Nothing illustrates better the insensitivity to minorities than Mr Cameron’s wish to legalise gay marriage. Dr Williams is critical of the “embarrassment” the Prime Minister has caused the Church. A “very inadequate” consultation overlooked the legal position of the Churches and marriage. By opposing the change, however, the Church attracted accusations of homophobia, and for good reason, he thinks. It has been too ”“ he says “lily mouthed” before correcting himself: “We’ve not exactly been on the forefront of pressing for civic equality for homosexual people, and we were wrong about that.”

To those who fear the constitutional consequences, he says legalising gay marriage would not of itself trigger disestablishment. “We’ve been assured that there will be no pressure on the Church to perform marriages, but of course as things stand, every citizen has the right to be married in Church. That’s alright, so long as the State’s definition of marriage and the Church’s definition are the same. If the State’s definition shifts ”¦ then we have a tangle.”

Read it all.

In responding to the interim report, Archbishop Rowan Williams has made the following statement:

“I am very grateful to those who have been conducting the Visitation in the Diocese of Chichester and to all who have co-operated with this process ”“ not least those survivors of abuse who have shared their experience. The abiding hurt and damage done to them is something that none of us in the Church can ignore, and I am deeply sorry that they should have been let down by those they ought to have been able to trust.

I hope they will believe that we take their experience seriously: we owe them not only our words of apology but our best efforts to make sure that in the future our churches will be safe places for children and vulnerable people of all ages. The interim report confirms that there have been many and longstanding failures in implementing a robust and credible safeguarding policy in the Diocese of Chichester. The guidelines laid down by the national Church and the agreed standards of best practice have not been consistently followed and the flaws in safeguarding practice have put children and others at risk.

Read it all.

What is it like to be a Christian? Not what do Christians believe or how many superstitions do they quietly excuse before breakfast? But what is faith as experienced?

It is an important question because, as Rowan Williams notes in his new book, The Lion’s World, people might think they know what faith is about when, today, they perhaps don’t, never having been there. Subtitled “A Journey Into the Heart of Narnia”, the book is partly about CS Lewis. But it is also a chance for the archbishop of Canterbury to convey what Christianity means to him. This is difficult to do, not only because contemporary Britons lack Christian experience but because, as titular head of the established Church of England, Williams recognises a need to “rinse out what is stale in our thinking about Christianity ”“ which is almost everything”.

The elusory character of Christianity is also on the mind of Francis Spufford, the historian and science writer. The subtitle for his new book, Unapologetic, is “Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense”. A central worry for him is not that the rational justification for belief has been undone. Faith is not about that anyway: as Coleridge noted, the best argument for Christianity is that “it fits the human heart”. Rather, it is that so many of the secular alternatives to Christianity only work because they “depend on some tacky fantasy about ourselves”.

Read it all.

As I look back over the last ten years, it is clear that our relationship as Christians and Muslims has grown and deepened. It has not been an easy time, and there are huge challenges that we still face together. Nevertheless, we have learned how to quarry together the resources we have of a vision of human beings honoured before God. The word honour, I believe, is one we should learn to use more freely, and even extravagantly, when we talk about our human world. We honour human beings because God in his creation and in his dealings with human beings honours them.

In practical terms this honouring has meant that Muslims and Christians have been working as never before in international development to serve the world’s poorest people, and I want to recognise the huge amount of financial giving that the Muslim community pours out during Ramadan especially. It has also meant at a local level that Muslims have shared with Christians and others during Ramadan in service to their communities through the ”˜A Year of Service’ initiative, in the ”˜Near Neighbours’ programme and in many other ways.

Read it all.

The CofE has refused to countenance any form of official liturgical recognition for civil partnerships; has sought special exemptions from human rights and equalities legislation in order to continue discriminating against openly gay clergy or gay employees; has repeatedly restated its condemnation of all sexual relations outside heterosexual marriage; and has formally debarred even celibate gay clergy from becoming bishops.

Most recently, the bishops of the CofE have set themselves against government proposals to extend civil marriage to include same-sex couples. Their opposition is above all a public and political stance which is intended to maintain ecclesiastical unity, particularly within the Anglican communion. About half the world’s Anglicans are African, and the majority of them are in violently homophobic countries whose churches back harsh punishments against homosexuals, right up to the death penalty.

These are the Anglican provinces which the current policy is seeking to appease and keep on board, while the American and Canadian Anglican churches that now openly bless gay unions and consecrate gay bishops are condemned for daring to treat gay people equally.

