Rowan Williams and the middle ground

In his Presidential Address, Rowan Williams has said something to upset just about everyone. I think he deserves credit since his seems to be such an effortless gift; others of us have to work at it.

Liberals are upset because Rowan is still not “fully including” homosexuals in the life of the Anglican church, even though he did issue a rather grovelling apology – perhaps what was missing was an obsequious Obama Bow™.

Conservatives will be upset because, among other things, he seems to think that TEC and the ACoC have exercised genuine restraint, because he jumbles together outside intervention and litigation as if they were equivalent wrongs and because he still doesn’t get it: the ACoC and TEC have become sub-Christian institutions.

Such is the problem of trying to find middle ground when there really isn’t any.  Rowan Williams might be able to thrive in the effete, refined halls of academia but he is quite incapable of leading the Anglican communion to anywhere but ruin.

Miss me yet?

Is apparently not a Photoshop creation:

Africagate

The global warming debacle continues with an admission of yet another climate hoax:

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed ‘Glaciergate’ by commentators.

I suppose one good thing about all this is that it should lay to rest the absurd canard that scientists are above corruption, pristinely objective, fastidiously apolitical and immune to the myriad frailties that assail mere mortals. Scientists are just as untrustworthy as everyone else.

The quantum phone

I remember sometime in the early 1980s John Bothwell, then Bishop of Niagara, writing an article in the – by today’s measure – much thicker Niagara Anglican denouncing the frivolity of fibre optic research, since its only application appeared to be in decorative lamps. Bothwell was, of course, almost as ignorant of technology as he was of theology, so he was quite shocked when someone pointed out that fibre optics made his phone work.

The clergy – bishops in particular – seem to be natural Luddites and so, had Bothwell heard of quantum physics, he would have had no use for it either. Today his phone probably has chips in it, so now quantum mechanics is making his phone work; and will soon make it work better:

Handheld devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm’s material that exploits a quantum physics trick.

The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied.

A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the “Quantum Tunnelling Composite”.

The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets.

In January, Japanese touch-screen maker Nissha also licensed the approach from Yorkshire-based Peratech, who make the composite material QTC.

However, as part of the licensing agreements, Peratech could not reveal the phone, gaming, and device makers that could soon be using the technology to bring pressure sensitivity to a raft of new devices.

Quantum mace

The composite works by using spiky conducting nanoparticles, similar to tiny medieval maces, dispersed evenly in a polymer.

None of these spiky balls actually touch, but the closer they get to each other, the more likely they are to undergo a quantum physics phenomenon known as tunnelling.

Tunnelling is one of several effects in quantum mechanics that defies explanation in terms of the “classical” physics that preceded it.

Simply put, quantum mechanics says that there is a tiny probability that a particle shot at a wall will pass through it in an effect known as tunnelling.

Similarly, the material that surrounds the spiky balls acts like a wall to electric current. But as the balls draw closer together, when squashed or deformed by a finger’s pressure, the probability of a charge tunnelling through increases.

The net result is that pressing harder on the material leads to a smooth increase in the current through it.

Victoria for Pope

But first Canterbury:

Canada’s leading female Anglican cleric has courted controversy at a major church conference in Britain by predicting the eventual rise of a woman as archbishop of Canterbury.

“The signposts are pointing in one direction,” former Edmonton Bishop Victoria Matthews told Reuters yesterday during a global gathering of Anglican bishops at the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference. “I would be very surprised if it wasn’t accepted worldwide.”

Bishop Matthews, whose selection in February as the bishop of Christchurch, New Zealand, sparked an uproar among conservative Anglicans in that country, also shot back at Vatican officials who have complained the Church of England’s July 8 decision to begin appointing female bishops poses “a further obstacle for reconciliation” between Catholics and Anglicans.

“With the greatest respect, the Vatican has to understand the Anglican Communion is not synonymous with the Church of England,” Bishop Matthews said in the interview. “The Anglican Communion has had women in the episcopate for about 20 years. They really need to do their homework and realize that the communion is 38 provinces and not one with satellites. That is a pretty significant error.”

And here she is, prepared and ready.

