Ruth Gledhill has interviewed Gene Robinson, the bishop of New Hampshire. The full interview is behind the Times paywall but there are two extracts on YouTube.
Gene Robinson Part One: the Anglican crisis
This week I [Ruth Gledhill] went to New York to interview Gene Robinson. “I have clergy friends in England who literally studied at Archbishop Williams’s feet when he was teaching and who have said to me it is almost as if aliens have come and taken Rowan away from us and they have left something here that looks like him but we don’t recognise him any more,” Bishop Robinson said. Giving his first interview since announcing that he will retire in two years, Bishop Robinson said that Dr Williams was a wonderful human being and a faithful Christian.
But he added: “I’m not at all sure that his attempts to hold us together as a communion at all costs is the kind of leadership that this time calls for. I pray for him every day.
Gene Robinson Part Two: A Boy Named Vicki Gene
Gene Robinson talks to Ruth Gledhill in New York: His parents, poor tenant farmers, were told he would certainly die. Before his birth, they had come up with a girl’s name, Vicky Jean, after his father, Victor and his mother, Imogene. “In his distress he just changed the spelling and thought it wouldn’t matter on a tombstone. So that’s the name on my birth certificate.”
Having the time – as a retired Anglican priest in New Zealand, I took the trouble to view the video recording of the first part of Ruth’s excellent and thought-provoking interview with Bishop Gene Robinson. In a relaxed and eirenic way, Bp.Gene has given us all an important look into his own understanding of the ABC’s apparent turn-around on the issue of homsoexuality in the Church. He points out the sad reality of the way in which the Primus Inter Pares of the world-wide Anglican Communion has felt constrained towards the ethic of Unity before Justice (those words are my… Read more »