Read it all.

Please keep comments on this thread focused on the content of the preface; thank you–KSH.

You can find the 1998 material there and that from 2008 here.

My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity to ask a question in this particular context because the plight of Congo is well known, I think, to everyone in this House. The issue of regional cooperation has already been flagged indirectly in what has been said, and one of the questions I should like to ask is to do with what Her Majesty’s Government is doing to foster a broader regional engagement in this ”“ a strategic engagement, involving more than simply the governments of Rwanda and Congo.

And as part of that regional question, I am very concerned about one particular issue – which is a cross-border one in the region – and that is the plight of the indigenous peoples, the indigenous minorities such as the Batwa.

Read it all.

Deeply shocking – there it is in Holy Scripture: a God who can’t give us up. And when we talk about peace with God, we’re talking about how God spends Himself, and pours Himself out, in the most extreme way possible ”“ in the suffering and death of our Lord; in the broken bread, the spilled wine of Holy Communion; pours himself out to make peace. The God who will hold back nothing to make peace, because he cannot imagine Himself as God without us. And so when we think of the peace that God has made with us in Jesus Christ, we should be sobered and shocked at its depth, at its force. That is what peace with God means; and the peace we are given with each other as Christians grows out of that.

And in that, there is the alarming hint that if God can’t give us up, we can’t give each other up – as Anglicans and Anglicans together, but as Christians and Christians together too. How very nice it would be if we could simply say: we’re giving up now on fellowship; that’s enough peace, that’s enough attempts to be together. And in those moments – which are frequent enough, God knows – we ought to hear God saying: But I’m God. I’m not you. You can give up on each other, but I can’t. And maybe with that before us, we can think of what it is that God goes on asking of us, in terms of making and keeping peace.

I’m not just talking about how we live through the deeply painful conflicts in our Communion, though that’s important enough. I’m talking about those attitudes to one another that shape our lives and our policies. That willingness to be spent for one another; that willingness to let others flourish and rejoice because of what we do; that willingness to be there for one another, whatever happens. And I believe that in our global Anglican family, in spite of all our tensions and divisions, we have learned a great deal more in recent decades about being there for one another, locally and internationally.

Read it all.

“Peace is the only option which can allow the flourishing of South Sudan and its neighbour Sudan,” the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned. Speaking on the first anniversary of the independence of South Sudan, the Archbishop has called for urgent humanitarian assistance in conflict areas and renewed efforts to resolve outstanding differences between the two countries….

Read it all.

Christians need to overcome their own feelings of embarrassment, shame and disgust about homosexuality, the Archbishop of Canterbury has insisted.

Dr Rowan Williams acknowledged that the Church was still “scratching its head” about where it stands on issues like same-sex marriage despite its vocal public opposition to the Government’s plan to legalise it.

In his most frank public comments to date on the subject, the Archbishop accepted that the Church was in a “tangle” over homosexuality.

Read it all.

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, will release “Faith in the Public Square” in September.

The book, published by Continuum, is a compilation of several of Archbishop Rowan’s interventions into the public discourse ”“ often at key points in wider debate ”” during the ten years of his ministry as Primate.

Read it all.

The archbishop of Canterbury has denounced David Cameron’s “big society”, saying that it comes across as aspirational waffle that was “designed to conceal a deeply damaging withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities to the most vulnerable”.

The outspoken attack on the prime minister’s flagship policy by Rowan Williams ”“ his strongest to date ”“ is contained in a new book, Faith in the Public Square, that is being prepared for publication ahead of his retirement.

Passages from the book, obtained by the Observer, reflect the archbishop’s deep frustration not just with the policies of Cameron’s government and those of its Labour predecessors, but also with what he sees as the west’s rampant materialism and unquestioning pursuit of economic growth. Williams also laments spiralling military expenditure, writing that “the adventure in Iraq and its cost in any number of ways seems to beggar the imagination”.

Read it all.

I shall be suggesting that if every complex society needs systems of representation, we have to come to terms with the fact that legitimacy is never a matter of electoral majorities alone. Good, “legitimate” government involves both direct election and mechanisms for representing:

–concerns that are of longer-term importance than electoral cycles allow;
–minority interests that can be silenced by large electoral majorities;
–groups with conscientious reservations about aspects of public policy; and
–the expertise of professional and civil society agents that will not necessarily be engaged in party political elections.

