Lord Blair of Boughton, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and a practising Anglican, delivered the 2010 Theos Annual Lecture this week: The image of religion must change. Andrew Brown had this comment at The Guardian: Faith and policing.
A writer in the Irish Times says that the Simple message of Jesus has been complicated and twisted.
Giles Fraser writes in the Church Times that Misery is not a spectacle.
The Archbishop of Canterbury delivered the Annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture this week, with the title Faith and Enlightenment: Friends or Foes?
Bishop Paul Butler writes about Sanitising the Bible for Children; he’s not in favour.
Christopher Howse writes in the Telegraph about The tomb of Jesus in central London.
Mr. Blair is completely mistaken in giving Christianity credit for the abolition of slavery. The abolition of slavery was largely a product of the enlightenment coupled with advancements in manufacturing. The early church going abolitionists had an up hill struggle inside the church in advancing their convictions. Seems we have not learned much in the meantime. Gay and Lesbian people now have full civil rights and access to marriage in this country (Canada). The issue, and its resolution, has passed the Church by. Whenever I have conversation with non-church people at social events ( they are the majority) their disdain… Read more »
I write to thank the administrators of Thinking Anglicans for including the article from the Irish Times: “Simple message of Jesus has been complicated and twisted.” This sums up in brief what I have been thinking for many years. I hope others are as moved as I was by this article.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has a very strange and distorted view of recent history: “To take some examples that are not just academic in the light of the last decade or so, this ‘closing down’ of possibilities might be evidenced in policies that restrict access to or support for public educational facilities like libraries and galleries; in employment regimes that reward patterns of work that undermine family life; in the encouragement of unmanageable debt; in the scapegoating, in general social attitudes or in policy, of refugees; or in the pressure for the kind of savings in public care budgets that… Read more »
I was Chris Smith and also some interesting comments followed it.
Charlotte, I think he must be using “liberal” in the British sense of the word, which is more like “libertarian” in the U.S.
“…or in the pressure for the kind of savings in public care budgets that further centralise and bureaucratise contact with physicians and narrow the pastoral or personal responsibilities of the nursing profession.”
– ABC’s “Faith & Enlightenment’ speech –
Reading between the lines in this tiny fragment of the Archbishop’s lecture, I was tempted to compare his awareness of the problems of the tendency to ‘beaurocratise’ the lines of admin-istration in the nursing profession, with the tendency to beaurocratise the administration of the Anglican Communion through the COVENANT.
Both equally non-productive and counter-justice- promoting.
“”The horrors of clerical child abuse and the arguments over homosexuality… are obscuring the basic decency that comes from the commandments to peace contained in all religions, a commandment which in the Christian church, for instance, requires each member of a congregation at every service to greet his or her neighbours with the words ‘Peace be with you'” – Lord Blair – Theos Annual Lecture – I found Lord Blair’s eirenic speech most wholesome – in it’s reference to the need of peace, rather than religious conflict. His mention of ‘the arguments over homosexuality’ as being a part of the… Read more »
Whatever “liberal” meant in mid-nineteenth century Manchester, no one has used the word in that sense since Herbert Asquith resigned the premiership. It looks like a case of deliberate, studied ambiguity, the “shifting terms” fallacy. It is unworthy of him.
Charlotte, with all due respect the term is routinely used in the Mancunian sense in contemporary continental Catholicism and sometimes in American Catholicism as well. Also in historically informed economics and cultural history. Since Dr. Williams was talking about Isaiah Berlin, I think the referent was clearly not to contemporary American political usage.