PLATELL'S PEOPLE: Don't blame Prince Charles for sex abuse bishop Peter Ball - I was duped by Rolf Harris

From The Daily Mail-

Over the years, I have been a fierce critic of Prince Charles. Yet now an inquiry has ‘damned’ him over his misguided backing for a bishop exposed as a serial paedophile, I find myself in the unusual position of being his defender.

Peter Ball, the former Bishop of Gloucester, was convicted in 2015 of abusing 18 boys and young men. 

By then, he had been a friend of Charles for more than 20 years — despite Ball having been cautioned by the police in 1993 for gross indecency and resigning from the Church in disgrace.

Charles saw him regularly and corresponded with him, telling him he was the victim of ‘monstrous wrongs’ and giving him money. The bishop prayed with the Prince at Highgrove and became Charles’s long-term mentor.

The Prince claimed that he never realised Ball’s 1993 caution carried an admission of guilt. But that seems naïve, particularly for a future head of the Church of England.

More here-

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7017073/PLATELLS-PEOPLE-Dont-blame-Prince-Charles-bishop-Peter-Ball-duped-Rolf-Harris.html

The Lutheran Pastor Calling for a Sexual Reformation

From The New Yorker-

Bolz-Weber had flown in from her home in Denver to promote her book “Shameless,” which was published last week. In it, she calls for a sexual reformation within Christianity, modelled on the arguments of Martin Luther, the theologian who launched the Protestant Reformation by nailing ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, in the sixteenth century. (One of the slogans of the church that Bolz-Weber founded in Denver, House for All Sinners and Saints, is “Nailing shit to the church door since 1517.”) Luther rebelled against the legalism that pervaded the Church during the Middle Ages, arguing that the focus on sinful conduct was unnecessary, because people were already redeemed through Christ’s sacrifice. “Luther saw the harm that the teachings of the Church were doing in the lives of those in his care,” Bolz-Weber told me. “He decided to be less loyal to the teachings than to their well-being.” For all of his faults—among them, rabid anti-Semitism—Luther’s theology centered around real life. “He talked about farting and drinking and he was kind of like Nadia,” the bishop Jim Gonia, who heads the Rocky Mountain Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, told me. Gonia summed up Luther’s idea like this: “Now that we don’t need to worry that we’re good enough for God, how do we direct our attention to our neighbor?”

More here-

https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/the-lutheran-pastor-calling-for-a-sexual-reformation?fbclid=IwAR1PwH5bQC_6zd21NUNvs2iIb55nAQQy7A2Ef_XNnUCjSaAxuxK94er13w8

Why Don’t People Want To Know?

From American Conservative-

I want to put this Alan Jacobs comment in a separate place from my thread about Christian higher education — the one I started earlier Monday, “The Big Freeze” — even though it rightly goes as an update. That post has been there since this morning, and I’m afraid if I updated it, most people wouldn’t read what Alan has to say about the same topic.

He has very strong words for Christians. Note well that Alan is a professor at Baylor University, an Anglican Evangelical, and not any kind of conventional conservative. He’s simply telling the truth here. Alan says the real crisis is going to come when Christian colleges and universities knuckle under to the left’s view of sexual desire and gender identity, or lose their accreditation. Excerpt:

"The people who argue that Christian institutions should support the modern left’s model of sexual ethics or else suffer a comprehensive shunning do not think of themselves as opponents of religion. And they are not, given their definition of religion, which is “a disembodied, Gnostic realm of private worship and thought”. But that is not what Christianity is. Christianity intrinsically, necessarily involves embodied action in the public world. And this the secular left cannot and will not tolerate, if it can help it, because it rightly understands that Christianity stands opposed to the secular left’s own gospel, which, popular opinion notwithstanding, is not essentially about sex but rather may be summed up as: “I am my own.”"

More here-

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/why-dont-people-want-to-know-benedict-option/