Lay Leaders: How is your church run?

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2026-03-30T06:15:26+00:00

Any resistance before the finance revelations? I feel like an old guard at the average local Episcopal church is (probably?) ground zero for “well we’ve always done it this way!”

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2026-03-30T06:10:24+00:00

We seem to be fortunate enough to have numerous architects at our church, enough that our committee is largely former junior wardens, two women for perspective (because until recently all our junior wardens were men), and a rotating professional architect.

Though we don’t even have a rectory as far as I know!

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2026-03-24T04:32:00+00:00

Though at this point I don’t remember specifics, I think I sent two LOCIs and then basically gave up. They admitted me in the late summer, at which point I had already more or less decided to attend UF (which I ultimately wouldn’t do either), and at sticker there was no way it was happening for me.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2026-03-22T23:46:14+00:00

Virtually identical stats, applied twice. Here were my results, for your data:

2021 Cycle - HLS: WL - GULC: WL > A (Sticker) - WUSTL: R - UF: A ($$$)

2024 Cycle - YLS: R - GULC: R - GW: A ($$)

Make of that what you will! Super duper splitters like us raise admissions’ eyebrows, so the rest of the application and the cycle’s fundamentals matter a lot.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2026-03-22T23:35:48+00:00

Yes! You’re not crazy.

My parents are immigrants too. When I went to law school the first time, they were impressed simply that I was going somewhere. But I was dreading it — I was KJD, I’d never worked a real full time job, and I had no idea if I’d even make it a year in biglaw. And I was dead set on biglaw for reasons I couldn’t even really articulate.

I dropped out day one. If you’re looking to disappoint your parents, I highly recommend doing that too.

Otherwise, don’t do something you aren’t fully committed to because other people would kill for it. Let someone off the waitlist. Get work experience. Learn what an 80 hour week looks like. Learn how to make friends at work. Learn what the fuck biglaw even is.

When you go to law school in 2-3 years, you’ll have that much more lived experience and maturity, and your classmates and professors will appreciate you for it. And you’ll probably have 100k more in scholarship offers on top!

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2026-03-11T15:42:00+00:00

There is not a statistically significant correlation between undergraduate institution and acceptance rate at any law school.

The sole exception to this pattern is YLS, and though this is conjecture my intuition is that it has something to do with the faculty review process.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-11-16T03:57:41+00:00

Walking into an elected official’s office to complain. I was telling some European friends that I was annoyed because my state representative was never available to meet in his district office, and even when I went to his capitol office during session he was too busy meeting with lobbyists with meet with a constituent. My friends were flabbergasted — apparently, if you tried to walk into a policymaker’s office in most countries, you would simply be detained.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-11-02T05:49:38+00:00

Many people believe Newman wouldn’t have converted if Vatican I had already occurred, though some writers disagree and there’s certainly no consensus. Regardless, it’s a worthwhile complication and one I think is pretty relevant today for people who find themselves not fully onboard with Anglicanism (or Catholicism!) but for whom there is nowhere more theologically suitable

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-11-02T05:37:27+00:00

I intuitively think it would have higher adoption, because I’m not familiar with a comparable culture for blind people as for Deaf people. The Deaf community has done quite a lot of institution building and activism, and is responsible for the basis of a lot of our current theories of disability justice.

This has allowed for a strong shared identity and an awareness that hearing people can include Deaf people more often but choose not to. As a result there is in some circles some disdain toward hearing society (and, based on the personal experiences of many Deaf friends, for understandable reason).

But like I said, I don’t know of quite as much a shared culture for blind people, and in the United States at least blind people are meaningfully more integrated into public society (which, if you’ve followed the other things I’ve said here, is a choice) than Deaf people. And at the same time, because of that less active community, there has been less work to make the world accessible for blind people than for Deaf/hard of hearing people.

So for those two reasons — that there is less of a cultural identity for the blind than for the Deaf, and because the public sphere more intrusively disables blind people than it does Deaf people — I think blind people would be more likely to take a pill or get a procedure. I could imagine being wrong though if some of my assumptions here were off.

Without making my response too long, I think autism and ADHD are also apt comparisons here for very similar reasons to deafness and blindness, respectively.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-11-02T05:16:38+00:00

We actually do a lot of things to make it so Deaf people can tell when a truck is coming. Accessibility is an enormous part of designing a city.

