Can you imagine what it’s like to read about a Persian prime minister seeking to destroy the Jews – as the Jewish army is finally fighting back with the American army against the Persian Jew-haters?
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NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) — Conservative Anglican leaders gathering in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, are planning to unveil a new leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, even as Archbishop Sarah Mullally is set to be installed as the first female leader of the body later this month.
The Global Anglican Future Conference, a conservative Anglican movement better known as GAFCON that has encouraged its provinces to cut ties with Canterbury and that rejects Mullally’s election, called the meeting to reorder the communion. During the four-day gathering, which began Tuesday (March 3), the global network of 10 provinces — representing at least half of the world’s Anglicans — plans to formalize the Global Anglican Communion, which it announced in October, and to elect a new leader.
Mullally’s election in October further widened a rift within the 85 million-member worldwide Anglican Communion, which since the 1990s has struggled with controversies around female leadership and same-sex marriage in the church. Conservative bishops and clerics with GAFCON accuse Mullally and other leaders of the communion of abandoning the inerrant Word of God to support the blessing of same-sex unions, ordain women bishops and elect Mullally archbishop of Canterbury.
Archbishop Henry Chukwudum Ndukuba, the primate of the Church of Nigeria, told those at the opening service of the meeting this week that GAFCON had been calling and praying for a turnaround among the leaders of the Anglican Communion, but having failed, the network was declaring that the future had arrived.
“You cannot serve God and mammon. Choose this day whom to serve. This is the cry and call of God,” he told the more than 400 archbishops, bishops, clergy and lay leaders attending the meeting, dubbed G26.
The clerics at G26 view the meeting, whose main focus is in reforming the Anglican Communion as a whole, to be a pivotal moment. GAFCON says it represents 85% of the world’s practicing confessing Anglicans, though independent studies have placed the number at closer to 50%-60%. Regardless, GAFCON represents a significant portion of Anglicans throughout the world, with large populations in Asia and African countries, including Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya.
Ndukuba said the church of God will continue to march on, not built on institutions of Canterbury, nor on the personality of the archbishop of Canterbury.
“But rather, we are returning, bringing back the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, to be the center of our life, our teaching and our practices,” he said, warning that obedience to the authority of Scripture in all matters of faith, doctrine and practice could not be substituted.
“What we see is the determination and the arrogance of the revisionists to impose their error on the whole church. They engage you in endless debates, dialogue and contentions and meetings, while driving and spreading their erroneous teachings.”
Officials say the intention is not to create a new communion but to reorder the current one.
“We are now taking ranks of leadership globally. A global church needs a global leadership,” the Rt. Rev. Paul Donison, general secretary of GAFCON, told Advent Cable Network Nigeria on Tuesday.
“I hope out of these, the average Anglican, average Anglican believer, they can say we have been clear, that the understanding from the statements, this is the center of leadership for our global church.
“They will no longer look back to a colonial structure that has gone so far away from the gospel, instead we have new global structures in the same Anglican Communion,” he added.
In October, GAFCON rejected the Instruments of the Anglican Communion, namely the archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates Meeting, for failing to uphold the doctrine and discipline of the Anglican Communion.
Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda, the chairman of GAFCON, declared in an Oct. 16 statement that the Anglican Communion will be “re-ordered, with only one foundation of communion, namely the Holy Bible,” as the Global Anglican Communion.
This Global Anglican Communion would be led by a Council of Primates, with the provinces electing a chairman “as first among equals” to lead the council. A province that wants to become a member only needs to accede to the 2008 Jerusalem Declaration, which the clerics consider the standard identity for Anglicanism.
The Anglican provinces that join the Global Anglican Communion will be barred from participating in meetings called by the archbishop of Canterbury, including the Anglican Consultative Council, and are not allowed to make any monetary contribution to the ACC, nor receive any monetary contribution from it or its networks.
“G26 is a summons to make room for Jesus afresh in the life of his Church, to listen again to his word and to walk together in obedience and courage,” said Mbanda in his last Christmas message.
Uganda, the African country with the largest population of Anglicans after Nigeria, has sent a delegation of 52, including 41 bishops.
“We are gathered here as Bible-believing Anglicans. … We glorify God for this time. We are all looking forward to what God is going to do for the communion. How he is going to reset the communion,” said Archbishop Stephen Kaziimba Mugalu in a short video message sent to RNS.
Meanwhile, the Anglican Communion is moving to reduce the archbishop of Canterbury’s centrality, an acknowledgment that most Anglicans now live in the Global South. On Monday, the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order released revised “Nairobi-Cairo proposals” ahead of the summer ACC that aim to decentralize leadership and create a less U.K.-dominated model.
