The new Area Bishop of Woolwich, in the diocese of Southwark, is to be the current Archdeacon in the area, the Ven. Alastair Cutting, it was announced on Thursday morning.

Currently the Archdeacon of Lewisham and Greenwich, Archdeacon Cutting was announced as the new Bishop at the Garry Weston Library, in Southwark Cathedral. He began by paying tribute to the “dynamism, presence, and charisma” of his predecessor, Dr Karowei Dorgu, who died in office last year (News, 11 September 2023; Obituary, 22 September 2023).

Archdeacon Cutting was described by the Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Revd Christopher Chessun, as having a “missionary heart”. His experience in the area meant that he would be able to “hit the ground running”, Bishop Chessun said, but it was “more important that he hits the ground praying”.

Archdeacon Cutting grew up in south India, and trained for ministry at St John’s College, Nottingham. He served his title in Sheffield diocese before moving to London in the early 1990s, to serve as assistant curate at St Andrew’s, Uxbridge.

📢We are delighted to announce The Venerable@AlCutting Archdeacon of Lewisham & Greenwich, as the fourteenth Bishop of Woolwich in the Diocese of Southwark🙏More info➡️https://t.co/BrvRMXbP0P

— Southwark Diocese (@SouthwarkCofE) June 6, 2024

GSFA First Assembly

11 – 15 June 2024, Egypt. Theme: “I Will Make You as a Light For The Nations …”. (Isaiah 49:6)

The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) is a recognised grouping within the  Anglican Communion which includes some 75% of Anglicans worldwide and traces its origins to the  first ‘South to South’ Encounter in Kenya in 1994. Since then, regular ‘Encounter’ gatherings have  brought the voice of Global South to the wider Anglican Communion and next week, 11^th-15^th June, a  group of 200 leaders is being gathered by the GSFA in Egypt as its ‘1^st Assembly’ under a new  Covenantal structure. 

The Assembly will meet in the context of the rapid growth of Anglican Churches of the Majority  World, in contrast to the Western Churches which, on the whole, have been unable to resist a  cultural drift away from orthodox Christianity. 

Press release from the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans ahead of the June 11-15 Assembly in Egypt. I'll be present as a journalist / observer. #anglican pic.twitter.com/NnuMG5yLRv

— Jeff Walton (@jeffreyhwalton) June 6, 2024

I’ve been thinking lately of that party, those women, the husbands they jettisoned like so much dead weight in a mimetic frenzy of best-life-living. Maybe the men were bad and deserved it, but it strikes me that nobody ever said so. My friends didn’t talk about being unhappily married; they just thought they’d be happier divorced, and no wonder. Even as divorce has retreated from the oft-cited peak rate of 50 percent, its place in the culture has all the urgency and incandescence of a current thing.

This year, we’ve already had a glut of divorce memoirs from authors celebrity and non; a much-hyped “divorce album” from Ariana Grande; a buzzy debut novel called The Divorcées, which is set on a ’50s “divorce ranch” in Reno; a piece in The Cut, on Valentine’s Day no less, entitled “The Lure of Divorce”; and a New York Times feature about how Emily Ratajkowski has set off a booming new market for “divorce rings,” refashioned from the wearer’s old wedding band. One of them is engraved with the word badass, a detail I would have found absolutely impossible to believe had it not been accompanied by photographic evidence.

Is it ^%$%$# to get divorced? Perhaps it was in the ’50s, when women had to schlep to Nevada to free themselves of their abusive husbands—or the ’70s, when women fought for the liberatory institution of no-fault divorce. And perhaps this history explains the current narrative, epitomized by a recent Guardian piece that portrays divorce as not just a path to empowerment but an exclusive sisterhood (the one I glimpsed among my newly single friends as they downed Jell-O shots and mimed intercourse on the kitchen countertop with a life-size plastic skeleton). Learning of the writer’s divorce, her hairdresser said, “all the coolest women she knew were divorced and sighed almost wistfully at the thought of it.”

Of course, these stories suffer from selection bias, in that they are created by and for the type of woman who sighs wistfully at the thought of divorce—as opposed to those of us who sometimes wake up sweating from nightmares in which we have inexplicably dumped our very good husbands. But they’re also a product of a popular “woman empowered by everything woman does” paradigm, where all choices made by women are a product of liberation, hence feminist, hence good. There is no error or disappointment that can’t be ^%$%$#@# away.

“Is it badass to get divorced? Perhaps it was in the ’50s, when women had to schlep to Nevada to free themselves of their abusive husbands.”@KatRosenfield on why glamorizing a trendy marital split in 2024 is merely “narcissism disguised as feminism.” https://t.co/THigCS8x59

— The Free Press (@TheFP) June 1, 2024

To engage with the medieval Italian priest Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) is to approach one of history’s greatest theological giants. Aquinas is second only to Augustine in his influence on Western Christianity—and his legacy of Thomism is a vast ocean. Academic discussions in theology and philosophy demand Aquinas and Thomism as conversation partners.

Yet evangelicals, in particular, have had an unresolved relationship with Aquinas over the years. The pendulum of 20th-century evangelical scholarship on Aquinas has swung between strongly negative appraisals (from Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til, for example) and, since the 1980s, more appreciative receptions (such as from Norman Geisler and Arvin Vos). Yet in the last decade or so, there has been a Thomist renaissance within evangelical circles.

