The Vagina Collects.

Don’t look now, boys and girls, but a bunch of uber-lefty Anglican womyn are writing a prayer book:

While worldwide attention is focused on discord and divisions within the Anglican Communion, Anglican women and girls are uniting to make their voices heard on issues of poverty and women's empowerment, express the power and depth of their faith, and to reveal their connections across cultural and economic differences, by contributing to a new book of women's prayers with a foreword to be written by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

Which means this ain’t your Altar Guild cookbook. These aren't women. They are womyn! They don't bake cookies! They are empowered! (They order out.) And with a forward from the Great Helmsperson, who needs recipes?

Following on the popularity of Women's Uncommon Prayers: Our Lives Revealed, Nurtured, Celebrated...

Which is currently holding a sizzling Amazon sales ranking of 79,598. I'm sure it will break 79,590 any month now. (UPDATE 18APR08: Well I'll be. It jumped 30,000 places in 24 hours, to 49,468. I guess somebody scooped up a dozen just to make me look bad.)

...this all-new collection of prayers, with its multicultural global reach, will be organized according to themes of the Millennium Development Goals.

You expected anything else? It's the whole reason we exist as a church anymore - to promote a UN program (peace and blessings be upon it), not thrust some 2,000 year old misogynist twaddle about sin and Resurrection down the throats of womyn! Like I said:

Editors say that the book will reveal how Anglican women are envisioning a way forward for the welfare of creation, including within the Anglican Communion itself. "At a time when a small cabal of male leaders are insisting on dividing the Anglican Communion over issues of human sexuality," said Dr Te Paa, "Anglican women are offering a way forward. We are committed to prayer, to the unity of the Anglican Communion around Christ's table, and to a common mission that leads to the full flourishing of all people."

Note that the above paragraph contains the one and only use of the word "Christ" in the entire article, so it's anybodies guess who these prayers will be addressed to. "Occupant," perhaps? And of course the article's author has to point out how horrible life is under The Episcopal Church's (tm) two approved Great Satans - conservative America and the conservative Global South:

For example, the book might show the spiritual bond between a teenage girl in the United States struggling with self-image because of a debasing popular culture and a teenage girl from the Global South who has disappeared into the slave trade.

See? Girls who have been seduced by the capitalist neo-cons into wanting an iPhone but cant get one have soooo much in common with girls who were gang-raped by Islamic militias. If you can't see the similarities you must be an insensitive. reasserter clod.

The book is due out in May 2009, just in time for the collective leap off the bridge in Anaheim.

UPDATE 18APR08: A different kind of gyno-empowerment project: cross-sections of female reproductive organs in cross-stitch. Yep. I'd want one of those on my wall.....