The Episcopal Church's General Convention has only one more legislative day to respond to the Windsor Report, and the report's requests for two moratoria still hang in the balance. Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold announced Tuesday evening that he will call the General Convention into a joint session beginning Wednesday morning to help bishops and deputies work further on a resolution.

Griswold announced his decision after the convention's house of deputies shot down an amended resolution that many liberals criticized as cruel to gays and lesbians and that many conservatives criticized as murky and evasive of the Windsor Report's requests.

The Windsor Report asks the Episcopal Church to implement a moratorium on consecrating any further bishops who live in a same-sex union, and a moratorium on blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples. The Windsor Report, written by an international commission convened by the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, came in response to the 74th General Convention's approval of ordaining Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as the church's bishop of New Hampshire.

An odd coalition of clearly liberal and clearly conservative dioceses sent the resolution to such a resounding defeat that an effort to reconsider the resolution also failed.

"This is clarity. They're too divided, they're too fractured," said the Rev. Ellis Brust of the American Anglican Council just after the resolution failed in the house of deputies. "You cannot reconcile two worldviews by committee."

When the house of bishops began discussing the deputies' decision, it took up a new substitute resolution that would have sent largely similar language back to the deputies. But it soon became clear that virtually no bishop who spoke about ...