James Cameron, Avatar Aeolist

I took my mother to see Titanic when it came out. As soon as the first actor spoke, I knew it was a mistake: my mother at the time was in her late 70s, but her mind was – I was going to say the equal of a 20 year old’s – when idling, the equal of the combined mental capacity of fifteen average 20 year olds concentrating hard. She liked her films to contain interesting dialogue, a commodity that had been thoroughly expunged from Titanic.

So my expectations from James Cameron’s latest attempt to turn the graphics backdrop of Far Cry 2 into a film were low. I watched it this evening and was not disappointed; my mother, were she still with us, would not have approved.

Leaving aside the inevitable demonising of the military, large corporations and industry, the lionising of noble savages in ecstatic pantheistic harmony with their computer game vegetation – all of which are irritating enough in their own right – the dialogue was so mind-numbingly trite, it make Titanic look like Proust.

For those who are interested and want to save 3 hours, the story is: nasty men want a rare mineral that is under the noble savages’ village. Nasty men try to kill noble savages to get rare mineral; some enlightened scientists and a crippled soldier help the noble savages drive out the evil humans with bows and arrows and send them back to their own planet which is not green; in fact Gaia earth is dead. Finis.

And it was very long.

Other than that, I enjoyed it from the professional perspective of marvelling at how many hours it took to render so many pixels for so little edification.

Burqa Bandits

It was only a matter of time:

Two burqa-wearing robbers have held up a French post office using a handgun concealed beneath an Islamic-style full veil, court officials said.

Officials said postal office staff let the pair through the security double doors of the banking branch near Paris, believing them to be veil-wearing Muslim women.

What is needed is an Islamic equivalent of Burn Your Bra: Burn Your Burqa. It could raise money to buy vitamin D for all burqa beleaguered ladies who never feel sun on their skin.

Who are the real Anglicans?

When I became a Christian, the final decision was simple. I felt like the thief on the cross with nothing to offer but sin, no recourse to good works to fall back on and, thus, no hope of earned salvation. I knew I was doomed without the only salvation that was on offer – the one from Jesus. There were no trappings, no liturgical requirements, no formularies, rituals or recitations, just a “remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

In the current Anglican strife, what has become apparent is the desperation of each party to be included in the category “Anglican” while convincing everyone that the opposition should not. It is so pervasive that it raises the suspicion that being Anglican is more important than being Christian – perhaps because Anglicanism as it is practised in the West has become a buffer against the exigencies of real Christianity.

The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada are determined that the ACNA not be recognised by the Archbishop of Canterbury and they are busy trying to sabotage the private member’s motion asking the CofE to recognise the ACNA. Such recognition would help confirm the “Anglicanism” of the ACNA, a confirmation TEC and  the ACoC are determined to derail at all costs.

For my part, I think the meanderings of Rowan Williams have the aroma of an institution long dead and now in an advanced state of decay; the vitality in the institutional Anglican Church is centred in Africa where to be Anglican also means to be Christian.

A similar parochial obsession is in evidence in the Archbishop of York’s declaring that ex-Anglicans who join the Roman Catholic Church as part of the Pope’s Ordinariate Scheme will not be “proper Catholics” – a contention roundly repudiated by at least some Catholics – as if such a thing bore the weight of eternal significance.

To solve the “who are the real Anglicans” problem, it might be best for Christian Anglicans to leave Western Anglicanism to bury its dead and take a new name: Aflicans, perhaps.

So who are the real Anglicans? Who cares.

A valuable onslaught on neo-Darwinist simplicities

A poke in the eye to atheist fundamentalism à la Dawkins:

Charles Darwin complained quite crossly in his autobiography that, despite many denials, people still kept saying he thought natural selection was the sole cause of evolutionary development. “Great is the force of misrepresentation,” he grumbled. Had he known that, a century later, his alleged followers would be promoting that very doctrine as central to his teaching, and extending it into the wilder reaches of psychology and physics, he might have got even crosser. Darwin’s objection was surely not just that he could see other possible causes. He saw that the doctrine itself did not make sense. No filter, however powerful, can be the only cause of what flows out of it. Questions about what comes into that filter have to be just as important. The proposed solution bears no proportion to the size of the problem.