In a word, I believe that if there is a “democratic deficit” in our governance in the UK, it is best addressed by taking all of these issues together and looking at what most strengthens civil society groups and local democratic mechanisms, rather than seeking a solution primarily at the level of national electoral systems.

Read it all.

“We are haunted by Christianity in this country; there’s a bit of can’t live with it, can’t live without it in some people’s approaches. Even with Dawkins, the sense that he can’t leave it alone is fascinating. It does mean that it’s a more complex phenomenon than it looks at first; it’s not as if everyone on that side wants to sweep things away and start from day one. I’m interested in how much scope that still gives for mutual understanding.”

I think we will come to miss Williams in national life. He functions in the exact opposite way to a politician, looking for mutual understanding, while embracing doubt. If there is a consistence to his inconsistency, it is to suggest that perhaps religion’s role is not to provide easy answers but to pose difficult questions; that complexity and paradox may be worth considering too. “That is hard in a short-term media age.”

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has today announced that the Very Reverend Canon David Richardson, the Archbishop’s Representative to the Holy See and Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome, intends to retire at Easter 2013.

Canon Richardson, who will be 67 next year, will have served for five years as Director of the Centre. He has recently been instrumental in establishing a five-year plan which will enable the Centre to take forward its mission with renewed focus and vigour in preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of the Centre in 2016 and beyond. David is Dean Emeritus of St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, and one of four Provincial Canons of Canterbury. He is married to Margie and they have two adult children.

Read it all.

Governments can, of course, and must, play their part in all this. Governments need to give fiscal incentives to green development. They need to promote programmes that encourage us all to reduce our waste. They need to ”˜green’ our economy, both at home and worldwide. And we, all of us, not least the faith communities, need to collaborate in that and support governments in that vision.

But at root, the question remains the same: what kind of world do we want to hand on? Imagine that you have a child’s or a grandchild’s birthday coming up. You want to give them a present. You want to give them something that will genuinely mean something to them, that will enrich their lives, that will be part of lasting growth and well-being. And that’s what we’re challenged to do here. It’s a challenge that I think will resonate for absolutely everybody across the world. Simply enough: what’s the gift we want to give? The gift of a world that’s more free from pollution, a world whose future is more secure, a world where more people have access to food and clean water and healthcare? Yes. But also a world in which we’re transmitting the wisdom of how to inhabit a world, how to inhabit a limited environment with grace, with freedom, with confidence.

Read it all or, if you choose, watch the video.

In its submission to the Government consultation on same-sex marriage, which closes on June 14, the Church of England states it cannot support the proposal to enable “all couples, regardless of their gender, to have a civil marriage ceremony”.

It adds that the consultation paper wrongly implies that there are two categories of marriage, “civil” and “religious” – “this is to mistake the wedding ceremony for the institution of marriage”. Changing the State’s understanding of marriage will, therefore, change the way marriage is defined for everybody and, despite the government’s assurances to the contrary, will change the nature of marriages solemnized in churches and other places of worship.

Read it all.

To declare a lifelong dedication is to take a huge risk, to embark on a costly venture. But it is also to respond to the promise of a vision that brings joy.

And perhaps that is the challenge that this Jubilee sets before us in nation and Commonwealth. St Paul implies that we should be so overwhelmed by the promise of a shared joy far greater than narrow individual fulfilment, that we find the strength to take the risks and make the sacrifices ”“ even if this seems to reduce our individual hopes of secure enjoyment.

Read it all.

Speaking to the BBC’s Newsnight, Dr Rowan Williams raised concerns about the gap between rich and poor and the lack of cultural cohesion in the UK….

“There have been moments in the last decade and more when, perhaps, we might have been able to take a different line,” he said.

He was referring to the way the British think and feel as a society and told Newsnight’s Stephen Smith that British society had “put up the shutters” and retreated into “corporate paranoia” in the wake of terrorist threats.

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is urging the people of Britain to pop into a church or cathedral to say thanks for the Queen and her Diamond Jubilee.

Speaking on Radio 2’s Pause For Thought… Dr Rowan Williams said he hoped this weekend’s Jubilee celebrations would give people the “chance to get in touch with the background of their lives, the big context, the things that make this the sort of world it is and give us the sort of values we have”.

Dr Williams, who retires at the end of the year, said: “I hope the Jubilee prompts us to see what we can do to get back in touch with the big background picture. Like the monarchy ”” it’s still there, and it still means something, and dropping into a church or a cathedral is a good way of connecting with it, and perhaps saying thanks ”” for the Queen and the Jubilee and for lots more besides.”

