Tuesday, March 04, 2014

There’s a story out of New Jersey about a teenager and some friends with whom she lives suing her parents for tuition money.  That’s an interesting story in and of itself, touching on all kinds of cultural issues.
But the fact that she’s using the courts to resolve the problem is an oddity.  Legal and other family service observers are starting to chime in, appealing for other means of dealing with the problem:
Talking the situation through would be a better route than a lawsuit, Kenneth Neumann, a New York divorce mediator and psychologist with the Center for Mediation & Training, tells Yahoo Shine. “We often use the legal system as a way to deal with disagreements when we should be using therapy or mediation,” he says, noting that Rachel’s case is “extremely rare,” and that he’s “not had a case like this in 30 years,” with the most unique angle being that the parents are not in disagreement.
The Episcopal Church came through the Civil War and all of America’s other social upheavals with nowhere near the amount of litigation and disciplinary sanctions indulged in by the current Presiding Bishop alone.  Her profile on the denominational website is a study in sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Litigation is not reconciliation.  As in the New Jersey case, so it is in The Episcopal Church.  The effort is to discard relationships in favor of perceived entitlements, mainly to stuff.  “Global good and reconciliation” my Lenten purple backside.

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