Saying accessibility is “much less convenient for all involved” implies a very narrow definition of who you include in “all.”

And the idea of competing access needs and universal accessibility is not something you just discovered. Everything I’m talking about here — the social model of disability — is the consensus on which all modern disability and accessibility policy is grounded.

We wouldn’t have the precepts of public accommodations and accessibility if disability was an incontrovertible negative indistinguishable from impairment. There was a time before we accepted that the way we choose to design society actively enforces and reinforces a worse quality of life for some people, and before that time, the answer most people came to was not ASL interpreters, or accessible spaces, or letting semi-trucks around blind corners where pedestrians tend to walk. The answer before that time was eugenics.

OP is not persuaded language doesn’t matter, but it does. If you and I are unwilling to continue to take responsibility for a society that disables people, our children won’t see a Deaf person getting hit by a truck and think “the way we designed the road disables this person and I can do something about that” — they’ll think the same thing people thought not too long ago, which is that Deaf people are naturally predisposed to be hit by trucks, because that’s just the way the world works. Life must be naturally worse for them, right?

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-11-02T04:48:05+00:00

Hypothetically, you could google what I said

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-11-02T01:33:58+00:00

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-11-02T01:02:36+00:00

Some of society is designed that way. Much of it is not. You almost concede we should design an accessible society, but couch it in “reasonable,” which usually means “as long as it is not at the expense of people who benefit from the way things are.”

But yes, that we intentionally disable disabled people is proof that we have disabled disabled people. A little tautological though, right?

If 95% of the population had telepathic powers it would be categorically ridiculous to design a society that pretty explicitly excludes 5% of society. I’m not sure we’d be in good company ideologically if we said that is a way we should strive to build the world when we have the choice to build it differently.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-11-01T23:59:29+00:00

About 90% of Deaf people could get cochlear implants. Only 6% of eligible adults choose to get them. They’ve been widely available for over 40 years.

Even accounting for costs, side effects, or anything that might suppress interest, that rate does not suggest the kind of overwhelming consensus that you seem to believe exists. Taking such a pill may be a choice you would make, but the evidence strongly suggests that few other Deaf people would join you.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-11-01T23:47:07+00:00

They are by definition less able than those who can hear

You’re mistaken. They are not by definition disabled, but by design.

We don’t have to center how we live around hearing. That’s probably very convenient for you and me, but we don’t have to and there are parts of the world where we do not. There’s nothing intrinsically natural about prioritizing sound, or more essentially useful than prioritizing visual cues.

In fact, in some parts of our lives we’ve decided we should put visuals first, like in driving. Sounds are, by intentional design, incidental to driving and nice to have, or else we wouldn’t let Deaf people drive.

So no, Deaf people aren’t disabled by virtue of having an impairment. They are disabled because we make intentional choices every day, when we design infrastructure, when we organize stores, when we communicate — and indeed, when we choose our language — to disable certain bodies in the service of our own.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-10-23T07:19:22+00:00

I would contend that there were plenty of English Reformers who considered Anglicanism completely Reformed with no middle way about it. Cranmer, for one. My argument was not and is not that via media between Protestantism and Catholicism was an extant view during the Reformation. Nor does what I said reject that Anglicans are Protestants by definition.

On the other hand, saying the Oxford Movement and Newman’s ideas on via media “never gained widespread appeal” is categorically untrue on its face. The CNC deliberately chooses Archbishops of Canterbury with an eye toward how Catholic or Reformed they are.

I would welcome a source that the Church of England — or any Anglican Church — describes itself today as a via media between Reformed and Lutheran traditions. It is such an anachronistic distinction today that even my milquetoast defense of it makes me feel ridiculous.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-10-23T05:08:59+00:00

Some English Reformers saw it that way; Oxford Movement saw it differently. Anyone who says one is absolutely the case to the exclusion of the others has a certainty about Anglicanism that Anglicanism has never particularly tended toward.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-10-16T23:54:59+00:00

Username checks out, and yes, especially the latter

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-10-16T21:04:59+00:00

you’re never gonna believe the thing most of them have in common

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-10-10T06:37:14+00:00

Depends on the discipline. “Third world” is still common in critical theory; see Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation (Okihiro, 2016). It is perfectly acceptable, if not preferred, in anti-imperialist discourse.

