Canon Alison Burnett-Cowan, Directory of Unity, Faith, and Order of the Anglican Communion Office defends the Covenant, arguing that we should read it before criticizing it.

Responses: from the Mad Priest:

From the Episcopal Cafe: “It seems to this writer that people have read it very carefully and are not so willing to gloss over the words as easily as the ACO.”

And from Tobias Haller:

What sense, after all, does it make to turn an ad hoc impairment in communion into something that looks very much like an institutional severance in communion? Since participation in the Instruments is at least in part definitive for membership and participation in the Anglican Commuion, and as the Covenant declares as well, the means by which the members “are enabled to be conformed together to the mind of Christ” (3.1.2), anything remotely resembling permanent suspension by or from those Instruments as a “relational consequence” seems to indicate a serious and debilitating breach in the Anglican Communion and the body of Christ. And the Covenant provides a mechanism to promote it, and little in the way of helping to prevent it. It is the schema for an autoimmune disease in the Body of Christ.

This is a Bad Idea. Please, England, put it down.

And from the No Anglican Covenant blog: A point by point response to some of the more tendentious assertions