Cliff is a Living Doll

In a shock non-announcement affecting thousands of silly adolescent evangelical girls, Cliff Richard today has declared that he is "no longer one of them."

Cliff has ditched several key identifiers of being an evangelical.

Instead of all those beautiful women he would never marry, like actor Lord Olivier Neutron Bomb and Sarah Barker, a tennis player, Cliff now prefers to hang out with his organiser, the ex-Catholic priest John McElynn.

Cliff with Lord Olivier

More disappointing for all those silly girls, many now in their seventies, is Chris's views on recognising gay relationships, which is bound to mean his records are no longer played in censored Christian bookshops, as well as even on BBC Radio 2 (where in the 1980s he had been a firm favourite, before Radio 2 started playing heavy metal). Chris writes in My Life, My Way:

Same-sex marriages are perhaps a modern example of how things have changed. I think the Church must come round and see people as they are now. Gone are the days when we assumed loving relationships would be solely between men and women.

In the end, I believe, people are going to be judged for what they are. It seems to me that commitment is the issue, and if anyone comes to me and says, 'This is my partner - we are committed to each other', then I don't care what their sexuality is. I'm not going to judge - I'll leave that to God.

After decades of spouting inane drivel purporting to be representative of Christianity, Cliff has suddenly had a breakout of sheer sense, following on his gaining a shot of reality from his companionship. He also put it:

People often make the mistake of thinking that only marriage equals happiness. I may suddenly meet someone and feel differently, but right now I am not sure marriage would enhance my happiness.

Lord Olivier Neutron Bomb said she was more concerned that she wasn't receiving any more royalties after the stopping of the endless repeats of The World at War on UK TV History.

Chris himself is currently making lots of new friends, and losing those who used him for far too long. In this now joins the Rev. Steve Chalke, who also shed one of those evangelical group identifiers, when he ditched penal substitution in his book The Lost Message of Jesus.

Intellectual Roots of Liberalism

The title isn't mine, but fine - my article appeared in the Daily Episcopalian (related to the In Depth Group where I present monthly discussion material). Some interesting comments, but of course I am saying that Barth and Bonhoeffer are not liberal, nor is even Tillich or Bultmann in the same way the nineteenth century people were. Barth took from Ritschl, but all of the twentieth century theologians created a special and closed off space for Christology: Ritschl only started with Christology but could not maintain it. I'm sure too those liberal elements go well back, the difference is that these nineteenth and twentieth century theologians were facing a secularising world, and the Church-universal culture that earlier theologians could rely upon (easier to uphold a widespread Incarnation) was not available to Ernst Troeltsch, who could only treat such as a disappearing history. He was also right about another, Enlightenment and after, individualist approach to faith that was neither Church nor sect.

Palin Attacks Russia

In a barnstorming speech to Republican fanatics, Sarah "Mike" Palin paraded her normal, American, dysfunctional family to show that one daughter at least takes after mother and a shy youth was put in the stocks - he will be marrying her, she said, before he ran away and hid from the crowd.

Gun handling Sarah slammed into her opponent, rarely naming him, and said she would easily overcome the old duffer. She said he was that horrible overtly apparent moderate guy who would nevertheless raise money to spend on public services. He was, she said, "A dead parrot, a Norwegian blue." She, meanwhile, looked forward to shooting tigers with ex-President Putin, before they turned their guns on each other. She herself looked forward to making George Bush the first American Prime Minister.

She said it was about time they drilled for oil on the White House lawn, and really get the building looking black. She was ambitious to get those troops into Georgia, once they were released from Atlanta, and get those bunkers in Alaska into good use. She told of her own son who could well be facing death in I Rack, or Afghanistan, or indeed the whole world when she is finished with "all those evil forces out there to get us".

"That will sort out global warming," she said to her audience going nuts, "I'm looking forward to my own heated swimming pool we used to call the Arctic Ocean."

She said she would start funding a gas pipeline straight away, to come direct from two main orifices of her own body. And when she herself met her maker, after his 6000 year experiment to make what she could destroy, she would donate herself to the Creationist Museum for apparent scientific research, on how such a person could be created on General God's orders.

At this point officials were handing out plastic bags to delegates, as many started wetting themselves in delirium. They had found, from nowhere, a major historical figure, a new President Reagan, but this time one who likes to sink her teeth into men's legs. Apparently this is one of the methods that passes for sex education in Alaska.

