“THE FOOT is still in the door, even if it is being squashed very painfully,” the Archbishop of Canterbury said last weekend when he was asked about the Church’s participation in public debate. He did not think that the Church had yet “dropped off the radar”.
Dr Williams was in dialogue with Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye and panellist on the BBC’s Have I Got News for You, at an event during “The Gathering”, a series of activities for all ages at Canterbury Cathedral.
Mr Hislop described the difficulty that Dr Williams faced with the media when people called for a moral lead from the Church. “When the Archbishop of Canterbury says anything, they say, ”˜Shut up,’” he suggested.
Dr Williams responded that “the leadership thing is a problem.” It was “a matter of trying to remember that when you’re speaking from the Church you’re trying to give some sort of critical perspective to try and show someÂthing”. The Archbishop admitted that he was “not brilliant at sound-bites”.
When asked what constituted success for the Church, he spoke of Jesus’s death on the cross, and the persecution of the Early Church. “God left us with a very troubling model of success. I think success for the Church has to be something measured by the degree to which the compelling radiance of God comes through.â€
Yes, I like this. “The compelling radiance of God.” It reminds me of the things he writes in his book Where God Happens which is his study of the Desert Fathers.
My question, however, “What does this compelling radiance of God look like on a day to day level?” What is suggesting in terms of a practical application of the Gospel to a dark world that needs a compelling radiance. I know what I would say. I’d be most interested in hearing what he would say.
The Archbishop admitted that he was “not brilliant at sound bites.” Fair enough. But the above quote, as good as it is, has a sound bite sort of feel to it.
“When the Archbishop of Canterbury says anything, they say, ‘Shut up,'” he suggested. Well, I say, that on an issue like the witness of the Church in the world today, I’d be most glad to have the Archbishop “Speak up.”
Foot in the door? We usually keep it in our mouth.
Like the first George Bush, was he not born with a silver foot in his mouth?
Wow is this a target rich environment! The AbC said it himself, “the leadership thing is a problem”. Now, if only we could get him to repeat this while looking into a mirror!
The Archbishop admitted that he was “not brilliant at sound-bitesâ€.
No one (with the exception of the stunted intellectuals who fancy themselves journalists) is looking for sound-bites. We’re all looking for leadership, and not finding it, by the by. Moral leadership is not accomplished by sound-bites.
Right, Athanasius, but don’t you see . . . . the reason why his musings about Sharia law and other such things are so often “misunderstood” by the savage hordes of primitives out there reading the papers is because he is simply unable to distill his own complex brilliance into small enough chunks that are both easily digestible and accurate enough for the uneducated proletariat.
And that is what he means by not being “brilliant at sound-bites.”
It’s one of those self-effacing little barbs that people finally come up with to both protect themselves and imply that the medium and the receiver are the two at fault — not the messenger or his message.