For about the last five years (even though it seems like 100), Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh has been fuming about Lambeth and how certain bishops shouldn’t come. He and his conservative friends have been demanding all sorts of things. “If THEY are present, we will not be there.” Then they went and created Gaffe-con, as the alternative anti-Lambeth.

I gather that these extremists were hoping that Archbishop Rowan Williams would…do what? Did they think that Williams would cancel Lambeth? Were they hoping that Williams would tell Americans and Canadians to stay home? What was the point of the almost nonstop petulant behavior?

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As I prepare for our final meeting of a parish book group this evening, I am happy to post this item. We’re reading Anne Lamott’s great book, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. We’ve had great discussions, and I expect tonight’s meeting to be fruitful as well.

Anyway, this little snippet gives a pretty good impression of what Lamott is like in real life, as opposed to in her poignant and often funny essays. Not surprisingly, she seems funny and poignant. Most important, she can hold her own against Stephen Colbert. That can’t be easy.

She’s talking about her new book, Grace (Eventually). I imagine I’ll read it at some point soon.

Do you like to have data on the go? Are you a Christian? Then this cruciform USB flash drive might be just the thing.

You can order here, where you can also see what it looks like on a person. Via the Blingdom of God.

This has nothing to do with anything, really. Maybe you’ll agree that this is not your usual animal story.

Jessica the abandoned hippopotamus is now so much part of Shirley and Tonie Joubert’s family that she regularly wanders around their home, eats at their table and even drinks a pint of two of tea…

The Jouberts have raised Jessica since she was found, barely a day old, on a river bank in Hoedspruit, Limpopo, South Africa, in March 2000.

Via Metro via Gizmodo.

Even if you’re not a pastor, this is good stuff. If you are a pastor, it explains clearly why you should be on facebook — and how to get around once you’re there.

Pastors are used to preaching. They are allowed the unique privilege and responsibility of preparing a message from God’s word each week and communicating that message uninterrupted in a one-way monologue. Those days are over. Preaching from the platform of a church may not have changed much, but there is an increasing demand from church members to have real and meaningful conversations with their ministr y leaders beyond the Sunday morning service times and outside the walls of the church.

Many ministers tell me they crave the same kind of contact with their church members. Facebook is a free, handy tool for you to cultivate closer relationships with the segment of people who come to your church and are part of the Facebook community. Should everyone in your church be on Facebook? Probably not. But if you have church members on Facebook looking for spiritual nourishment throughout the week, shouldn’t you be there to provide it?

You can find the whole book — for free! — online here. Download, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

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Maybe it’s because I recently watched both 28 Weeks Later and I Am Legend, but this drawing caught my eye.

Early Christians were accused (falsely) have practicing cannibalism, I guess because of the Eucharistic language. Today we aren’t accused of cannibalism, but we still have droning crowds.

Why, you might ask, did I watch these two movies? Well, let’s just say that when you’re on a plane ride for 18 hours and you can’t sleep, you’ll watch just about anything to pass the time.

ASBO Jesus seems to have captured what’s happening within ECUSA and the Anglican Communion these days. Lots of people like to talk about anything other than the real issues. We are easily distracted by things that really aren’t all that important. Sigh.

I mostly ignored the Anglican blogosphere while I was in Japan — and for the last couple of weeks. Maybe I missed something, but here’s what I think happened. If you are one of the people (like I usually am) who follows these things closely, perhaps you can tell me if I missed anything.

• Archbishop Rowan Williams has written a letter telling some bishops to stay home from Lambeth George Conger says. N. T. Wright says yes, but not yet. Oops! It’s weeks later and there’s no letter. Once again bishops and journalists were reporting their own wishful thinking, with no apparent correspondence to reality.
• Our favorite Uncle Fester look-alike came to America. Some people thought our Presiding Bishop should drop everything to sit in the audience and have him remind her that she’s not in The Club. But she was out in Utah doing the work of the church. Snub? Mission-focused? You decide. Note that your decision will depend on whether you have decided that a priori that +KJS is the antichrist or the Christa. A lot of virtual spilled ink on this one.
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Hello, dear readers. A few weeks ago, I signed off just before our wonderful vacation in Japan. My original plan was to resume full-on blogging once I got back to the US. However, parish life was just a bit too nutty for me to have time for this. Now things are (sort of) humming along smoothly, so I’m back here. Golly, I have a lot of accumulated stuff to post here. I’ll try to catch up gradually, over the next few days.

If you didn’t check them out, you can find photos of the Japan trip over on flickr. I noticed there’s something wrong with the colors. I think either iPhoto or flickrUploadr are killing things when I resize the pics. You can see this if you compare our 2008 trip to the set from our 2006 trip to Japan. If I can figure it out, maybe I’ll upload a fresh, brighter set.

One of the photos was blogged here. It’s all in Japanese, and the Japanese-to-English web translator was of no use. I hope it’s kind. [See below for an update.]

More on Anglican drama (and drama queens) in the next few posts. Also, you can look forward to techno-sundries!

UPDATE: The author of the blog posting about my flickr photo has commented here — thanks! Turns out that I made a wrong assumption. The blog posting is in Chinese, not Japanese. So here’s the machine translation. In my defense, Japanese kanji are very similar to Chinese writing. On the other hand, I should have noticed the difference. Well, fortunately it’s all sorted out now!