Republicans went out polling immediately after her speech, and on Palin's instructions they can only ask the God-given heads of households - men. As for how their wives will vote, each man said, "Alaska." Asked by a reporter how she could explain women ruling over men in God's created order, that is herself in the top job, Palin bit his head off and held it high, the Senators in the crowd apparently raising their swords and shouting "Hail Caesar, Hail Caesar," or something similar.

Biographical note: Sarah Palin has been unknown all her life, apparently starting out as a comedian and ending up as one too.

Liberals and Wales

I'm asked to consider what would be the effect of Jeffrey John becoming Bishop of Bangor on liberals and indeed the middle roaders of Anglicanism. Would the liberals finally get it together?

The first effect would be to take some pressure off the United States and Canada, in that people there could point elsewhere that evidently a similar inclusive approach is happening, that someone partnered and who teaches that such partnered people can be blessed (and indeed be consecrated) is in the British Isles as well as the United States. Those who may be called liberal in North America may well come to be less defensive.

I have written of the diverse and many grouped nature of the Christian and religious humanist liberals. They exist on the margins of churches, in them and just outside of them, gathering in various groups and coming under different umbrellas, many of them self-constructed.

Much of this is not simply about social exclusion in the churches. Sometimes I look at liberal leaning Anglicans and apply a Unitarian test. Would that person be happy in the Unitarian setting, allowing for adjustments and a little de-formation and re-formation. If not, would they be happy as say Liberal Catholics, with less stress on magic and the esoteric and other stranger tendencies if such a group was available? Would they be Quakers and wish to say nothing. Are they sort of in between faiths... None of these will be galvanised by an openly gay and pro-gay talented man becoming a bishop. Some would scrap bishops, after all, or think they should be regarded more as functionaries.

All liberals would agree with inclusion, and that this obsession with the sexual act is a nonsense, and that what matters is people being open, honest and faithful with one another in their many relationships. Most liberals are marginal for more clearly ideological reasons: it is what they cannot and what they do believe. Some of these liberals who are active in churches go public, and some keep quiet until they meet someone who gives the funny handshake and is identified as one of them. I don't give funny handshakes: I wear a discrete badge that is easily readable at talking distance.

Some people who are in favour of inclusion are not even liberal, not really. They are dealers in the tradition (usually Anglo-Catholic), in its inheritance and spirituality and they remain wedded to that spirituality still forming them. Clearly they can work with the tradition in a critical fashion, but it is always the tradition as a whole. They are not liberal postmodernists or subjectivists, they are at best (or worst) conserving postmodernists and even then many probably have points of objectivity that means they are not postmodern. They might feel much more comfortable with the full inclusivity of gay and lesbian people and their relationships, but it will not alter their allegiances or practices.

So there is a kind of absence of effect here. One is the liberal ideological decision making for each individual that decides whether someone is in or out of the Church scene, on grounds of belief and the boundaries that are perceived to exist. The other type of people are those who are simply in, wrapped up in their practice.

Also unaffected is the middler attender, who has done so all their life, who turns up and is always local, and who carries on. Only when such people cannot put things they do not like at arms length do they start to protest. The English especially like their churches to be at arm's length, which is why many who might attend do not, and some who do have a lifetime of quiet devotion.

So who is affected? It is probably the person in the lesbian, gay and bisexual group itself, who are so fed up with their enforced marginalisation, that they in the end give up. They are always fighting and campaigning and a kind of exhaustion sets in, or if they don't campaign they take on board the frustration of inclusion. Such people would perhaps end up (maybe reluctantly) in the Metropolitan Community Church, which to all intents is orthodox but is gay inclusive. But these folks are themselves not necessarily liberal, it is just that institutional circumstance forces them into the liberal camp and its inclusive, open base. Many would leave that camp once the gay issue is settled.

Far more significant will be female bishops. This will bring in the boundaries in of the Church, as extreme Anglo-Catholics go elsewhere or fall into complete marginality (waiting for pensions, nowhere else to go, etc.) and one more reason is created for evangelicals to divide. But in a tighter Church, where liberals are not under the pressure they are now, they will themselves divide into moderates and radicals, and so the effect of success in this area is more of a negative ideological divide. Many radicals are frustrated with the do-nothing liberals and their forever compromises, and when liberals demand compromise in a narrower Church that includes accepted liberals, open evangelicals and inclusive Catholics, the radicals may not wish to tow the line but see an opportunity to press for more reform.