Read it all (subscription required).

It seems to me that what her importance has been for most people in this country has been as a sign of stability, a sign of some kind of security. And that wouldn’t have happened had she not been so profoundly committed at every point, so intelligently committed to understanding the society she was in, working with the flow of the changes that have taken place. To have someone who has been a symbol, a sign of stability through all that period is really a rather exceptional gift. Her role in the Commonwealth is not the least important part of that. I think she has reminded us that we in the United Kingdom are part of a worldwide fellowship. That’s not the least of the lessons she has shared with us, and again, the change that she has helped to happen from Empire to Commonwealth while yet retaining that sense of fellowship and family between nations.
Part of the regular rhythm of life as Archbishop is that I see The Queen privately, just one to one, perhaps once or twice a year. I have really valued those meetings because she is always extremely well informed about issues concerning the Church – extremely supportive and full of perception. She’s seen lots of archbishops come and go, she’s seen prime ministers come and go, so she knows something of the pressures of the job. And I’ve always found it really refreshing to be able to talk with her about these questions, to get her perspective – purely personally, I’ve felt very strongly supported there. I’ve felt she’s understood the difficulties when there have been quite trying events and episodes in my own life as Archbishop. She has been unfailingly kind, understanding and supportive, and I value that enormously.

I hadn’t had any contact at all with royalty before coming into this job. I didn’t know what to expect, really. I found in The Queen someone who can be friendly, who can be informal, who can be extremely funny in private (and not everybody appreciates just how funny she can be), who is quite prepared to tease and to be teased, and who, while retaining her dignity always, doesn’t stand on her dignity in a conversation.

Read it all or watch the whole video.

There has already been a lot of discussion about the amendments agreed this week by the House of Bishops to the draft Measure concerning the ordination of women as bishops. Although the senior officers of the Synod (the ‘Group of Six’) have determined by a majority that these amendments do not alter the substance of the proposals embodied in the Measure, much anxiety has been expressed as to their implications, and it may be helpful to set out what the House attempted and intended.

The House fully and wholeheartedly accepts that the draft legislation voted on by the dioceses represents the will of an undoubted and significant majority in the Church of England. They did not intend to make any change in any principle of that legislation or to create any new powers or privileges for anyone. They believed that, if certain clarifications and expansions of the wording were made, the Measure might be carried with more confidence, and, out of that conviction, agreed the new wording, which affects two questions….

Read it all.

We are keenly aware of the great suffering caused by the non-implementation of several key parts of the CPA. The cry of pain continues to be heard from South Kordofan, Blue Nile and Abyei, as well as from those affected by the escalation of conflict in the border region between Sudan and South Sudan. I pray that the UN Security Council Resolution and the AU Roadmap will result in real progress in settling the outstanding issues.

The church’s dedicated efforts in peace-building and advocacy continue to represent a powerful witness to the gospel. We are inspired by the untiring efforts to bring peace in Jonglei. We also stand in special solidarity with the church’s situation in the Republic of Sudan and will continue to press for freedom of religion and worship and the safety of the Christian community.

Read it all.

From here:

For some time now, the Anglican Communion has been exercised over the issue of same-sex relationships. As this copy of ”˜Outreach’ was going to press, Rowan Williams announced his decision to stand down as Archbishop of Canterbury. There have been many column inches written about the pressures that have led to this outcome, including those relating to this issue.

It’s high time that the Christ Church family had a mature conversation about same-sex relationships. We plan to do so at a special event in the Harwood Hall

England’s Catholic jurisdiction for former Anglicans has received a $250,000 donation from Pope Benedict XVI, prompting an expression of thanks from its top cleric.

“I am very grateful to the Holy Father for his generosity and support,” said Monsignor Keith Newton, head of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, in a May 1 statement….

Read it all.

(Close readers of this blog may note that we featured the amazing resource of Michael Sandel’s Harvard Course on Justice in September 2010–KSH).

Should people be paid for donating blood? In the United States, there is a mixed economy of free donation and the sale of blood through commercial blood banks. Predictably, most of the blood that is dealt with on a commercial basis comes from the very poor, including the homeless and the unemployed. The system entails a large-scale redistribution of blood from the poor to the rich.

