News round-up

Anglicans gear up for ultimate same-sex debate

Nearly two years have gone by since New Westminster Bishop Michael Ingham said he would permit the blessing of same-sex unions, but because the Anglican Church of Canada was not scheduled to hold its next General Synod until May 2004, the national church has not yet had a chance to address the ramifications of his decision. Now, with the General Synod just a couple months away, the church has announced that it will decide at that meeting whether diocesan bishops have the authority to permit such blessings, reports the Vancouver Sun.

The announcement came just a couple days after the primate's task force issued a report recommending that dissenting minorities who disagree with their bishops' endorsement of same-sex blessings should be given temporary alternative episcopal oversight (AEO). Edmonton Bishop Victoria Matthews told the Anglican Journal that AEO should be temporary because, otherwise, "we would be doing damage to the church because we would be setting up parallel jurisdictions. The general view we kept hearing was, 'we need this in place until the dust settles.'" Comparing AEO to a "trial separation", Matthews added, "What we're saying here is that we're leaving the door open for the Holy Spirit."

The conservative Anglicans protesting Ingham's decision in the Diocese of New Westminster had not publicly responded to these developments at press time. For his part, Bishop Ingham told the Sun he had reservations about the task force's recommendation: "The question arises why the temporary partition of a diocese along theological lines would restore unity. If it's not a long-term solution, why is it being presented as a short-term solution? Many people also have concerns that temporary arrangements become permanent."

Disney gets behind new Narnia movie

The Disney company has seen a lot of turmoil in recent months, but it has also scored a few coups, from acquiring the Muppets to arranging a deal to make films based on the works of Judy Blume. Now they're hopping on board the British-fantasy bandwagon that has brought great success to the makers of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films -- by signing a deal to co-finance and distribute the first feature film based on C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The 1950 novel has been adapted a few times before, but only for television -- as a British mini-series in 1967, as an American cartoon in 1979 and as a British teleplay in 1988. Andrew Adamson, co-director of the Disney-parodying Shrek and its upcoming sequel, is already working in his native New Zealand on the new film's pre-production with Weta Workshop (the special-effects company behind Peter Jackson's hugely successful Tolkien trilogy), but no casting decisions have been announced yet -- though it was briefly rumoured that Nicole Kidman was being considered for the White Witch.

The film has been in development for a couple years, ever since Walden Media, a company financed by Christian billionaire Philip Anschutz, acquired the rights to The Chronicles of Narnia from the Lewis estate; Walden's other films include Holes and the IMAX documentary Ghosts of the Abyss, in which James Cameron re-visits the Titanic. Walden and Disney bought newspaper ads announcing their intention to release the film Christmas 2005. It remains to be seen how Disney's attachment to this film will affect the Disney boycotts that some Christian groups have engaged in over the last few years.

Stories about same-sex marriage:

A history of marriage shows it's a work in progress
People who oppose same-sex marriages often claim that such unions violate the traditional notion of matrimony. They seek a monopoly over an institution whose quality, they claim, has remained the same from the beginning of time. An examination of this tradition, however, shows that marriage is essentially about substantial change.
John Klassen, Vancouver Sun, March 5

Christians will win the culture war
I guess the reason why gay marriage is so pervasive, on every screen, on every op-ed page, is that "rights" for gay men and women is the only idea the Left has left that actually rocks. It has traction, it is where, in that ghastly creaky phrase, the rubber hits the road. Why? I have no idea, so I went off to St. John's Shaughnessy, the largest Anglican church in Canada to find out why.
Elizabeth Nickson, National Post, March 5

Earlier: Commissioners must perform gay weddings -- or else

Other stories from the past week:

U.S. terror fears strand Amish man in Canadian village: Refuses to have photo taken
Cannot cross border to return home without green card
CanWest News Service, March 5

Celibacy is the root cause of abuse
Canadian news outlets provided minimal coverage of last week's Catholic sex abuse bombshell in the United States. We should be paying closer attention: As scandals at orphanages, residential schools and churches here in Canada demonstrate, the molestation epidemic afflicting Catholicism knows no borders.
Jonathan Kay, National Post, March 5

Spanish pilgrimage tests limits
The road to Santiago de Compostela is like an open-air museum, winding across a plateau of ancient villages, farms and well-organized hostels for pilgrims
Montreal Gazette, March 6

Lama-palooza ticket rush to be solved through lottery
The chief organizer of an historic Vancouver dialogue with the Dalai Lama, South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, former Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi is being knocked off his feet by well-placed people in Canada and the U.S. lobbying him for some of the 1,200 passes to the event.
Vancouver Sun, March 6

The sound of moderate Islam's silence
The voices coming over Australian radio the other night were new to me and the names they mentioned were strange, but the story they told was painfully familiar. Once more an imam living in a Western country was preaching Islamic terrorism, and once more his supporters were insisting that he could never have said such things and must have been misunderstood, quoted out of context, or wilfully mistranslated.
Robert Fulford, National Post, March 6

Faiths' founders were three astonishing, similar men
Spiritual leaders say one of the keys to creating better relations is to promote understanding of each other's basic religious tenets -- and especially to highlight common ground. There are many strong similarities among Judaism, Christianity and Islam, even though zealots like to exaggerate the differences.
Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun, March 6

Morality, reduced to an equation
The Science of Good and Evil is the third in a series that Shermer has written on "the power of belief." Why People Believe Weird Things covered pseudoscience and superstition, How We Believe: Science, Skepticism and the Search for God covered religious belief. His current book takes on an even more timely issue, in this moment of war and terrorism: the nature of good and evil and the origins of morality.
National Post, March 6

CBC Web site bars use of word 'Jewish'
Internet users who post messages on a CBC Web site have launched complaints that the Crown corporation routinely removes the words "Jew," "Jewish" and "Israel" from network chat rooms devoted to online discussion of news events.
National Post, March 10