(RNS) — Responses to the rise of artificial intelligence have tended to fall into predictable patterns: enthusiastic adoption, calls for cautious regulation or outright rejection. These approaches assume, however, that AI is primarily a technical or managerial problem. In this new age, the most pressing question is not whether we will use these technologies, but whether we will have the courage to shape them around practices of judgment, interpretation and moral imagination.
The deeper question, in other words, is not whether AI works into our workdays or professional codes, but what it does to those who live alongside it. How does constant interaction with intelligent systems shape judgment, attention, responsibility and the stories people tell about who they are becoming?
These are questions that matter deeply to those of us who work in religious higher education. Religious leaders and theologians have recognized this AI moment as one shaped by “digital empire.”
AI systems are built by powerful actors, trained on uneven datasets and deployed in ways that often marginalize already vulnerable communities. As the American Civil Liberties Union’s chief technology officer, Ijeoma Mbamalu, wrote in July, “AI-powered surveillance systems — whether it’s facial recognition or predictive policing — are trained on prejudiced data and used in ways that disproportionately target communities of color, further embedding discrimination into our social reality.”
What is being extracted today by the AI models is not only writers’ labor or resources, but knowledge itself: AI is deciding for us whose stories count, whose perspectives are “objective” and whose ways of knowing are treated as peripheral or expendable. Its benefits, risks and formative influences are then being unevenly distributed around the globe, creating new divides.
This is not new. It is a familiar logic, dressed in digital clothes. Artificial intelligence has quickly become the latest phenomenon in which long-standing patterns of power reassert themselves. Western scholarship once trained generations to see the human figure in pristine white marble as the “natural” image of the ancient world — never mind that classical era statues were initially painted in vibrant colors. Today’s digital systems are similarly shaping what feels credible, neutral and authoritative. Over time, these distortions no longer appear ideological; they seem obvious.
When knowledge systems are designed without paying attention to whose epistemological ground they stand on, entire communities are rendered data-rich but voiceless. AI accelerates this process.
Naming these realities is not alarmism; it is moral clarity, a prophetic act. But prophecy has never ended with naming alone. Formation must follow, and this is where my community, religious and theological educators, faces its own moment of decision.
If we stop at denunciation of AI or refusal, we risk quiet abdication. Students continue to use AI, often intensively, often invisibly, outside the structures of education, theology and communal discernment. When institutions refuse to engage, they do not prevent formation; they leave it to the very systems they distrust.
The more faithful response is neither rejection nor uncritical embrace. It is intentional formation.
This requires a shift in posture. AI must be approached not only as a tool that produces outputs, but as an environment that shapes interpretation. Every interaction with an intelligent system influences how questions are asked, how answers are weighed, how uncertainty is tolerated and how responsibility is understood. Over time, these interactions accumulate into patterns, which can lead to interpretation and moral imagination.
The task, then, is not to “use AI ethically” in the narrow sense of compliance or control. It is to design learning environments in which judgment can be practiced rather than outsourced, where meaning is constructed rather than delivered and where ethical reflection unfolds over time rather than at the moment of engagement.
This is where religious education matters in a distinctive way. Long before the advent of computational machines, theological traditions wrestled with questions that are now unavoidable: How do human beings make sense of their lives across time? How do we discern meaning amid ambiguity? How do we relate to the divine? How do we weigh competing goods when no option is without cost? How do memory, narrative and community shape moral and spiritual identity?
Religious education has developed pedagogies precisely for this kind of work. Practices of interpretation, confession, testimony and discernment train students to step back from immediacy, recognize patterns in experience and narrate who they are becoming. Formation is about cultivating the capacity to live responsibly when answers are incomplete.
That expertise is urgently needed now.
AI excels at processing information and identifying patterns. What it cannot do, at least not on its own, is exercise judgment: the ability to arbitrate among competing values, to act under conditions of uncertainty and to take responsibility for decisions whose consequences cannot be fully predicted. Judgment is not a data problem. It is a human achievement, developed over time, through reflection and relationships.
The challenge now is whether institutions will bring that wisdom to bear on AI. This does not mean turning technology into theology or baptizing systems that remain entangled with power. It means acknowledging that AI is already shaping lives and asking how communities committed to justice, dignity and human flourishing will respond. Will they retreat into critique alone, or will they take responsibility for shaping the conditions under which formation occurs?
To design intelligent machines for formation is to accept a long horizon. It requires patience rather than hype, architecture rather than improvisation. It asks institutions to think in stages: how ethical memory is established, how interpretive environments are configured and how learning is carried into lived contexts. It demands attention not only to what students know, but to who they are becoming.
