The Sacrament of Reconciliation is all very well, but have you considered confessing your sins to a garden? At the non-denominational Union Seminary in New York, students have been doing just that.
“Today in chapel,”the seminary’s Twitter account announced, “we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honour.”
The accompanying picture showed students in the chapel, sitting and contemplating a small patch of earth on which there were several leafy plants. “What,” the tweet asked, “do you confess to the plants in your life?”
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Another leftfield proposal comes from Sister Ilia Delio, a theologian who teaches at Villanova University.
Sister Delio told Vox that she was sympathetic to the idea of robot priests, as they would undermine the “very male, very patriarchal” nature of the priesthood. “A robot can be gender-neutral. It might be able to transcend some of those divides and be able to enhance community in a way that’s more liberating.”
While theologians rejected the idea, Bishop Richard Umbers saw a possible upside: “Can they attend meetings?”
