Thinking Anglicans

columns of opinion

Christopher Howse writes in the Telegraph about Gays, marriage and Rowan Williams.

Background: Rowan Williams remarks at launch of National Marriage Week. Andrew Brown’s observations on this.

Stephen Plant writes in The Times about Charles Wesley’s hymns: Churches must ask why the English Hymnal is out of tune.

Martyn Percy writes in the Guardian’s Face to Faith column that Anglican dioceses should be more expressive of their catholic identity.

…Bishops have a vital role here in presiding over diversity while maintaining unity. This is why the key to some of the current divisive Anglican dilemmas may lie in dioceses and provinces becoming more expressive of their catholic identity, and celebrating their coherence amid their diversity. A diocese is a part of a larger, organic whole – a branch of the vine. Therefore, exercising its freedom and expressing its particularity is less important than maintaining its connectedness. Naturally, such restraint need not impose limits on diversity. It merely asks that the consequences of exercising one’s freedom be more fully weighed.

As the Anglican primates meet next week in Tanzania, there will be much to contemplate. How to hold together amid tense, even bitter diversity. How to be one, yet many. How to be faithfully catholic, yet authentically local. In all of this, an ethic of shared restraint – borne out of a deep catholicity – may have much to offer the Anglican communion. Without this, Anglicans risk being painfully lost in the issues that beset the church – unable to see the wood for the trees. Or perhaps, as Jesus might have said, unable to see the vine for the branches.

In the Tablet Tina Beattie asks Has liberation theology had its day?

In the Church Times Giles Fraser explains: This is what is wrong with rights.

Earlier in the week, Andrew Brown wrote on Comment is free about Shuttered windows to the soul.

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seeker
seeker
17 years ago

‘Opinions’ may be informed by facts… & humour !

Do listen to Out on Air on bbc radio 4 at 8pm tonight –from Mrs. Dale to Sandy & Julian -apparently !

Soundeth good !

Andrew Brown
17 years ago

Thanks for that. I hadn’t noticed they had used that piece on CiF!

Cheryl Clough
17 years ago

I applauded Rowan’s acknowledgment of the “…”prosaic heroism” of earlier generations of married couples…” when I read it in the Telegraph earlier this week. My heart was saddened that for many marriage is still reduced to the tenets of baby conceiving and rearing. This overly simplistic model of marriage has many things to condemn it. At one level, it is misogynistic, men marry those filthy women so you can use their wombs to create children for the glory of God (aka soldiers in our next war). Women, have children, or you have no worth – we don’t love you for… Read more »

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