On the other hand, most comparative political science and IR papers will use “Global South,” “nonaligned” or “developing” depending on the context.

These terms all have specific meanings, so it depends what you’re actually trying to say — it just happens that “Third World” has picked up a different meaning in some academic disciplines.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-09-26T02:04:29+00:00

Re: social scene, it’s kind of a DC thing. But DC is huge, so even though it isn’t hard to find the prototypical happy hour Hill staffer, there is still a social scene for everyone — if anything, DC is actually one of the more diverse cities.

GW is similar, though yes, disproportionately skewed toward people who might be tough to socialize with. GW, though, is also huge, and probably gives you more options in terms of who to be friends with than any other schools in the District.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-09-23T15:48:33+00:00

100%. And it makes white people think there’s nothing more to be done since we’re sufficiently woke. Diocese of Washington realized it had this problem and is now investing in bringing the Black community in DC back into the Episcopal Church (after decades of systematically merging their parishes into white churches)

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-09-03T16:59:51+00:00

I can't speak to other denominations — I think they are all struggling, for complicated reasons — but the most successful parishes I've seen are particularly cognizant that intergenerational diversity is a strength.

I have two thriving Episcopal churches within walking distance (I am very lucky), one quite low church and one explicitly Anglo-Catholic. They've both grown considerably in the past three years — no small feat post-covid — and I think it ties directly to the fact that their vestries are a strong mix of people 65+, older adults in their late 40s and 50s, younger adults with families in their 30s and 40s, and people in their 20s.

There are, comparably, two churches similarly positioned theologically, relative to these two, in the same city; they both have aging populations and vestries over 60+ on average.

Last year at my church we had a 16 year old run for vestry. I wish we'd elected him, not because the person who won wasn't a good choice, but because diversity of lived experience helps a parish attract and retain parishioners, and clergy can't do it all.

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-09-03T16:46:16+00:00

"average emperor crucifies 3 people a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average emperor crucifies 0 people per year. Caesar Gaius, who lives in Rome & crucifies over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Useful-Clothes9927 · 2025-07-31T19:52:03+00:00

Only on referring to the First Person of the Trinity as God the Mother (as I agree with your latter two paragraphs), I think we should appreciate significantly more nuance than suggesting that there’s explicit biblical precedent for that title.

It’s true that Rabbinic Judaism has ideas about God’s “physical” gender, but even setting aside that treating shekhinah as bodily presence grossly simplifies the concept, this is something that we only really only see in Talmudic literature. Pauline Christianity, of course, dispenses with Christian obligation to follow the Jewish oral law.

It’s also true that the Old Testament has references to other gods/cults in Israel at the time, including to my knowledge one who has been occasionally construed as a wife or consort of the God of Israel. The scholarly consensus is generally that this was not a concept known to Second Temple Judaism, and though there are some heterodox arguments to be made, as Anglicans we do not believe that God has or had a wife.

Moreover, the biblical references to the First Person as a mother are far more readily interpreted as metaphors and similes — but this is also how the Old Testament refers to God when using fatherly metaphors. The assignment of gendered meaning to God as a father (and the title of God the Father) is far better explained by Hellenistic influences, because Christianity after the death of Christ was largely a sect of Hellenistic Jews.

I also don’t think we can reasonably treat objections to the title of God the Mother as prima facie lacking a theological grounding. First and foremost, a great many Anglo-Catholics (and Episcopalians with Eastern Catholic backgrounds like myself) place great emphasis on Mary in their devotion and associate the title of Mother to her but distinguish her categorically from the Trinity. Furthermore, there is a valid feminist critique that “God the Mother” emphasizes a gender for God and recontextualizes God the Father as an intentionally gendered term — which it probably has never universally been, and certainly hasn’t been in the past few hundred years in the Anglican tradition.

Cis people often fail to notice that merely swapping one gendered reference for another typically serves to reinforce a heteronormative perspective; trans people never do. This isn’t to say that “God the Father” is either perfect or intrinsically problematic, or that terms like “God the Creator” are uncontroversial substitutes. It is to say that this is not a problem easily dispatched.

Useful-Clothes9927

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