{"id":6011,"date":"2006-09-09T00:07:35","date_gmt":"2006-09-09T00:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/the-hindu-anglicanpriest.html"},"modified":"2006-09-09T00:07:35","modified_gmt":"2006-09-09T00:07:35","slug":"the-hindu-anglicanpriest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/the-hindu-anglicanpriest.html","title":{"rendered":"The Hindu, Anglican…priest."},"content":{"rendered":"

O-kay. <\/p>\n

The latest from the Church of England…(not that we RC’s have much of anything to brag about…)<\/a><\/p>\n

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AN ANGLICAN CLERIC who converted to Hinduism has had his permission to officiate as a priest in the Ely diocese renewed for three years.<\/p>\n

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The cleric, the Revd David Hart, aged 52, now lives in India, where he carries out Hindu priestly duties in the temple in his village of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. <\/p>\n

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Mr Hart, who has taken the Hindu name Ananda, blesses the daily congregation of about 60 with fire that has previously been offered to Nagar, the snake god. The ritual, he said, was normally performed only by Hindu priests.<\/p>\n

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Mr Hart is also the international secretary of the World Congress of Faiths, and in April this year published a book about his conversion to Hinduism.*<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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He has also been an Anglican priest since 1984, and owns a house in the diocese of Ely. In July, he had his permission to officiate renewed for another three years by the diocesan bishop, Dr Anthony Russell. The certificate arrived with a personal letter from the Bishop. <\/p>\n

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On Tuesday, the Bishop reported that he had not known about Mr Hart\u2019s conversion to Hinduism when giving him permission to officiate. He said he had been sent a letter from a fellow bishop confirming that Mr Hart was a \u201csafe\u201d person to whom permission could be given.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The Bishop\u2019s lay chaplain, Dr Bridget Nichols, said that the news was \u201ca complete revelation to us\u201d. \u201cThe first time we had heard that David Hart had converted to be a Hindu was yesterday,\u201d she said. This was despite Mr Hart\u2019s book, and an article in the Leicester Mercury in July.<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Times UK religion reporter Ruth Gledhill blogs on the story, and in the comments, Mr. Hart himself responds to objections:<\/a><\/p>\n

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(I think. I’m just going to assume it’s him and not an imposter…)<\/p>\n

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Thanks for your article…but one of the commentators does accuse you of some double standards here in your questioning of my dual commitment with your own practice of Zen…and what on earth evidence does Alistair McBay have that I was always ‘doubtfully Anglican’….IF he is also one he should recall Elizabeth I’s view that the Anglican compromise was NOT dogmatic…all that was provided was a liturgy and a building to worship in: ‘we do not make windows into men’s souls’. Following the Elizabethan settlement, I am still, Mr McBay, an Anglican Full of Conviction on the rightness of Her Majesty’s words…<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(To clarify, the initial sentence in the comment refers to Gledhill’s recent attendance at a Zen Buddhist retreat, which she’s in the process of blogging.)<\/p>\n

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Comments at Midwest Conservative Journal<\/a><\/p>\n

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More at TitusOneNine.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

O-kay. The latest from the Church of England…(not that we RC’s have much of anything to brag about…) AN ANGLICAN CLERIC who converted to Hinduism has had his permission to officiate as a priest in the Ely diocese renewed for three years. The cleric, the Revd David Hart, aged 52, now lives in India, where…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Hindu, Anglican...priest. - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/the-hindu-anglicanpriest.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Hindu, Anglican...priest. - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"O-kay. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}