[Rowan] Williams is a shy man. Approachable and engaging, no doubt keen that the head of the Church of England has a prominent role in public debate, but shy all the same. All the more intriguing that this reserved theologian has acquired a reputation as a bookish bigmouth; someone who wades too readily into affairs outside his purview.
This is the problem of being Archbishop of Canterbury in the 21st century: we demand the incumbent be relevant but we do not really expect members of the clergy to say anything too challenging. Although his remarks on trying to understand terrorism, the partial adoption of Sharia law and the sense of mistrust in the Irish Catholic church have been typically nuanced and thoughtful, reaction (and the framing of reaction by the media) is often less so. Someone is always “furious” when difficulties are addressed.
This explains, perhaps, a slight apprehension at the prospect of another interview. Williams has admitted he is comfortable with a “concrete audience” but “less at ease when there’s a vague sense that anyone and everyone is listening and, therefore, I’m not quite sure”¦ what the response is”. And yet the subject that has tested his patience beyond any other is an internal dispute, the kind of ecclesiastical problem he has been able to ponder for decades, write about at length and enjoy numerous “concrete” conversations with the relevant parties.
Sigh… another church reporter who doesn’t understand Christianity or the church. That he could refer to the issues dividing the Anglican Communion as “ecumenical disputes” shows he doesn’t understand what the word Ecumenical means.
It’s like a political analyst describing a nation’s civil war as an “international” conflict — no, it’s a conflict INSIDE a nation, not BETWEEN nations.
Reporters who don’t even know what the basic words of the field they are covering mean need to do something else.
You have to bear in mind that [i] The Big Issue [/i]is a magazine produced in order to be sold by homeless people on the streets as a money-raiser. You wouldn’t expect deep theological analysis, and I thought it wasn’t a bad article.
In fact it homed in on something I’ve been thinking about concerning Archbishop Rowan – and he put it in words here. He is only happy communicating when he knows who he’s speaking to,
That’s interesting. It explains why he infuriates so many people – he will speak to the Gay and Lesbian people as he did in ‘The Body’s Grace’ in 1988 and say how bad ‘conventional heterosexist ethics’ are, and how same-sex unions, precisely because they are sterile, are better because their ‘product’ is not a child but ‘an embodied person aware of grace’.
But that’s for the gay audience. Now, we hear him saying how wonderful the forthcoming marriage of Prince William and Kate Middletoin is. That’s for a different audience. You’d hardly guess from what he said about that wedding that he has also said that many heterosexual marriages ”are a framework for violence and human destructiveness on a disturbing scale”.
I used to wonder what he [i] really [/i]thinks. But now I know, thanks to what he has told us in this article, that it’s pointless trying to work that out from his writings or public statements, because he onlt speaks confidently to a “concrete audience” – and changes what he says to suit his hearers, whoever they may be.
No real advice or leadership for the (former) AC, but lots for any defined audience? Rich, that is.
#2 William S
I think that is a very perceptive remark, and more developed than the impression I have had which is that Williams is uncomfortable with large groups because he cannot control them and their agenda, which as a control freak bordering on the sociopathic, makes him very uncomfortable indeed.
But I think this remark stood out for me from his interview:
[blockquote]Q: Has the intensity of the quarrel become difficult to deal with?
A: “Well, no more difficult than usual. It’s an ongoing set of problems. It’s to do with a Church that tries to span some very different cultures, and which is often rather unwilling to learn across cultures… It’s easier, sometimes, to go to our corners.â€[/blockquote]
The view from Planet Zog.
Ho hum.
Hey, has anyone seen Woody Allen and Rowan in the room **at the same time??** Does Rowan play the Albert System clarinet? There may be an explanation to this.
#s 2 & 4, I said the same thing years ago on a different blog, just prior to the primates meeting at Dromantine. ++RW is like the dad at the head of a table, seated with his ~ 8 unruly(his perception) children–what the children are doing, who is right/wrong, or who is grounded in truth makes no difference, the kid that screams the loudest gets a delicious chocolate chip cookie. That kid shuts up, and the next kid starts screaming, whereupon he receives a delicious oatmeal cookie; and so on, and so on. It has nothing to do with parental(or otherwise) leadership, it’s more a form of pacification. And a person like that turns out to be no leader at all, because his “skills” lie in no more than keeping others happy at the time, an eventually impossible and pointless task. Somebody could make a funny New Yorker cartoon out of it, if he/she tried.
Not to mention, it illustrates the old cliche that he who stands for nothing falls for anything.
And then there’s this
“…and how same-sex unions, precisely because they are sterile, are better because their ‘product’ is not a child but ‘an embodied person aware of grace’.”
The archbishop should be grateful that his parents didn’t feel that way, or else he wouldn’t be here.
“It’s to do with a Church that tries to span some very different cultures, and which is often rather unwilling to learn across cultures… It’s easier, sometimes, to go to our corners.”
Yup, the elitism surely doesn’t work when you’re trying to convince intelligent people of the obvious unTruth of things. And embracing unTruth would not make me or anybody else more “intellectually developed”. Physical pleasure is not necessarily congruent with “right” or “Christian”, despite fancy, agenda-driven, useless terms like “embodied persons aware of grace”.
“…and how same-sex unions, precisely because they are sterile, are better because their ‘product’ is not a child but ‘an embodied person aware of grace’.â€
This just in; the head of the Anglican Communion has defined the dogma of the Immaculate Absence of Conception.
Film at eleven….