So little impact among liberals would come from openly gay men being bishops. However, if a lesbian with a partner were to be a bishop, the impact would already have been made.

Economic Non-Measures

We've had the Chancellor say here comes the worst economic situation for 60 years, and a series of small measures to try to rescue the housing market. The basis of this is the housing market is seen as a British economy engine of growth.

If it is, then this is surely wrong-headed. No matter how often you go to the toilet, if you keep eating you get fat, and fat has to go somewhere. In the British economy, this fat or credit it goes into housing because of the large scale private housing market and a shortage of accommodation.

Credit is money that we have and ought not to have. If it is not inflated out, then it is going to store up in some unusual places. The problem is that it will have to be lost, and there will be winners and losers.

The person who buys an expensive house on borrowed money and then pays towards the debt even after the asset value has collapsed is, in essence, taking on the debt that was in the house price during the boom time. The solution to this is not to pump up the house market again, but to say sorry but the boom was a mirage. Gordon Brown was yet another Chancellor who did rule over boom and bust, despite his claims otherwise at the time of rising values.

We know this because house prices went well outside the reach of buyers and their salaries, and schemes then to help people get more credit just banged up the prices even higher. In the end, that had to fail, and it is doing now.

The trend is upwards, and will be because the population is growing, households are smaller and housing falls into disrepair and the rate of restoration and building has to cover growth.

Inflated house prices are, in effect, a form of inflation, stored up and hidden, as a brought forward wealth effect to be discharged later, and therefore inflated house prices are to be avoided as much as inflation. The Chancellor's measures now are pathetic: he may as well order the Bank of England to print money and let inflation take over. But the Bank of England is independent.

House prices have gone through boom and bust: something like this graph shows the trend (as on BBC: Newsnight) over 30 years or so from 1975. The key policy should be to smooth out the actual to the trend, and flatten the trend through enhanced supply. If there is symmetry into the future, there will be a prolonged slump - but my point is, painful as it may be, there ought to be such a slump for significant readjustment. Housing relates to demand as well as supply: people have to afford housing over a working life or housing is not purchased.

But here is the problem: our so called strong economy is post-industrial. Its added value, in financial services and information, and services in general, dance on the head of a pin. Chunks can vanish instantly, and invisibly, whereas people could see the closure of a factory. Such an economy can start up again quickly too, but there is something of the mirage about an economy financed on make-believe.

Real growth can be built while you have a wealth effect being deposited into property, just as you can get real growth from an inflationary period. But at some point it has to stop, and a reversal involves real, if potentially temporary, decline.

The pound is tumbling at present. Oil prices did not rise on the European continent as they did here. A falling pound simply means the British economy is worth less. We pay more for imports and sell at a reduced price. Plus let's not believe that rising oil and other commodity prices fuel inflation. They don't: their prices rise, money diverts to them, and other prices have to fall. If other prices don't fall, they don't sell - and indeed, what does happen is they go out of business. Forced to lower prices and yet facing higher fuel bills, firms go bust.

What is the answer? First of all, join the Euro. It will cost (because the pound is weak) but it will have an instant stabilising payback. That was another missed Blair initiative, partly thanks to Gordon Brown's obstinacy. So lock in to the European market. Secondly build back mass public housing and accommodation. Plus, see the value of broad based public services, as people are already getting poorer, and many will rely on public provision. Allow the economy to recover gently, and when it builds in the future, this time don't have the debt of Private Finance Initiatives and lack of taxes, and other pay later schemes to cook the Treasury books, but actually pay off public debt. Have a house price policy to reduce wealth effects: they are a mirage and they end in tears: they give wealth to the wealthy and remove wealth from the poorer.

Start of In Depth Theology Sessions

I'm very pleased with how the In Depth Theology session went Tuesday evening. The best comment came from one participant: "It's not exactly Sunday School!" I replied that that is the subtitle: it is not Sunday school.

First of all it was a case of introducing what I'd been doing, and then what the structure of now 25 sessions would be, with seven written and the eighth on the way. The folks would engage with this however they liked: it could be as a course where they both do the course and comment on it. Or we could just treat it like a conversation prompter. The latter is what happened, and in any case this first session had much more in the way of introductory elements.

I took along two large handled baskets of theology books, and went through these that had been background for me, as well as two core books that had helped produce summaries of theologians.

