I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but the Episcopal Diocesan Convention here in Colorado last weekend got minimal press. The only article I’ve found, in fact, is this Jean Torkelson column — which even she had trouble punching up into something appropriately apocalyptic and controversial.
This was the first year in the last four or five I haven’t been a delegate at the convention, so I have only the few eyewitnesses I talked to by which to judge the “pandemonium” assessment — and their description sounds a lot more like the bishop’s.
Now, as to whether the relative (and tightly managed) calm at the convention was for good or for ill — I don’t know. On the one hand, trying to enforce civility and dodge any major confrontations (as the bishop did by making this a “resolution-less” convention and turning matters over to yet another commission) keeps arguments from spiraling out of control and turning disagreements into profound divisions. On the other hand, I get a sense that it’s only delaying the inevitable, papering over the
divisions that are already there, and encouraging the radicals (of either stripe) to take action on their own. If the truth shall set ye free, maybe we ought to find a less round-about way toward it.
UPDATE: BD blogs on the article.