Monday, September 7, 2009

Oh Dear

One of my heroes in the Episcopal Church was the 19th century priest William Augustus Muhlenberg [1796-1877]. Among other achievements, he founded what's now St. Luke's/Roosevelt Hospital, the Fresh Air Fund, one of the first pension funds, a couple of religious orders, pioneered new ways to use flowers and colors to enhance liturgical presentation, allowed people to sit in any pew they wished [as opposed to those that families had purchased for their own usage], and generally made more sense than any other cleric of his time. Naturally, he was never a bishop.

Oh, and he founded the Church of the Holy Communion in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The congregation could no longer support the parish as of the 1980's, so it was sold by the Diocese of New York. That's where the fun begins and, apparently, continues:

Church's third act: mini-mall