James Martin writes in The Huffington Post that The Saints Were, Yes, Funny.
Theo Hobson writes in The Guardian that Rowan Williams got it right about ritual.
Andrew Brown writes in The Guardian Stonewall’s ‘bigot of the year’: careful with overusing that word.
He has also written this: Wanted: new archbishop of Canterbury – must have plans to fill the pews.
[The Bishop of Lincoln has issued a message relating to this article; it is item 2 here.]
Stonewall’s ‘Bigot of the Year’ award serves a useful purpose in countering extreme rhetoric that may cause harm to significant numbers of people. The Cardinal went way beyond a reasoned argument against gay marriage. After all, I somehow doubt Brown’s colleague at the Guardian – Michael White – would have attracted a single vote for his mildly expressed opposition. Stonewall’s Scottish President got it about right when he said that the Cardinal’s comments had ‘gone well beyond [a] decent level of public discourse’.
It might serve the Scottish Catholic Church well to turn the other cheek.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/02/stonewall-unrepentant-cardinal-bigot-award
Calling someone a bigot is, after all, speech and we’re always told how important free speech is.
If the cap fits…It seems to me that the (manufactured) outrage over awarding the bigot of the year award to the Cardinal means that the point has been well made.
So Theo Hobson’s turning his back on liberality and substantive content is instead towards a vacuous ritualism for its own theatricality.
Following Rowan Williams, Theo Hobson has tried to bypass the aporias of linguistic or communicative approaches to religion. The sign or signifier is a metaphysical notion of meaning because it presupposes legibility. A signifier refers to a signified, something which would be outside the chain of signification. A sacramental sign means what it says is an early version of traditional speech act theory and notions that meaning is constructed the way one builds a barn. But, following Jacques Derrida, it would be more accurate to speak of traces, marks which may or may not mean something. It remains undecidable, recalling… Read more »
An excellent article by Theo Hobson in The Guardian. His assessment of ++Rowan’s charismatic influence on him in matters of liturgical worship should not be lost in any attempt to understand ++Rowan’s spiritual and philosophical approach to wholesome religion. Prayer and contemplation are embedded in the Archbishop’s priestly ministry in the Church. Having recently experienced ++Rowan’s presidency and preaching gifts at a celebratory Eucharist in the chapel of Christ’s College, Christchurch, here in New Zealand; one could not but be struck by the simple and yet profound way in which the ABC led us in worship. He celebrated the liturgy… Read more »