Expenses scandal helped shatter faith in ‘public service’ – Rowan Williams; OBE for Street Pastors founder; Yorkminster nave transformed into field of grass; Awards for church chair designs; Cowboys and swimmers among choristers touring UK; C of E “fit only for bigots and hypocrites”?
Expenses scandal helped shatter faith in ‘public service’ – Rowan Williams
Telegraph – Corruption, including the MPs’ expenses scandal, has so tarnished faith in politicians’ motives that few people even believe they are interested in “public service” any more, the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned.
Dr Rowan Williams said there was “deep wariness” towards those in power leading most people now to assume that politicians are acting only for their own ends.
He also argued that democracy alone would not be enough to protect people’s freedoms, adding that many “appalling tyrannies” had been built on electoral support.
And he warned of the dangers of “mass opinion” which he said sometimes tended to create “scapegoats” among minority groups and unfairly assume that all asylum seekers or terror suspects are guilty
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/9335001/Expenses-scandal-helped-shatter-faith-in-public-service-Rowan-Williams.html
OBE for Street Pastors founder
Les Isaac has received an OBE in the Queens Birthday Honours for his work with Street Pastors
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/obe.for.street.pastors.founder/30086.htm
Yorkminster nave transformed into field of grass
Earlier this month, a living grass carpet was laid out in Yorkminster for a fund-raising event. The Daily Mail explains. Report, photos and video at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2155495/Let-mow-Striking-scene-York-Minster-carpeted-16-000-square-feet-turf-ahead-fundraising-dinner.html
Awards for church chair designs
The Bishop of London last week presented awards to designers for their stylish and innovative church chair designs
www.christiantoday.com/article/3/awards.for.church.chair.designs/30079.htm
Cowboys and swimmers among choristers touring UK
Rodeo cowboys opera soloists and long distance swimmers are just some of the members of a choir from Houston touring the UK
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/cowboys.and.swimmers.among.choristers.touring.uk/30080.htm
C of E “fit only for bigots and hypocrites”?
Nick Cohen of the Guardian is not so keen on the Church of England, and neither are the headline writers who called this piece “A church fit only for bigots and hypocrites.” It includes this bit:
The African bishops played on Williams’s white man’s guilt. Decent treatment for homosexuals was an imperialist assertion of western values, they implied. Williams folded and forced John, who was once his friend, to stand down. He admitted that among his motives was his desire to appease the “resentment toward the United States and England in some former colonial areas”.
The fault of anti-imperialist politics in either its left or liberal forms is its inability to see distinctions among the formerly colonised. Williams’s retreat has mollified the Ugandan Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi, who says: “Homosexuality is evil, abnormal and unnatural as per the Bible.” Williams has kept him on board. Held the Anglican communion together.
But how can Anglicans oppose the Ugandan government’s attempts to mandate death sentences or life sentences for homosexuals? Can Anglicans expect anyone to believe them when they say there is no connection between theological justifications for homophobia and the terror the Ugandan state and the Ugandan Anglican church wish to direct against homosexuals?
The language of “communion” and “engagement” sounds kind and woozy. There is nothing kind about the prison cells that await gay men in Kampala – nor grace behind their bars.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/17/nick-cohen-rowan-williams-hypocrisy?INTCMP=SRCH