Since his time, biologists have discovered a huge amount that is really interesting and important about internal factors in organisms that affect reproduction. This powerful little book uses that material to challenge sharply the whole neo-Darwinist orthodoxy – the assumption that, essentially, all evolution is due to mutation and selection. Its authors do not, of course, deny that this kind of classical natural selection happens. But they argue strongly that there is now no reason to privilege it over a crowd of other possible causes. Not only are most mutations known to be destructive but the material of inheritance itself has turned out to be far more complex, and to provide a much wider repertoire of untapped possibilities, than used to be thought. To an impressive extent, organisms provide the materials for changes in their own future. As the authors put it, “Before any phenotype can be, so to speak, ‘offered’ to selection by the environment, a host of internal constraints have to be satisfied.” Epigenetic effects, resulting from different expressions of the same genes, can make a huge difference. And genes themselves are now known not to be independent, bean-like items connected to particular transmitted traits, but aspects of a most intricate process, sensitive to all sorts of internal factors, so that in many ways the same genes can result in a different creature. Recent work in “evodevo” – evolutionary developmental biology – shows how paths of development can themselves change and can change the resulting organism. And again, forces such as “molecular drive”, which ­rearrange the genes, can also have that effect.

Besides this – perhaps even more interestingly – the laws of physics and chemistry themselves take a hand in the developmental process. Matter itself behaves in characteristic ways which are distinctly non-random. Many natural patterns, such as the arrangement of buds on a stem, accord with the series of Fibonacci numbers, and Fibonacci spirals are also observed in spiral nebulae. There are, moreover, no flying pigs, on account of the way in which bones arrange themselves. I am pleased to see that Fodor and ­Piattelli Palmarini introduce these facts in a chapter headed “The Return of the Laws of Form” and connect them with the names of D’Arcy Thompson, Conrad Waddington and Ilya Prigogine. Though they don’t actually mention Goethe, that reference still rightly picks up an important, genuinely scientific strand of investigation which was for some time oddly eclipsed by neo-Darwinist fascination with the drama of randomness and the illusory seductions of simplicity.

This book is, of course, fighting stuff, sure to be contested by those at whom it is aimed. On the face of things, however, it strikes an outsider as an overdue and valuable onslaught on neo-Darwinist simplicities.

As this article notes “no filter, however powerful, can be the only cause of what flows out of it.” Christians have always known the force that drives the filter: God.

Greening Sacred Space Awards

Is humanity a cosmic stage where the armies of righteousness battle the fallen powers of darkness until the Final Battle when the Beast will be cast into the Lake of Fire, the dead will be raised and Christ will return to claim his own?

Or is it all about installing a bike rack, eating local and holding recycling bin classes?

Well, the winner of the Greening Sacred Space Award has the answer:

St James has had a walkthrough audit, they have held 2 eat local feasts, they have bought a bike rack, they offer regular recycling/composing/green bin use education to the community at large. They are part of the newly formed Eco-Churches of West Hamilton and they are heavily involved with climate change action (350, Copenhagen). The have helped develop a green cleaning products guide that FCG have adapted.

Personally, I am proud to announce that St. Hilda’s, ANiC is doing its bit to become green. While CGI simulated congregations from the Diocese of Niagara were occupying the worship space, they didn’t look after it very well; the orange carpet was afflicted with damp, became mouldy and turned a verdant shade of green in parts. To combat global warming, the greening of the carpet will be encouraged to flourish.

UN global warming apparatchik loses his composure

As we all know, climate science is rational, dispassionate, non-political and irrefutable. That’s why the UN’s climate chief suggested that anyone who questions him should rub his face in asbestos:

Rajendra Pachauri, the besieged head of the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change, told the Financial Times on Wednesday that he is the victim of a “carefully orchestrated” campaign to block climate change legislation.

“I would say [there are] nefarious designs behind people trying to attack me with lies, falsehoods,” he told the paper, swatting away allegations that his India-based climate institute, TERI, has benefited from decisions made by the IPCC, which he also chairs.

Climate change skeptics “are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder,” he said.

“I hope that they apply it (asbestos) to their faces every day.”

