Killing me Spoftly ...

Hello, everybody. I'm Craig Goodrich, living in Las Vegas (otherwise known as the Corinth of the Mojave).

I'm a cradle Episcopalian, confirmed in 1956 in the Diocese of Fond du Lac (the line at the time was that it was the only Episcopal diocese in the country that regarded the Pope as a low churchman). In the early '60s I went off to college and discovered beer, which was my principal source of spiritual enlightenment for the next three decades or so.

What with one thing and another, I came back to the church when I moved to Las Vegas a couple of years ago. I felt like Rip van Winkle:

When I left, the church had a Prayer Book that was the envy of anglophone Christendom; its language and rhythms essentially created the English literary tongue of Shakespeare, and its underlying theology was such that the Eastern Orthodox -- the most theologically rigorous of the Church catholic -- could adopt its Eucharist for their Western Rite with only the most minor changes.
When I came back, the church had a Prayer Book that somehow managed to combine the sense of style of a high-school chemistry text, slovenly liturgical scholarship, and the theological depth of a late-1960s bumper sticker.
When I left, the profound hope of the church was ecumenical reunification based on the Lambeth Quadrilateral of scripture/apostolic succession/dominical sacraments/creeds.
When I came back, the church viewed the Bible as a collection of stories and found its Holy Writ on the editorial pages of the New York Times, ordained anyone over the age of majority, had a Standing Liturgical Commission whose sole aim was apparently to perform ever more inventive acts of vandalism on the sloppy liturgies we have left, and was run by a House of Bishops which was unwilling to pass a resolution affirming basic Christian teaching. All the while, of course, continuing to pray fatuously "that the Church may be one."

So why am I sticking around? Well, I love the music we play (I'm currently one of the guitar stops on Grace in the Desert's virtual organ) , and of course I love the people. (Notice how for more than a generation, the authoritarian bureaucracy at 815 has been holding local congregational affection hostage to promote its silly ideas?)

Also, I've spent a lot of time over the last fifteen years as a libertarian agitator, one of my major challenges being to convince unreflective conservatives that just because something was immoral, it wasn't necessarily a good idea to declare it illegal. So now for a change I guess I'll start trying to convince unreflective liberals that just because something is legal, it's not necessarily a good idea to declare it moral.... <sigh...>

So I'm glad this group is here. Forwards! ... ? ...

Craig