I was pleased that my ad-libbing made what I had written easier to understand; because of the person doing the printing was elsewhere the number of copies were very few, but the chap who'd read everything previously made this comment.

Ethics isn't one of my main interests as a subject, but I took it as going from the me, or the I, as self-conscious, language speaking and library recording biological units, aware of our own death, going from that to recognising similar in the other and developing an ethical stance. Then the other means the collective, and from the collective to institutions for us that then come under ethical criticism. But there is no agreement on ethics, there are clashes of ethical values. Theology comes rushing in (and in different religions and traditions) as a resource for ethics, and there are many homes or bases for theologies - and even Jurgen Habermas who has supposed that rationality to truth is available to the disinterested conversation, the last of the Enlightenment thinkers, has in later life seen the value of tradition as a resource. There are many traditions.

One of the conversations we had was as thinking, collective beings - as products of emergent evolution - was how Richard Dawkins turns against evolution for his ethics. Some, after all, I said, took Darwinianism and came up with eugenics, to kill the rubbish. Such is an ethical stance! In coming up with also expressions of wonder and awe, and non-precise language like art and music, does convergent music mean we who are religious build a God from such traditions and culture or are we meeting our maker. I was trying very much not to put my own view on this, but the room seemed to be of a general view that we make the God from our own cultural and traditional development (it happens to be my view).

We also referred to the Golden Rule throughout religions, and what is useful ethically in the Ten Commandments. For example, as for an identifiable local who polishes his rarely used large car, what ethical damage does that graven image do? Very little, probably. Some religions, or parts of religions, are full of graven images - Anglo-Catholcism being one. Even Islam has pictures of Muhammad on his Night Journey. We talked about the ethical drive in Buddhism and in Islam: and someone said about no images of Buddha for quite a long time in Buddhism.

We spoke about Christian "flat earthers" and a good point was that there are a number of flat earth theologies about now - in that, what was a response against nineteenth century liberalism is today being seen as liberal by all sorts of present day reactions within Christianity.

My point was that we'll see how the ninteenth century theologians - back to Schleiermacher (earlier) but then Ritschl, Harnack and Troeltsch tried to access theology through the newly clarified academic subject areas and found problems (of losing Christian uniqueness). Too hooked to optimism and social progress, the effect of the First World War, the Depression and Nazism was a set of modern theologians and all of them finding a special reserved space for Christology. But this method (with God belief) also means that history and science and social science has no interest in what theology thinks, whereas theology is interested in history, social science and science. It is a one way street, and how to do theology in such a secular world.

I said the idea that clergy in training only look at these theologians and that there is a gap between this training and most people in the pews, and in any case in position many clergy revert away from such learning, is something we can reject and thus break into what theology is about.

So we have ethics and defining theology (we did some theology defining before we got to the resource paper), then the nineteenth century, then the theologians that have set the scene, then some Anglican controversies and reactions, and then a general survey of theologians. For example, I mentioned in passing David Tracy, supposedly Roman Catholic theologian, who has a theology of the impact of the classics, like the Bible Qur'an and Bhagavad Gita, and the compelling impact the classices have on us, and who values the place of conversation... What makes him Roman Catholic? It is, I suggested, that unlike Karl Barth or Radical Orthodoxy or Yale postliberalism there remains an engagement with the world and not a withdrawal from it, either into a postmodern bubble or revelation. I'd shown some of these books and quickly mentioned them, such as Radical Orthodoxy and its move to its base at Nottingham.

England is really a bywater in theology. Asked why Germans and Americans should be so dominant, someone gave a better answer than me. It's not just the original seat of the Reformation (in Germany) but the princes of the many diverse German states each wanted a university and theology was an important long-standing subject in each. The answer for the US is in its well resourced educational institutions.

It is the first time I have done some planned and sustained presentation for some time, with more to come (how much more - well until people get bored, I said, and I can stop, but some said two years in the life of In Depth is quite short! It has been running for 15 years).

So I shall carry on, with a number in the bank. However, reading and mainly ad-libbing, I did say how the first three paragraphs in particular of the ethics and theology resource paper were terrible (they thought not, but then I had my text and my mouth said differently) and I will just have to clean this up. Half the people there (one new, could have been another, should be more when back from holidays) seemed not to be on the Internet, which makes resourcing difficult unless I spend loads of my own money on ink - we shall make sure papers are delivered in advance next time.

