There is a technique used by good chefs to make a concentrated red wine sauce: simply take an entire bottle of red wine, and gently simmer it (with, say, some minced shallots, garlic and herbs) over low heat until the 25 ounces of wine have been reduced to about 3 ounces of rich, red sauce. It’s a marvelous sauce marchand de vin (without any butter or fat) to accompany grilled meat—but as any good chef will tell you, how the sauce turns out depends on the wine with which you started.
Episcopal Life, the national news organ of The Episcopal Church, is currently publishing a series of Sunday bulletin inserts that deals with the history of the Lambeth Conference—the decennial gathering of all the active Bishops in the Anglican Communion under the auspices of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Like a sauce marchand de vin, the series has been condensed from a longer series written by the Rev. Christopher L. Webber, the author of Welcome to the Episcopal Church, and Re-Inventing Marriage (as well as others described on his Web site). The parent series, entitled “Unity and Diversity in the Lambeth Conference,” was posted on the now-ended Episcopal Majority site; you can read it in four parts here, here, here and here.
By the time the longer series has been reduced to the bulletin version, what remains is chiefly the pro-American, pro-Episcopal Church bias of its author, but the theme of the longer series—“Unity and Diversity”—has been boiled down (by some anonymous editor at Episcopal Life, I must assume, for reasons shortly to appear) to a single note of “Change—It’s Healthy, Necessary, and Inevitable.” Please do not misinterpret me: there is nothing wrong with bias; we each have our own. The problem I am reacting to is the lack of balance in the resulting condensed product.
The Anglican Curmudgeon deserves gratitude for illuminating the deficiencies in Fr Webber’s historiography (if one can even use that term). I have found references to it on revisionist websites all fawning over it and trumpeting its significance. People are buying it and using it. I have been leaving comments that do little more than direct them to the Curmudgeon. If there is one thing I despise it is manipulating people by manipulating history. That and not using turn signals.
Orwell and Santayana come to mind.
I’ve been looking for some inserts to include in our bulletin (printed in, not loose), and I wonder if anyone might have an alternative to the Episcopal Life inserts that actually serves the purpose they are supposedly intended for (informing the congregation about Anglicanism, etc…) without being so heavily slanted to the revisionist side?