This is the heading at the top of the web site of the Episcopal Book/Resource center at the national church headquarters in New York City. In keeping with this mission they are offering only the best Christian literature possible more pagan ritual for a Church that has lost its way as well as its mind. Fr. WB over at Whitehall turned me on to this, and Stand Firm has continued their work by looking into this issue. Consider this little gem, it’s a book of “Love Spells” written by an author who has written a number of neo-pagan books. In the span of the three years since I came to Sewanee for seminary, we have seen a pagan religious service
masquerading (and not very well at that) as a “women’s eucharist” on the national church website. This service included blatant Astarte worship and any reference to Christianity was a thin veneer. Later, it was discovered that the female priest who had posted this liturgy had in fact posted a neo-pagan Druid service which she had written under he Druidic pseudonym “Glispa.” Glen Ruppe Melnyk is her name; she and her husband Bill, in addition to being Episcopal Priests, moonlighted as Druids. Bill Melnyk ended up resigning his Episcopal Orders and becoming a full-time druid. At any rate, the inclusion of this book on the Episcopal Church Book and Resource center page illustrates two things. First, it is further evidence of something a friend of mine said in college, “Wicca/neo-paganism is nothing more than a pre-packaged religion for teenage girls,” (apologies to teen age girls, most of whom wouldn’t fall for the sort of tripe one gets in neo-paganism), and it shows the further decline of the institutional Episcopal Church into an apostasy based upon utter denial and foolishness. Since Stand Firm seems to be having a problem with the screen-capture they took of this page, I took the liberty of creating my own, so that there will be a record of this, unlike the Women’s Eucharist (or the liturgy for divorce that also appeared), which had all evidence of it expunged from the national Church’s web site after conflict arose.
[update: it appears that the title has been removed from the bookstore, though one can still find the original page that it was on, you can’t get to it through searches of author, ISBN, title etc… they seem to have removed it from their available purchases, and one assumes this page will be gone soon. It also appears that this page may have been left over from an older site, as it looks like the Episcopal Book and Resource center now uses a service called “Anthology” to manage their content. Be that as it may, this event still illustrates a major problem in ECUSA, which is perhaps best expressed by the concern voiced by a friend of mine because the wife of his rector works in a new-age book store, and often conducts seminars for people within the parish…. there are simply too many people in ECUSA who don’t see any conflict between spells, neo-pagan chants or any number of other things and Christianity.]
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