From the blogs:
Alan Wilson gives some background on Indaba in The Morning After: Indaba or Prozac?
He then also comments on the press coverage in Ten Rules for cooking up a Gay Schism:
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Are we wobbling off piste? Reporting the same Lambeth Conference launch, Riazat Butt in the Guardian concludes “Gay Climate of controversy clouds Anglican gathering” whilst, probably more accurately, Ruth Gledhill of the Times reports “Sexuality will barely be on the Lambeth Conference agenda.” The blue train is wobbling on the tracks, friends. Entirely as an exercise in communications studies (and not theology, you understand) may I humbly propose a facetious little something to help keep this thing rolling…
Only Connect has an article by Paul Bagshaw titled Lambeth Conference in no sense a law making body.
This is the bit I liked in Paul Bagshaw’s piece: ‘a lawmaking body in the strict sense’? What other sense is there? This is playing with words: it was never a lawmaking body. Full stop. It is the sheer frustration with the words used. Another was the reply to Fred Hiltz, that the Archbishop could not support or sanction interventions by foreign bishops. Hiltz wasn’t asking for support or sanction, but the opposite! That the answer is turned around 180 degrees, which sounds like pale agreement, makes you wonder if there are occasions when the Archbishop would like to support… Read more »
Paul Bagshaw in his article says: “Discourse, not law, is what keeps a communion together.” Wise words.
Pluralist and others –
Watch the word sanction. While in the US it usually means support it can mean just the opposite as when a nation is warned that sanctions will apply if they persist in an unacceptable course of action. I suspect that may be the common British usage.
Columba
Could be negative. That would be “I cannot give support or apply sanctions against”. It looks to me, as someone very English, that he used the word sanction to mean supporting, but it means more than support but give it legitimacy. But you could be right. It just shows why we end up baffled.
Pluralist —
Quite right! I’m sure that if the ABC wanted us to know what he meant, he could manage (or get Jane to write it for him — I do so miss her pieces in The Church Times).
But the pieces from Bishop Wilson & Paul Bagshaw are first rate — this using vagaries for their own sake really helps no one (IMHO).