Prophetic witness remains essential. Naming the empire remains necessary. But prophecy, at its best, also imagines alternatives. It not only exposes what is broken; it gestures toward what could be otherwise.
If religious education cannot help communities do that work, it risks surrendering formation to systems that were never designed to carry it.
(Uriah Y. Kim is president of Graduate Theological Union. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
(RNS) — Wednesday (March 4) is Holi, the prominent Hindu holiday recognized for its colorful celebrations. Across South Asia and its diaspora, revelers gather in large groups to throw colored powder at one another, dance to Bollywood hits and wash the pigment away with water guns and balloons.
For many, Holi simply marks a farewell of winter and the arrival of spring’s abundant blooms. The day falls on the last full moon, or purnima, in the Hindu lunar month of Phalguna. In modern times, public color runs, large music festivals with DJs and children’s Holi parties invite people of all backgrounds to join in on the fun. But behind the exuberant color play, the holiday’s ancient origins are contested, with various mythologies offering different explanations.
In 17th-century India, Holi was a festival that celebrated agriculture, good spring harvests and fertile land. Some historians have suggested that music, rather than color, was central to the initial Holi celebrations.
Yet colors play a significant role in Holi, representing various emotions and elements of nature. Red symbolizes love and fertility, yellow signifies prosperity and new beginnings, blue is associated with the divine Krishna, and green embodies the rejuvenation of life and the onset of spring. Many of the colored powders used to celebrate are made with natural ingredients, such as dried marigold, hibiscus flowers and henna leaves.
In classical Hindu framing, one of the most widely recalled Holi narratives comes from the Hindu scripture Bhagavata Purana. In the story, the demon king, Hiranyakashipu, demanded that his subjects worship him as supreme. His son, Prahlad, however, was devoted to the Hindu Lord Vishnu. Enraged, the king plotted to kill Prahlad with the help of his sister, Holika, who possessed a gift that made her immune to fire. Holika sat with Prahlad in a blazing pyre to kill him, but Prahlad’s devotion to Vishnu protected him and Holika was consumed by the flames.
The ritual of Holika Dahan, observed on the eve of Holi, or Chhoti Holi (little Holi), commemorates this mythological story. Bonfires are lit to represent the destruction of arrogance and evil and the triumph of devotion. People dance around the fire, and some burn an effigy of Holika. They might also throw wood, leaves, grains or chickpeas into the flames as a symbolic gesture of letting go of negativity and welcoming the new season with positivity.
In another story from the Braj region of India, where the Hindu deities Radha and Krishna grew up, the festival is celebrated as Rang Panchami, commemorating their divine love for each other. According to devotional lore, the dark-blue-skinned Krishna despairs about whether the fair-skinned Radha will like him because of his skin color. His mother teasingly suggests that he color Radha’s face in any color she wishes. From this playful act grew a ritual of color-throwing. The story is also behind Phagwah, the Holi celebration in Indo-Caribbean Hindu communities.
And in parts of South India, Holi is sometimes linked to the god of love, Kama, and Lord Shiva. After the death of his consort, Sati, the god Shiva withdrew into deep meditation. The gods, seeking to restore cosmic balance, had Kama shoot arrows at Shiva. Angered at the interruption, Shiva opened his third eye and burned Kama to ashes. This upsets both Kama’s wife, Rati, and Shiva’s own wife, Parvati. Rati performs her own meditative asceticism for 40 days, after which Shiva understands, forgives out of compassion and restores the god of love. This return of the god of love is celebrated as Holi.
Across the United States, Holi parties on college campuses, in bars and on boats will be held throughout the month. The largest American celebration of Holi is said to be held in Spanish Fork, Utah. The celebration has become interfaith, holding more of a cultural than ritualistic significance. Sweet delicacies such as gujiya, a dumpling-like pastry, are eaten to symbolize abundance. The traditional Indian milk drink thandai, infused with sugar, spices, nuts and saffron, and the yogurt drink lassi, usually flavored with fruits, spices or herbs, are also popular. And in some traditions, a cannabis-infused milk drink called Bhang is enjoyed.
In all interpretations, Holi is seen as a festive day to end conflicts, forgive the past and start a new season. Many Hindus see the day as an opportunity to connect with family and make new friends, often through smearing color and shouting the Hindi greeting “Holi Hai!” (“It’s Holi!”)
Anglicans worldwide are grappling with foundational questions: Can they stay together? Should they? Or have their theological differences frayed centuries of unity beyond repair?
