Piety Hypocrisy Watch

During a visit to Chicago last week, Bishop Frank Griswold, spiritual leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States, was supposed to be talking
about the future of his faith tradition in an increasingly secular world.
But his mind was elsewhere.

"We are in a state of corporate desolation," Griswold told the Sun-Times in
an interview Friday at an Oak Brook hotel where he was attending an
Episcopal conference called "Will Our Faith Have Children?"

"The only sense of community we have now is shared fear or anxiety,"
Griswold said. "Instead of this experience of 9/11 making us, as it were, in
a new way citizens of the world community bound together in a common sense
of vulnerability, our reaction has been one of bald assertion of our
strength and our power. But I think underneath all of that, people still, no
matter how firmly the president of the United States speaks, are living with
a level of anxiety, a sense of insecurity, which is, of course, bolstered
now by the economic situation we're living with, the specter of war, and no
sense of what the consequences of a military invasion of Iraq might be.