course everyone is invited to God's party no matter who they are, no matter what their background or struggle in life. Yes, part of what Jesus offers is a profound love and welcome, but it is not a love that leaves people where they are, but a holy love which calls them to be who God wants them to become.

This is why Jesus said to the woman in John 8 on whom he had compassion, "go and sin no more," which he would say to Gene Robinson if he were physically here today. Inclusivity without transformation is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. We cannot be deaf, we shall not capitulate to what some in elite culture insist the church should do.

Churches hijacked by "elite culture" and "inclusivity without transformation" -- could there be a better description of the modern Christian crisis? The rest of her statement and a bevy of others can be found here.

All this brings to mind John Derbyshire's interesting article from last June, bemoaning the "gay-ghettoization" of modern Western Christianity; as it turns out, the article got Derbyshire into hot water with hang-wringing Midwestern academics who found such utterances insensitive.

I just finished Adam Nicholson's God's Secretaries, about the making of the King James Bible. It is popular history at its best and worst, taking a dusty but important event and making it accessible to the non-specialist, yet conjecturing and making the participants speak in a loose imaginative manner, unbecoming of a history text. Edmund Morris comes to mind, as Nicholson wonders what people are thinking and saying when the sources fail him.

The book also struck me as a paean to Jacobean society in general and King James I in particular, both of which I am unused to seeing. Granted, I spend most of my time lurking in nineteenth century America, but what I have read has always cast condemnations on those monarchs (James I & II, Charles I & II) who were more at home with divine right than popular rights. Perhaps Nicholson's take is a healthy one, giving the Stuarts and the Cavaliers a polite nod in the midst of an audience full of frowns.