Highways and the High Way

Highways first--

Everyone can sympathize with those who will be inconvenienced by the extension of Hungryneck Boulevard in Mount Pleasant [ http://www.postandcourier.com/assets/webPages/departmental/news/Stories.aspx?section=localnews&tableId=126777&pubDate=1/17/2007 in today's paper ], and especially with the older black community that must feel as though a tide of population growth is sweeping them away.

That said, George Freeman simply is incorrect when he says, "If you build a road, people will come. You will accelerate growth in the community." The part of Mount Pleasant he refers to couldn't possibly grow any faster than it already has by the addition of a road. All the road will do is prevent major gridlock in the area. As I said in a previous post in regard to extending I-526, they will build, road or not!

Having lived in other congested parts of the country, I have been impressed with the no-nonsense planning of road improvements on the part of the town of Mount Pleasant. So far the work done has been extremely effective. How can anyone could say that road improvements over the past five or so years have accelerated growth? What these improvements have done is improved the quality of life for those who live in the area or those who must drive through it daily.

To which I say, right on!

Now, as to the High Way--

Check out the op-ed page of the Newsless Courier today for a letter signed by former Episcopal Bishop Allison and the Cathedral's Rev. McKeachie for some good-sense reading on the crisis (I use the word advisedly) occuring in the Anglican Communion--developing even as I type.

I can't say better their following response to previous letters:

"Dozens of Episcopal Church dioceses today, in which biblically faithful Christians are marginalized, manifest this tragic irony. Dozens of Episcopal bishops in such dioceses have willfully forgotten that the original Episcopal consecration vows administered until the late 20th century included explicit assent to the following questions:

"Will you then faithfully exercise yourself in the Holy Scriptures, and call upon God by prayer for the true understanding of the same: so that you may be able by them to teach and exhort with wholesome Doctrine, and to withstand and convince the gainsayers?

"Are you ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God's Word; and both privately and openly to call upon and encourage others to the same?

"The forgetfulness, indeed total disappearance, of such commitment since the new Episcopal Prayer Book was adopted in 1979 has caused many Episcopalians to seek the cover of overseas Anglican bishops in order to remain faithfully rooted in the Catholic order and Protestant freedom of the Anglican Reformation.

"Kevin Wilson's claim that under Queen Elizabeth "no one agreed on theology" is nothing but another example of forgetfulness and denial. The disagreements in that era were minuscule compared with those of Episcopal bishops today who have turned their backs on the theological content of the very vows they swore at their consecration.

"For her part, Barbara Mann has forgotten, in her claim that we are not a confessional church, the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion as integral to the well-being of Prayer Book Anglicanism and "established" by the bishops, clergy, and laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America in 1801. Her false claim allows her and others like her to accommodate the church to the world, rather than the world to Christ, against which St. Paul strongly warned in his Epistle to the Romans.

And the Episcopal Diocese of Charleston is indeed one of the fastest growing in the Episcopal Church.