Tag Archives: Archbishop of Canterbury

More on the Trinity Institute

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Rowan Williams wrote a brief essay for this week’s Newsweek that summarizes much of what he said last week at the Trinity Institute. The essay is available online. In it, he points out pervasive the use of economics to understand relationships (customer, consumer, for example, even in the church), and how any perspective that narrows the range for understanding human being to a single factor diminishes humanity. He concludes:

Our job as human beings is to imagine ourselves—using all the raw materials that science, psychoanalysis, and economics provide us—in the hope that the images we discover and shape will have resonance and harmony with the rhythms of what Christians, and others, call the will and purpose of Almighty God.

He consistently stressed during the institute the importance of both a full account of human being and developing ways to nourish fuller human being. If that truly is the goal, not just of political institutions, but of churches as well, then one might think finding ways of nourishing people who find fuller human being in same-sex relationships, and nourishing those life-giving relationships, ought to be a priority as well. Of course, he argued just that in essays written long before he became Archbishop of Canterbury.

Trinity Institute: Building an Ethical Economy

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This year’s Trinity Institute is taking place today and tomorrow. The topic is Building an Ethical Economy. I was invited by Luther Memorial Church to participate as one of the theological reflection group leaders. To be honest, I was somewhat hesitant, because my background and interest in economics is quite limited. I only took one class in college, and I must of spent much of it sleeping (it met at 2:00 in the afternoon, nap time). I certainly haven’t thought much or read much about the topic in the intervening years, either.

Besides that, Rowan Williams was on the agenda. He’s a brilliant thinker, but a turgid writer. I’d heard him speak more than ten years ago and was very impressed, but I’ve always had trouble understanding his prose, and my perception of him is shaped in part by his work as Archbishop of Canterbury. So I wasn’t expecting a great deal.

Today was great. Williams was brilliant and comprehensible. He pointed out that economics was only one way in which human beings relate to one another and that to reduce everything to economics or the marketplace is false. Money is only a symbol, as language is a symbol. Most importantly, he stressed that the questions we should be asking are about are ultimate end and purpose: human well-being, and that our focus should not be only on the individual but on our shared life, as communities, and as a world community.

He ended by saying that “what makes humanity human is sheer gift, sheer love;” that is to say, God created us in and from love. Love requires relationship and community; that we are “helpless alone, gifted in relationship.”

In the panel discussion that followed his talk and Kathryn Tanner’s, tomorrow’s speaker, Partha Dasgupta said some very insightful and provocative things. I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say tomorrow.

It was fun to sit around in a room and talk about these questions with others. We had an intelligent and provocative conversation.

There’s much more info about the Trinity Institute at its website. Transcripts and webcasts should be available soon.

More on the Archbishop of Canterbury

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There have been a number of blog entries concerning what seems to be a double-standard from the ABC. He spoke out immediately to criticize the election of the Rev’d Canon Glasspool as Suffragan Bishop of LA, but continues his silence on Uganda. Fr. Jake points out the timing here.

Ruth Gledhill observed that the Archbishop is in a very difficult spot because of these two events.

Others have contrasted Williams’ statements before becoming ABC with his current stance. Among the most eloquent is from Colin Coward, who was one of Williams’ students in the 70s. Again, Ruth Gledhill has the story.

Perhaps the best analysis of the ABC’s apparent inconsistency is this blog entry. The money quote from Williams:  “I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.”