This is not a post about me being frustrated with my wife. This is a post about my wife being deeply and abidingly forgiving of me. FYI

You aren't responsible for what you did not do.
BUT
You actually are responsible for what you are willing to defend.

So I don't know what you're up to in your life that you're saving for a New Year's Resolution or something but like... Don't you dare wait. Life is short. Death is coming. Whatever it is...

Get out there and improve yourself.

Oh you read half a sentence in Thessalonians and so now you believe children should starve? That's not conservative Christianity. A conservative Christian would look at Jesus saying to feed people and they would do it no matter the cost because it is what was commanded by the Lord.

Those are, in short, all conservative.

That vocabulary doesn't line up with 21st century American politics. But we've been here longer than either major American political party. We've been here longer as Anglicans than the idea of the modern nation state. We don't have to use their vocabulary.

We are members of the Anglican communion and inheritors of a tradition which measures conservativism by the historical witness of scripture, adherence to the Creeds and councils of the early church, and affirmation of other historically attested positions that we do not ourselves hold.

In short, if you've made it this far, I am very tired of my colleagues referring to themselves as progressive clergy when you can sit down and ask them what they believe and they start quoting Augustine or Athanasius or Gregory or Maximus or they start talking about the Chalcedonian definition.

The Episcopalian nun who spends a third of her day praying, a third reading patristic theology, and a third of her date growing organic apples... Is what we consider to be conservative. With her cloistered apple growing reflections on the Creeds.

And we have to stop conceding that a religious and socio-political movement starting in the middle of the 19th century or the middle of the 20th century depending on which branch of it you are talking about is conservative.

They may not define themselves that way, as conservative. But I'm talking about Anglicans. Because I am an Episcopal I most often talk to Anglicans.

The conservative American Evangelical, I mean the one who is trying to conserve the roots of their particular religious movement and the origins of what only some of them consider to be a denomination, is the not small number who advocate for things like minimum wage raises and Affirmative Action.

The geopolitical values of the people who invented this hermeneutic have shifted so dramatically over the last 80 years it doesn't even make sense to call them conservative in the context of their own religious movement.

That's 19th century popular American hermeneutics invented explicitly In conjunction with the social politics of the 19th century Evangelicals. These are the people who fought for women's suffrage, who created labor unions and fought paramilitary mercenary groups for our 2-day weekend.

They may hold conservative values or leanings in the context of American politics but so do plenty of Anglicans (and Episcopalians). But that doesn't make them conservative Christians.

Decontextualizing Scripture and reading it a verse or sentence at a time without isn't conservative.

So we really need to stop calling American influenced English-speaking neocalvinists who rely on a "plain reading" of Scripture as defined roughly by the Second Great Awakening as Christian conservatives.