The outlook for the Anglican Communion, one of the world’s largest families of Christian churches, remains uncertain, but some answers may emerge by the end of this week.
Conservative leaders of numerous Anglican churches are gathering in Nigeria on Tuesday for a four-day meeting. They’ll discuss a plan that could result in a historic split in one of the world’s largest Christian communions.
At the same time, representatives of the historic Anglican Communion on Monday announced a revised restructuring plan of their own. It would decentralize its leadership away from its longtime base in England and potentially enable cooperation despite strong theological disagreements.
It’s uncertain whether such a plan will sway members of Gafcon, or the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. Their gathering in Abuja, Nigeria, is bringing together numerous primates — national Anglican leaders — and other bishops, clergy and lay people.
This group — mostly from nations of the Global South, representing some of Anglicanism’s largest church provinces — is a conservative coalition that operates outside of the official, London-based Anglican Communion, though most of Gafcon churches also remain members of the communion.
Liberal trends widen divisions in Anglican Communion
Gafcon leaders have opposed liberal trends such as same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly LGBTQ+ clergy in the Anglican churches of Europe and North America, including the Episcopal Church in the United States. Divisions have widened so sharply over recent decades that some national churches stopped participating in Anglican Communion gatherings.
Gafcon’s chairman, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda, last year issued a statement essentially calling for a break from the historic communion as it’s currently structured, declaring that “the Anglican Communion will be reordered.”
The statement envisioned a reformulated “Global Anglican Communion,” overseen by a new council led by elected chairmen regardless of country. Historically — although churches are self-governing and cooperate on a voluntary basis — the archbishop of Canterbury in England has been considered “first among equals,” a symbolic spiritual leader.
While some Anglican primates involved with Gafcon endorsed Mbanda’s proposal last year, others remained silent or reaffirmed a commitment to retaining ties to the traditional Anglican Communion. The Abuja meetings could result in Mbanda’s plan being adopted, modified or rejected.
Last year’s proposal was “not the final word,” said Bishop Paul Donison, general secretary of Gafcon. It must now be deliberated in Abuja, he said in a video on the conference website.
“There is much to iron out, much to discern, much to structure carefully and faithfully,” he said. “But we will do that work together.”
Even as the Anglican rifts have widened, the strains haven’t reached the point of a definitive schism. That could change if the primates approve a final break with Canterbury, although Gafcon leaders say they’re proposing a reformed communion, not a new one.
85 million members and centuries of cooperation
The Anglican family traces its roots to the Reformation-era founding of the Church of England, with its mix of Protestant theology and Catholic-like ritual and sacraments. It spread throughout the world alongside British colonialism and missionary efforts, followed by large-scale evangelistic successes under local leadership, particularly in Africa.
The Anglican Communion Office estimates a membership of about 85 million people across 165 countries, including more than 40 autonomous provinces.
The meeting comes shortly after the Church of England installed Archbishop Sarah Mullally as the first woman to be archbishop of Canterbury.
While some conservative Anglican leaders in other countries criticized her selection on the basis of gender, they mainly opposed her stance on LGBTQ+ issues. Mullally has affirmed the Church of England’s current definition of church marriage as between a man and a woman, but she supported a plan for blessings of same-sex couples and has acknowledged “the harm that we have done” as a church to LGBTQ+ people.
Homosexuality remains taboo in many African countries, in some cases criminalized under colonial-era laws or newer legislation. Uganda enacted legislation in 2023 prescribing the death penalty for some homosexual offenses.
The Anglican Communion is moving toward a decentralization plan of its own, making it “less Canterbury-centric,” according to a summary of the proposals, recognizing that a majority of Anglicans now live in the Global South, far from England.
The proposals — years in the making, with some revisions announced on Monday — are technical in detail. The upshot is that the archbishop of Canterbury would share many leadership roles with primates from other nations. The proposal goes before the Anglican Consultative Council — made up of representatives from around the communion — for review this summer.
Bishop Graham Tomlin, who chairs the commission proposing the changes, said he doesn’t know if the proposal will affect Gafcon’s deliberations. The goal is continued cooperation while “acknowledging the depth of the disagreements among us,” he said in an online news conference Monday.
“The history of the church tells us that when we do make radical breaks from one another, it’s very hard to mend those walls, and this is a way of hopefully keeping us together,” he said.
More than 400 people — clergy and lay members in addition to bishops — are expected at the Gafcon gathering in Abuja, according to Donison.
While Global South churches are prominent in Gafcon, other participants include the Anglican Church in North America, formed by conservatives who broke from the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada.
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