Anglicanorum Coetibus And Conservative Wishful Thinking
I've already posted here about the schism dividing the United Methodist Church over same-sex marriage and the fact that Methodists are already fully eligible to enter the Roman Catholic Church as intact parishes with their clergy under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus . This is, at least in theory, an option available to the thousands of UMC parishes that are investigating disaffiliation and joining a more conservative denomination. However, I concluded in that post that this isn't what William James would call a "living option" : [L]et us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option...