So maybe we will have a run through of the structure: trouble is, I don't know what I'll be doing in two years and this all may be a passing phase in my life. I just don't know.

I put it that I have written this to try and let each position speak for itself, not impose myself. Well why not, one asked, as though I should. Well I was happy to say that I think Ernst Troeltsch was about right, and all rounder, but exposing the difficulties of Christianity into the new situation from one where it was culturally more anchored. I was pleased to lend two books out, one by Dennis Nineham as I'd mentioned his scepticism about history and Jesus, and one on Theology and Anthropology (very close to my position too - a fantastic book of overlaps and insights) by Douglas Davies.

Here is the list as it now exists (session 8 has been changed):

1. Ethics and Doing Theology Today
2. Mainly Nineteenth Century Theological Liberalism (Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Harnack, Troeltsch)
3. What Became Narrative Theology: Karl Barth (1886-1968)
4. Towards God and Secular Theology: Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)
5. Theological Correlation: Paul Johannes Oskar Tillich (1886-1965)
6. Demythologising and Keeping a Distinctive Christianity: Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976)
7. Pragmatism and the Supreme Sacrificial Ethic of Jesus: Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)
8. The Place of Theology and Other Disciplines
9. Anglican Controversy: Essays and Reviews
10. 1938 Church of England Doctrine Commission
11. Honest to God and Debate - Metaphors and Mixing Bultmann, Tillich and Bonhoeffer
12. The Myth of God Incarnate - Meanings of Myth
13. Theology of David Jenkins - using Barth and Bonhoeffer
14. Traditionalisms from the past (eg Thomist theology, Anselm, Puritans, etc.)
15. Victorian Oxford Movement and Evangelicalism
16. Evangelical reactions - National Evangelical Anglican Congress (NEAC) 1967 and after; the rise of fundamentalism
17. Comprehensive: Hans Kung
18. After the Shoah and a Theology of Suffering: Jurgen Moltmann
19. Theologies of Liberation with Politics and Radical Education
20. Eco-Feminist theology: Sallie McFague and Rosemary Radford Ruether
21. Classics and Conversation: David Tracy
22. Faiths: John Hick and Exclusivists, Inclusivists, Pluralists and Universalists
23. Real Absence and Back to Transcendence: Raw, Cold Theology and the Poet
24. Postmodern Theology: Nihilist Textualism and Radical Orthodoxy
25. Theological Issues for the Future

Home Made Speculation

I have been asked to speculate on what will happen regarding Anglican politics should Jeffrey John become Bishop of Bangor.

The first important point, as stated by Peter Ould, is that there will be much hedging about his appointment, in that he has declared previously that Jeffrey John is in a celibate civil partnership. Thus a contrast will be made between him and Gene Robinson. Ould says it is sexual practice that debars a gay man from episcopal office, and it cannot be a civil partnership that debars a man because of the Church's own position on civil partnerships when it comes to pensions. If the criticism is based on his teachings, Ould says, then it is no difference from Rowan Williams's The Body's Grace, or indeed what he wrote to Deborah Pitt years ago. Ould concludes, from his "post-gay" perspective:

The best card to play is a combination of the same-sex union ban and the teaching of Dr John on sexual morality, but such an objection has huge implications for the Church of England (as regards its stance on Civil Partnerships).

This really won't do, nor does the positioning of the goalposts. They had been moved by Rowan Williams, when he sacrificed his friend, as he asks other bishops to sacrifice gays and lesbians in order to have a more coherent Anglican Communion. Rumourland has it that the now Fulcrum people offered Rowan Williams a bargain that Jeffrey John could be a Dean without trouble, but not a bishop, which if so was another one of those bargains that comes back to haunt.

The first thing that Jeffrey John as Bishop of Bangor does is make Rowan Williams's position more untenable in the eyes of many (that is to say, for some it is somewhat untenable now, that he argues and indeed builds a position on the basis of views he does not personally hold). One can argue - I would - that his open private view reduces any duplicity. But this time matters start to look somewhat twisting, in that the man he in effect forced to step down takes up a position in a Church where Rowan Williams used to be the chief. The answer could well be that at that time, and in that province, Rowan Williams may well have also agreed with his consecration. If that is the answer, then it is somewhat against his bishop-is-different response to Deborah Pitt (and to that hapless reporter in the African airport - "I am an Archbishop and this is what I teach") that he may well have employed then. If this was the view, then it says that England is more important than Wales, that by necessity England cannot be as progressive as can Wales. If this was the argument, then of course TEC and ACC also can be progressive. In the end Rowan Williams would have to push to a further extreme his view that he holds certain private views but neither in Wales nor in England would he act in this way.

