Where Have All the Scholars Gone? 3: More Scholars

Updated 4/24/08

Many of you know already about the recent conference held at General Theological Seminary titled, "An Anglican Covenant: Divisive or Reconciling?." The topic was, obviously, the process for developing a covenant for the Anglican Communion, and particularly the most recent St. Andrew's draft from the Covenant Drafting Committee. You can find audio files of the presentations here (or at least of most; as of this writing some have still not been linked, but the Seminary promises to link the rest as soon as possible).

You can read what others have written about the Conference (for example, here , here, and here). However, those posts have focused on the addresses of the keynote speakers. I would encourage you to spend some time with the shorter presentations by various panelists. The conference scheduled panel groups after each keynote presentation. Most Episcopal seminaries were represented, as well as several Canadian seminaries. As with the keynoters, there is a spectrum of opinions, from "we need a written covenant, and this draft needs consideration;" to "the last thing we need is a covenant, much less this draft.” From my listening, most were somewhere in between – somewhere along the line of “we expect that some form of covenant will be developed, and so the important issues are what sort do we already have, and what sort do we want.”

Take some time to listen to the various voices. At twelve to fifteen minutes apiece, they are quite manageable. All are well prepared, and provide good food for thought. As we consider where we think God is leading the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church, listening to all these perspectives is worth the effort.

UPDATE: Today posts that are not available as audio files are now available in print and can be read on line. All presentations, as well as other materials, are available here.