Fulcrum published this response to General Convention and Canterbury’s Reflections.
LGCM published this response, which is titled Retrograde General Convention: Episcopal Church Fails To Challenge Homophobia By Embracing Windsor Report, but scroll down for the full text, the latter part of which is a response to the Reflection.
Ekklesia had more to say in its helpful roundup.
Anglican mainstream has published An Open Letter to Bishops and Delegates Who Participated In General Convention 2006 by Dr Leander S Harding which asks “Do I understand what you are saying?” See http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/?p=540
Reflecting back to someone what has been heard can help us to listen to each other. I’d be interested to know whether other participants or observers have heard the same message as Harding,. His reflections seem to me valuable for being lucid and less Windsor-centred than most.
I will only comment one part of Dr. Harding’s rather verbose commentary.
In item #14, I would be interested in any scientific evidence that genuine same gender attraction can be permanently reversed.
That is, I would like to see reference to research produced by legitimate scientists, associataed with research universities or major teaching hospitals [like the Mayo Clinic in the US] under controlled conditions, using scientific protocols, published in authoritative, peer-reviewed publications of genuine scientific societies such as the APA in the U.S.
Harding’s letter seems to be a classic example of a straw man. In pretty much every particular, no, Harding, that’s not what people said.
Thomas
Frankly, I read Harding’s article myself some days ago in the original at http://leanderharding.classicalanglican.net/?p=208
and did not choose it for inclusion on TA. Of course I wasn’t at Columbus myself, but this article didn’t seem to me to bear even a vague relationship to the reports of many others present there that I had also read. Lucid was not among the words that came to my mind either.
I would be much more interested in your opinions on the two articles that I did choose to link to.
Simon and others – thanks for your responses. I am interested in the hermeneutical issues involved and on this point I found Harding interesting and even lucid, maybe precisely because it is somewhat wordy. Anglicanism (by which I do not mean “Church of England” which as part of the holy, catholic church is of course older than “Anglicanism” as a distinct branch of world Christianity) got going with people who had a wonderful way with words from Cranmer onwards. This is a feature which the AB did not mention – maybe because this wonderful way with words has so often… Read more »
Thomas- Wise words. The valuing of clarity is not a culturally relative matter, but an essential matter. This is because there is only one logically possible position: namely that reality/realities come first and words come second and are derivative from the realities which they evoke. Any worldview that sees words/language as primary cannot possibly be correct. Words are the servant: they cannot but point to the reality which brought them into being in the first place. (After all, which came first? – the word or the reality which the word expressed?) Words exist precisely to express a prior reality, and… Read more »