This is only one of the examples cited by Michael Sandel, the political philosopher and former Reith Lecturer, in his survey of the rapidly growing commercialisation of social transactions, but it is symbolically a pretty powerful one. We hear of international markets in organs for transplant and are, on the whole, queasy about it; but here is a routine instance of life, quite literally, being transferred from the poor to the rich on a recognised legal basis. The force of Sandel’s book is in his insistence that we think hard about why exactly we might see this as wrong; we are urged to move beyond the “yuck factor” and to consider whether there is anything that is intrinsically not capable of being treated as a commodity, and if so why.

Read it all.

From here:

I am at the GAFCON/FCA gathering in Battersea this week. We’ve been asked not to indulge in too much personal blogging, tweeting, etc, so I’ve not posted anything before, but below is an official release of the opening address.

The mood is good — positive and outward looking, and it has been good to meet so many people from Africa in particular.

Yesterday we had a welcome from the Archbishop of Canterbury delivered by the Bishop of Southwark (in whose diocese we are meeting). That felt odd!

If you believe, as most Americans do, that the upper reaches of the church don’t have much to do with the ground floor, the next Archbishop of Canterbury will have mostly trivial interest to you. Perhaps it will be John Sentamu, and the ECUSA is in for the deep-freeze. Perhaps it will be a conciliator or a caretaker. Perhaps it will be someone with an even more lush and vigorous patch of Muppet fur insulating his brows from the slings and arrows of church leadership. Who’s to say? But Easter will come, just as it did this year. There will be babies to baptize, teens to confirm, crappy church coffee to be drunk (maybe good sherry if you’re in the right congregation), and ministry to be done, regardless of who fills Williams’ seat.

But if you believe, as many Americans do, that it is of the utmost importance to speak with one voice on women in ministry, or the place of gays and lesbians in the church””if you believe that without a common creed and ethics and way of reading scripture, there’s no point in calling it a “church”””well then, you’re in for a very interesting six months or so. It’s unlikely that you’ll get a champion of orthodoxy like Benedict, and probably not such a fierce champion of unity-at-all-costs as Williams. You may have to face the same uncomfortable ideas that the rest of us are confronted with: that there is no single voice for Christianity, that Christ’s prayer “that they may all be one” is and always has been a fond wish and ardent desire but never a fact on the ground, that Christianity as a world movement has not produced a standard culture but has shaped and been shaped by many different cultures in many different ways, to the detriment of its coherence. But at this point, who the hell knows? You may find somebody who can bring it all back together, or (more likely), you may find another weak leader committed to togetherness in principle but unable to do much about it in practice. Either way, good luck, and definitely let us know if you find somebody with bigger eyebrows than Rowan Williams. We’ll want to be warned about that right away.

Read it all.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the leader of the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion, recently announced that he would step down by year’s end. A few days later, the Church of England rejected a Williams-backed unity plan for global Anglicanism, a church fractured by issues of gender and sexual identity. The timing of the resignation and the defeat are probably not coincidental. These events signal Anglicans’ institutional failure.

Read it all.

Saying that he hopes that his successor has the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros. Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, will resign at the end of this year and return to academics. He will become the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge where he can meander along the River Cam and take tea at the Orchard Garden in Grantchester far away from the turbulence of the 85-million member Communion he leaves behind. When an archbishop retires at the usual age of 70, no one bats an eyelash. But when he resigns in good health nearly a decade before normal retirement age, people sit up and take notice. It evokes the image of a battle weary pugilist whose “sponger” looks at the condition of his man and tosses his sponge in the air. The fight is over. We might as well declare defeat.

The battle, of course, was his to lose. Anyone with half an eye could see the turbulence that lay ahead for someone assuming the role of leader of the world’s second largest Communion. The same year he took office an openly gay man, Gene Robinson, was consecrated bishop of New Hampshire despite public assurances from Frank Griswold, the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, that he would not participate in the consecration. Griswold went right ahead and did just that. With one part of his Communion going its own way, and thumbing its noses at the rest, while the vast majority were profoundly upset, Williams was forced to choose. Either he would take a self-imposed mediatorial role, and desperately try to keep all parties at the table. Or he would take sides, and do what he could to bring the truculent back in line.

He chose the former, with the result that no one was satisfied. Privately he held to a liberal position on sexuality, as enunciated in his well-known, though highly inscrutable, paper entitled The Body’s Grace. Publicly, he towed the line that was spelled out by Lambeth Resolution 1:10, which stated as the official position of the Communion that “homosexuality was imcompatible with Scripture.”

Read it all.