The Sunday Telegraph interviewed Christina Rees, Coming very soon… women bishops.
The same paper had a report by Jonathan Wynne-Jones headlined Liberals may split from Canterbury over homosexuals.
Both the BBC and the Independent report on Ben Bradshaw’s criticism of the Church of England.
Christopher Morgan in the Sunday Times reports that St Alban is holier than St George.
What Rowan Williams actually said about St Alban can be found here. Other pictures of the occasion can be found here and here.
WOW thanks for that RW sermon. What a nourishing nibble. He mentions touchstones which are so near the point of my following of Jesus. Speaking peace in principle to Roman magistrate types, pledging harm reductions that involve honoring diversity, keeping the small feed bags of inquiry and discussion near as I journey into that phenomenal and unfinished birthing of the Body of Christ in our worlds. RW’s sermon nicely asks me to consider how I shall live in peace with conservatives who seem to wish me off the planet, including those who also pledge conservative and conformed allegiance, only to… Read more »
hehe, i like Wynne-Jones’ take. imagine the scene, when the diocese of canterbury, which i hear is pretty liberal, applies to the united states for “alternative primatial oversight.” whatever precedent +++Rowan decides to set for for worth, quincy, and whatever, will be back at his doorstep.
This is looking good – liberals are at last getting a bit of backbone and fighting back. This is the way forward – stronger links with the US and if necessary, an alternative stream looking towards the USA, leaving canterbury behind in, as Ben Bradshaw so rightly points out, its own homophobia.
An interesting contrast (not for the first time) between what +Rowan said and what was reported. What’s this stuff about “England” with regard to S. Alban? I understand that a Sarum sequence called him “protomartyr Anglorum”, but this was an egregious anachronism. No such silliness is to be found in the homily of the soundly Celtic Dr Williams.
As for historicity, I think that nobody really knows any more for certain about S. Alban than they do about S. George!
I get annoyed at ++Rowan & then he comes up with something like this:
“the heaviest of our duties at times is that demand to be in loyalty, in solidarity, not only with the people we haven’t met, but with the people who don’t particularly want to be with us, and don’t even want us to be for them”
I am so glad that the Holy Spirit is in charge rather than me!
Mike wrote, “This is looking good – liberals are at last getting a bit of backbone and fighting back.”
From your lips to His ears… 😉
It would seem more natural for the whole CoE and +++Rowan to be affiliated with ECUSA, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Scotland, than with a bigger bloc headed by a conservative bible-thumping ++Akinola. Somehow these churches will remain in communion with Canterbury, and if Nigeria and its allies are thereby lost, they will come back, with changed leadership, over the next decades.
“most of the CofE” is never going to join ECUSA but a minority will want to do so. Have you noticed that most of the CofE is not at all in line with ECUSA? Why do you think the ABC sells the “liberals” down the river at every point. I do not believe he is a cynical politician but he knows where the growth, strength and health in the CofE and global Anglicanism is. Heard of Alpha? Heard of big, growing evangelical (conservative and charismatic) churches even in England? The CofE may lose its dwindling, subsidised “liberal” wing but that… Read more »
“most of the CofE is not at all in line with ECUSA?” The myth of the undistributed middle. Most aren’t in line with Akinola, I guess, but people like me wouldn’t extrapolate from that the assertion that everyone was supportive of the most left-wing aspects of ECUSA. I think here we have a contamination of thought processes by the same sort of ‘either/or’ hermeneutic which bedevilled (eg) Christology at one point. (You know the thing, used to be in IVP paperbacks in the 70’s, ‘Jesus said he was God: if you don’t agree, then Jesus has to be mad or… Read more »
mynsterpreost – I never gave Akinola as the alternative to ECUSA. ……actually, I would take believing, upholding the articles of the CofE as the alternative to ECUSA. Never understand how people can with integrity be paid and housed having sworn oaths which they now do not keep…if they intended to do so. Sorry for being so simple…but then the Lord was not equivocal if we believe his words in the Bible….. but then “liberals” never look at what he said when it does not fit their created religion because it is so much easier to make up a messiah who… Read more »