Simon Butler ViaMedia.News The Anti-Testimony (on reading the House of Bishops’ Report)
Giles Fraser The Guardian The church’s strategy on protecting the child is designed to protect itself
Ysenda Maxtone Graham The Spectator The slow, strange race to be the next Bishop of London
Erin Clark a funny thing happened on the way to decorum the duchess be with you
Jem Bloomfield quiteirregular Vada the Omi: On the Polari Evensong
Tim Thorlby Church Times Open up the doors and let the people come in
Emma Percy WATCH What we might learn from the business world about equality and diversity
Could girls also be “caned” and were they? All pretty horrifying to this non-Brit, especially that it lasted (legally) into the 1990s ……. and Thank you to Giles Fraser, as ever;
Sara, thanks for raising that question – when the Bishops’ report was issued the other week, I automatically read it as being by a group of men (I wonder what the women in the House and College made of it all?)about what men do with their genitalia. Male neurosis indeed.
Dr Chartres has been a fine bishop, but the much lauded ‘growth’ experienced in London has been less impressive when set against the rapid general growth in the population, by more than two million. Let’s say that he helped create conditions where numbers were stabilised and advanced slightly, and that this moderated the relative decline. I usually have a strong aversion to speculation about senior appointments. However, I understand why there has to be a ‘pool’ of eligible candidates (as described by Ysenda Maxtone Graham). I also understand why some clergy, having succumbed to ambition, should desire to be in… Read more »
Yes, Erin Clark. I agree. Mostly. Unfortunately, it’s not only men, although very much predominantly, who ‘benefit’ from seeing God as male. A number of women like it that way too. We can speculate on the reasons but I’ve attended a church where this is so. I have no personal problem with the language of the Bible. I can transcend the maleness of the language to see the love. I pray.
I can’t see how the CNC is the “least worst” way to select bishops. If you wanted to design the worst system for raising people to the purple, it’d be in the running. The fix is in. It allows a patrician elite to pack the English church with pliant company men in their own image (and now, equally pliant women: truly, equal in all things). All other British provinces elect their bishops, keep patronage out of it, and allow partisanship to at least be subject to a majority’s consent. Why’s England special? Imagine if English dioceses could elect their bishops,… Read more »
“One thing seems clear to me: the CNC keeps producing broadly the same type of bishop. The current vogue is for administrators”
The best opportunity the current CNC has to make a nomination ‘out of vogue’ concerns the vacant See of Sodor and Man, the last CNC to be considered by the 2012-2017 CNC. But will they?