Faith and the Zen bishop-elect (updated)

If you search the World Wide Web for the name of Father Kevin G. Thew Forrester and the word “bishop,” you will find that an ocean of digital ink has been spilled in coverage of the bishop-elect of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan. However, once again, you will find that this is apparently a “conservative” news story, with most of the “news” reports running in alternative, conservative publications and stirring up responses in advocacy media on the left.

Alas, if you look for the story in the mainstream press, you will find next to nothing. This is strange, because there are several interesting and newsworthy angles to this election in a tiny liberal diocese, which has a total membership about the size, or smaller, of a single evangelical megachurch.

The headline grabber is that Thew Forrester is both an Episcopal priest and an ordained — whatever that means — teacher of Zen Buddhism. However, it is also interesting that, when he was elected, Thew Forrester was the only nominee. In an attempt to derail the election, conservatives are asking, “Who anointed him in this manner and why?”

The bishop-elect has avoided mainstream coverage, in part, by declining interviews from publications such as the respected Anglican periodical The Living Church. The lack of info has allowed his supporters to simply say he is being attacked by people who have no interest in understand the complex nature of his approach to these faiths.

However, Frank “Bible Belt Blogger” Lockwood of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has marched into the gap, landing an interview that may be just as hot as his famous — on the record, nicely recorded — interview with former President Carter in which he called the George W. Bush administration the “worst in history.”

More here-

http://www.getreligion.org/?p=10940