Evangelical apologists were first attracted to his epistemology, especially his defense of an evidentialist view of the relationship between faith and reason, which assumes that reason can ascertain the existence of God. Evangelical theologians then began retrieving his “classical” doctrine of God’s oneness in the face of modern Christological and Trinitarian trends, which they perceived as slippery slopes to unorthodox views—which promote a social trinity and a hierarchical subordination of Jesus to the Father, for instance.

In the face of pressures from secularization and the identity crisis felt in some evangelical quarters, Aquinas can be perceived as a bulwark of a “traditional” theology that needs to be urgently recovered—and is thus in danger of being idealized in an uncritically positive retrieval.

Evangelicals have had an unresolved relationship with Thomas Aquinas over the years.

An evangelical theologian offers five principles to affirm that “evangelical interest” without veering into “heterodox territory.”https://t.co/NJ8phKQgCF

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) June 7, 2024

By now it’s a cliché that liberalism in the Anglosphere has become a religion, whether or not its adherents know it. But less often remarked is a fact somewhat in tension with this claim: namely, that its worshippers get to be minor gods too, making up the moral rules themselves. The past few weeks have offered up two new case studies for us to contemplate. The first involves a married couple from the US, Malcolm and Simone Collins, described as the “poster children of the pronatalist movement”, now thrust into an even wider media spotlight courtesy of a viral Guardian interview about their lifestyle. The second is a book by political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life, published on Tuesday.

Since the article about the Collins family first emerged a fortnight ago, most scandalised public reactions have been about the fact that father-of-four Malcolm was observed slapping his toddler’s cheek in a restaurant — albeit that the reporter noted it was “not a heavy blow”. Collins said the practice was agreed with his wife beforehand and modelled on their having watched “tigers in the wild” disciplining their offspring with the swipe of a paw. (Let us hope they didn’t also see the part where an adult tiger sometimes kills a cub for food.) This week, he wrote a further defence, blaming “much of the media” for being “hell-bent on presenting pronatalists as evil and backward”. To my mind, though, Malcolm and Simone could do with being a bit more backward; for even leaving their disciplinary habits aside, they seem to constitute the reductio ad absurdum of attempts to freestyle the moral universe.

In the Collins’s world, every stage of the childrearing process is approached as if to be redesigned from scratch. For instance: the couple have given their two little girls “gender-neutral names” — Titan Invictus and Industry Americus — apparently on the grounds that this will make the girls “more likely to have higher paying careers and get Stem degrees”. The fact that future employers are bound to presume such names could only have come from a terrifyingly crazy bloodline seems to have been discounted. A further justification offered by Malcolm is that such “strong names” will predispose their owners to “a strong internal locus of control”: that is, to that inner feeling, identified by psychologists, of being fully in command of whatever happens to you in life, as opposed to a helpless passive drifter. Clearly, he hasn’t imagined having to spell “Titan Invictus” out over the phone.

Wrote for @unherd about the pronatalist Collinses, and the claim that liberalism could be a satisfying atheist religion if only we were devoted enough https://t.co/OzX9Nhzr83

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) June 7, 2024

A proud city of gleaming high rises, oil wealth and five-star hotels lies in ruins. Millions have fled. A famine threatens. The gold market is a graveyard of rubble and dog-eaten corpses. The state TV station became a torture chamber. The national film archive was blown open in battle, its treasures now yellowing in the sun. Artillery shells soar over the Nile, smashing into hospitals and houses. Residents bury their dead outside their front doors. Others march in formation, joining civilian militias. In a hushed famine ward, starving babies fight for life. Every few days, one of them dies.

Khartoum, the capital of Sudan and one of the largest cities in Africa, has been reduced to a charred battleground.

A feud between two generals fighting for power has dragged the country into civil war and turned the city into ground zero for one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes.

As many as 150,000 people have died since the conflict erupted last year, by American estimates. Another nine million have been forced from their homes, making Sudan home to the largest displacement crisis on earth, the United Nations says. A famine looms that officials warn could kill hundreds of thousands of children in the coming months and, if unchecked, rival the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.

Fueling the chaos, Sudan has become a playground for foreign players like the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Russia and its Wagner mercenaries, and even a few Ukrainian special forces.

Great reporting and photographs by @declanwalsh and @ivorprickett : A War on the Nile Pushes #Sudan Toward the Abyss
https://t.co/8oyxZrUptC

— Paulo Nunes dos Santos (@pdossantos) June 5, 2024

O Lord Christ, Son of the living God, who at the last assize wilt acknowledge all deeds of mercy to others as done unto thee: Grant, in this world of sin and pain and want, that we may never pass by the poor and helpless whose cry is thine own; for the honour of thy holy name.

Happy Friday all! Here's the view from Roseberry Topping:) pic.twitter.com/1dtV68tCv1

— David Oxtaby (@Disc_light) June 7, 2024

Guard your steps when you go to the house of God; to draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools; for they do not know that they are doing evil. Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven, and you upon earth; therefore let your words be few. For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words. When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it; for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake; why should God be angry at your voice, and destroy the work of your hands? For when dreams increase, empty words grow many: but do you fear God.

–Ecclesiastes 5:1-7

Happy Friday all! Here's the view from Roseberry Topping:) pic.twitter.com/1dtV68tCv1

— David Oxtaby (@Disc_light) June 7, 2024