Will Rowan Williams' two-track proposal gain traction? And if it does, will this be a good thing for conservative and moderately conservative Episcopalians, particularly those who are minorities within more liberal or progressive dioceses?

We have Communion Partner bishops and Communion Partner rectors. I've proposed that there be a Communion Partners Clergy Association that would include all clergy, regardless of order or position.

And what about the laity who wish to jump on the Covenant bandwagon?

What we need is something akin to a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval--a Good Churchkeeping Seal of Approval. Up until now, that "Seal" has been structural and visible communion with the See of Canterbury. But as we have seen in recent years, communion with Canterbury is no bar to rougish and unedifying behavior on the part of either the left or the right, nor does…

As a freshman in college, I was taught that parallel lines never cross. This is the mathematical layman's way of summarizing the fifth postulate of Euclid's Elements of Geometry. Euclid's plane geometry, in which space has no curvature, is the standard geometry that we use to explain the world as we experience it. In a Euclidean world, all triangles are 180 degrees, for instance. Euclidean geometry is beautiful and regular; its elegance and symmetry helps to explain our everyday experience of the world, and for many centuries it was assumed that Euclidean geometry was an absolute explanation of reality.

Mathematicians, however, including Euclid himself, were not happy with the fifth postulate because it was neither self-evident nor provable. This led, in the 19th century, to the development of non-Euclidean geometries, which reject the fifth postulate. As a senior in college, I was introduced to Lobachevsky's non-Euclidean geometry,…

Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, has issued his much-awaited response to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church: “Communion, Covenant, and our Anglican Future.” Although it’s not as lengthy as Pope Benedict’s recent encyclical, it’s sure to be parsed almost as carefully and debated nearly with the same intensity by Anglicans throughout the world. The letter is worthy of such scrutiny: As he has done so often in the past, Archbishop Williams has given us both a substantively theological read of the present moment and a sound and hopeful way forward for the Anglican Communion.

For those keeping score, the leadership of the Episcopal Church—including the Presiding Bishop, the president of the House of Deputies, and the church’s chief ecumenical officer—had attempted to argue that the actions of their General Convention didn’t go against the repeated requests of the wider…