Bishop Duncan on the Anglican future

Bishop Robert Duncan, head of the TEC breakaway Anglican Church in North America, had a great line capping his Q&A in today's New York Times Magazine:

Q: I see a lawsuit was filed by the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh to take away both money and property in your control as the longtime bishop there.

A: There is an ongoing lawsuit. They may get the stuff, but we'll get the souls. They may get the past, but we've got the future.

God grant the good bishop many years! The only time I've heard Robert Duncan was in an interview he gave in 2004 to Terry Gross of the public radio show Fresh Air. I tuned in after he'd been introduced, and didn't know who he was. It was clear that he was against same-sex marriage, and that he was an Episcopalian cleric, but that's all I knew. I was really struck by how gentle and humble he was, especially given how tense and hostile the host's questioning was. I haven't been able this morning to find a transcript of the interview, but I did find this quote from Bp. Duncan's 2004 interview in a transcript of a more recent one Gross did with TEC Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori:

Bishop ROBERT DUNCAN (Former Episcopalian Bishop, Pittsburgh): What I'm saying and what we are trying to say in the gentlest, most graceful, most Christ-like way is that we didn't make the rules here, that God did, and that we believe God knows what he's doing, even if at times we question it. Again, scripture describes the human race as fallen and all of us as sinners. And if, even if it were allowed, which, again, is much disputed that orientation has some genetic part of it, as well as what all would agree is an environmental part. Even if it has some genetic part, there are many genetic conditions that people have to live with, have to work with, have to work through and work around.

The Church loves us in whatever disorder, disease we may be afflicted with by the fall in this - in the creation. And that's all I can say about the affectional same sex that's sort of wiring, that it's an affectional disorder. That's - those are hard words, but I think they're true words. They're at least consistent with the scriptural description of who we are and how God's made the world.

I remember thinking as I listened to that interview how remarkably patient Duncan was with his interviewer, who was bristling with hostility (not in a talk radio way, but in that muted way that characterizes everything on NPR -- which, I must confess, is why I really like NPR).
That, by the way, is par for the course with Terry Gross. I generally like her program, and listen to it on podcast, but the two topics she returns to over and over again are homosexuality and television (especially anything related to Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert). I'm a fairly regular listener, and have been for years. The host struggles audibly to conceal her lack of comfort with the occasional social or religious conservative she has on the program, as Doug LeBlanc has observed. No, she's not a lesbian; she's married to a jazz critic for the Village Voice. Anyway, I like her show, but I wish she were more fair to thoughtful social and religious conservatives, and had them on her program more often. I'm a big supporter of NPR, but I do wish its commitment to diversity included having more conservatives on the air. There are quite a few of us who don't listen to talk radio, and who like NPR precisely because it offers such reasonable, elevated discussion as a general rule. I support NPR for the same reason I subscribe to The New York Times: because the quality is there, and a pleasure to partake of, even as I believe they are often unfair or dismissive of people like me. They can do better.

Sorry, I didn't mean to go off on that NPR tangent. I just want to say that I thought Bp Duncan had a great line, and that based on what I know about him, Anglicans under his authority are indeed fortunate to have him as their spiritual father.