“We want that statement to be clear and unambiguous and we are working in that direction,” said Episcopal Bishop Neil Alexander of Atlanta. The bishop made this statement at a press conference during the meeting of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops that ended in New Orleans yesterday.

The mere fact that the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson is the Episcopal Church’s first openly homosexual bishop ensures that he will be a media celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. To a great extent, he has become a symbol to both conservatives and liberals in contemporary Christianity.

William Bennett once observed that America was fast becoming “the kind of nation civilized nations sent missionaries to.” In truth, that is what America has now become, with the installation of Martyn Minns as “missionary bishop” for the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA).

The Very Reverend Dr. Jeffrey Philip Hywel John believes that the church’s traditional understanding of the cross of Christ is both “repulsive” and “insane.” His comments on the cross and atonement ignited a firestorm in Great Britain and the controversy has now spread to America as well. Anglicanism does not seem to have whatever it takes to deal with heretics these days, and so the church simply leaves them in places of influence, such as Dr. John’s position as Dean of St. Albans.

The meeting of the Anglican primates in Dar es Salaam is now over, but the church’s crisis is not — not by a long shot. The primates released documents described as a Covenant and a Communique, but arguments over what the documents mean emerged even before the ink could dry.

Ruth Gledhill of The Times [London] is out with a bombshell in this morning’s edition of the paper. If the report had been published in a paper less respected than The Times, we might have reason to doubt it. Gledhill reports that “senior bishops” of the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church are ready to support a proposal for union under the Pope.

Thirty-five of the Anglican Communion’s Thirty-Eight primates, each presiding over a national church, are meeting this week in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The meeting is a last-ditch effort to avoid a total meltdown in the communion over the issue of homosexuality. Of course, the deeper issue is biblical authority — and many of the bishops attending the meeting are only too aware of this fact.

The Episcopal Church finally passed its measure intended as a response to the Windsor Report of the Anglican Communion, but the tepid measure falls far short of the repentance called for by the report — and short of a promise not to consecrate any more openly-homosexual bishops.

The crisis in the Episcopal Church USA and the larger Anglican Communion deepened as the American church’s election of a woman as the denomination’s Presiding Bishop sent shock waves throughout the Anglican world.