Then that raises the whole business of autonomy. He cannot quite say, well I would not have done it but Wales is under new management and Wales remains autonomous. Rowan Williams's position now is that provinces of the Anglican Communion ought to be more interdependent.

It comes to something, of course, if the next door Church, once of the Church of England, doesn't agree with this supposed Mother Church (supposed by Rowan Williams).

Presumably the position would be of an interfering Anglican Communion, that is to say it would put its new up and coming Pastoral Forum into the space of Wales to take into its ship holding bay congregations and even dioceses of Wales. How bizarre that would be, as requests come forward. Although such would be Communion level, there would be a more than a hint of England interfering in Wales and the whole issue there of establishment and not being in the establishment. The Church in Wales for deep religious-cultural reasons has to be disestablished and hints of going in the other direction would not do. Rowan Williams as Chair of such a Pastoral Forum would be in an untenable position, it would be a clash of interests as Primate of All England, and it would look very colonial.

On which point it is back to GAFCON again. Almost certainly they will not go with the "combination" of Peter Ould. They will just treat it as a progressive Archbishop of Wales and treating Wales as The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada are treated. Indeed it would be the first way in for setting up a new Province.

Just as the GAFCON Province across the Atlantic is for North America (after all, it's not that big), this one would presumably be for the British Isles. The legal complications of priests and congregations in England joining the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans and ignoring their own diocesan bishop are many to the point of impossibility (it is a case of leaving) so FCA people in England are going to have to play their sympathies and obligations fast and loose. Wales, Scotland and Ireland may well be different. All the GAFCON Primates Council has to do is create a few bishops and attach members to them. Existing English bishops would again be hugely complicated legally, but there might be a few from elsewhere: more than likely GAFCON will make some more.

This also will join up with the whole isse of Episcopal headship. The Church of England General Synod, in part because of GAFCON, refused to have a diocese or two extra for those who wanted male only bishops. No doubt in the shaky alliance between GAFCON evangelicals and traditionalist Anglo-Catholics, another function of a GAFCON Province of the British Isles would be a place to put traditionalist Catholics. But again, they would be forced to leave the Church of England completely, without any sense that they can steal the property. Many of them would just linger on in the back alleys of the Church of England. How much GAFCON can create this function depends on how it manages its own contradictions, e.g. upholding the Thirty-nine Articles in a more absolutist manner than the Church of England does and indeed the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (I've noticed how some of Old and even Liberal Catholic sympathy have to go back to 1549).

So the clearest outcome must surely be from the breakaway Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans and its expected declarations of heterodoxy for some Canterbury connected provinces around the world. From a Communion point of view there would be acute sensitivities of any Pastoral Forum coming into action in Wales. It follows that the Communion then would be hampered, even its drift to centralisation (via Rowan Williams's personal outlook and public policy) would be checked. Rowan Williams's own position would be like someone tied in knots by a rope that keeps going around him.

Yet, and this is the other side of it, Anglicanism would find its fluidity again. Provinces would indeed be autonomous and some would innovate while others would not. They would, as they say, apply the gospel into particular cultural situations, what Andrew Linzey has argued is the necessity of a theology of the Holy Spirit within a responsive Anglicanism. If Jeffrey John is the new Bishop of Bangor (assuming he is the best candidate) then he may well be a means at last to free up Western Anglicanism at least, whilst allowing those in the Global South to go at their own pace. No doubt there will be many bilateral relationships and severing of relationships, but that follows, just as it does with the Orthodox Church. If we go back to the Covenant of Fate and Covenant of Faith as lectured on by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks at the Lambeth Conference, we know that the Covenant of Faith proposed is either to be too restrictive or pointless, but that a Covenant of Fate (for serving the world) may well become the focus of a flexible, diverse, Anglicanism in all sorts of agreements made between provinces around the world. There is nothing to stop people of difference talking, as they did at Lambeth 2008.

Gosh, all this speculation - and all without Ruth Gledhill opening her mail (as she does not when away). One wonders what her mailbox contains about this matter or closely related - she having been on holiday for August.

Oh she is back and not a bad report at all, quite detailed on procedure and responses.