so...

Emily,

Probably one of the unsettling problems with communications based on internet postings occurs when the poster drops out for a week.

Good news, mostly, that has kept me away from the computer. Work is going well. Partner and I took a little long weekend trip to DC to visit with friends. I had another birthday.

Reading through chapter six and seven, we find people working against their best interests: Spaniards and Italians fighting each other over control, interpretation in the Catholic Church; Calvin and followers disliking Lutherans more than Catholics; an Italian pope who has an opportunity to reclaim England during Mary Tudor's reign, but who resisted the very people who could help make that happen.

And the killings in God's name.

And the oddities: Elizabeth refusing to adhere closely to the reformers of Edward VI, enough to keep music as part of what is becoming Anglican tradition ( thank you, says a grateful choir member), and the beginnings of an Anglicanism that stubbornly refuses to give up some of its Catholic practices, becoming distinctive enough to be neither Roman nor European Reformed.

Christians ought to be careful when they refer to thousands of years of tradition, because if we look at the tradition too closely, we find lots of behavior that we try to forget. Our unity, in the west, is quirkily human and fragile, alive and yet fractured.

Don