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are actually no scientists claiming that anthropological global warming is a reality. After all, scientists are supposed to be sceptical, yet anyone who expresses scepticism is told by the chief UN tinpot alchemist to rub his face in asbestos.

In the UK, there’s no-one worth voting for

Labour have turned the UK into a training ground for Islamofascist terrorists; the BNP are the next best thing to Nazis; the Liberal Democrats are so naïve that they “Believe in Fairness” and the Tories have become the gay party:

Cameron tells Rowan: Make your Church pro-gay.

Tory leader David Cameron has launched an astonishing attack on the Church of England over its attitudes to homosexuality. In an interview with the gay magazine Attitude, Cameron tells award-winning journalist Johann Hari that ‘our Lord Jesus’ would back equality and gay rights if he were around today. He says he doesn’t want to get into a row with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. ‘But I think the Church has to do some of the things that the Conservative Party has been through – sorting this issue out and recognising that full equality is a bottom line full essential.’ He also introduces a new phrase to the English language, one that might be current in High Tory circles but not one I’ve heard before, in reference to Muslim women: ‘Blowing the hijab off them.’

Ho ho. And we all thought he was a politician.

ACoC priest, Alan Perry, questions the ACNA briefing paper

Canon Alan Perry is challenging the accuracy of the briefing paper prepared by Lorna Ashworth for the Church of England’s General Synod next month. The motion is to “express the desire that the Church of England be in com­munion with the Anglican Church in North America”.

In his challenge, Canon Perry makes a number of points; among them is this (my emphasis):

Only three former bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada have associated themselves with ACNA:
* Donald Harvey, formerly of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador
* Ronald Ferris, formerly of Algoma
* Malcolm Harding, formerly of Brandon

None of these have been deposed. All were already retired, and all three voluntarily relinquished their ministry pursuant to Canon XIX of the Anglican Church of Canada. This is the equivalent of Canon C1 (2) of the Church of England which makes provision for a cleric “voluntarily [to] relinquish the exercise of his orders and use himself as a layman.”

However, three former presbyters of the Anglican Church of Canada have recently been consecrated as bishops by ACNA: Stephen Leung, Charles Masters and Trevor Walters. This may account for the claim of six. (Also, Silas Ng was consecrated as a bishop by the Church of Rwanda.)

As of March 2009, 52 of the clergy (other than the six bishops) in ACNA were former clergy of the Anglican Church of Canada. The claim of 69 includes the newly ordained and possibly some other transfers.

The total of Anglican Church of Canada clergy as of June 2009 was 3861.

Not a single Canadian priest has been deposed for joining ACNA. The term is almost entirely unheard of in Canada. It is one of the penalties provided for in the Canon on Discipline. However, none of those who have left to join Rwanda or Southern Cone or ACNA have been canonically disciplined.

The phrase “relinquish license for ministry” is canonically meaningless in the Anglican Church of Canada. The correct phrase is “relinquish ministry” pursuant to Canon XIX, on “The Relinquishment or Abandonment of the Ministry” which states that relinquishment:

“removes from the [cleric] the right to exercise that office, including spiritual authority as a minister of Word and Sacraments conferred in ordination.” (emphasis added)

Relinquishment renders the cleric unlicensable in any Jurisdiction. Relinquishment of ministry is reversible, but only in the jurisdiction in which ministry was relinquished.

The issue of whether a priest or bishop relinquishes his right to minister when he leaves the Anglican Church of Canada has come up before.  In December 2008 Alan Perry wrote a letter to the Anglican Journal saying:

Is a bishop still a bishop after he/she leaves denomination?

Anglican Journal, Dec, 2008 by Alan T. Perry

Dear editor,

I am confused as to why you continue to refer to Don Harvey as a bishop, most recently in your news bulletin of Oct. 16 regarding four parishes purporting to put themselves under the “episcopal oversight of Bishop (sic) Don Harvey.”

Nearly a year ago, the Anglican Journal reported that Mr. Harvey had relinquished his ministry. The mechanism for relinquishment of ministry under our canons, to which Mr. Harvey will have repeatedly sworn an oath of obedience, is found in Canon XIX of the General Synod. The relevant section specifies that “relinquishment of the exercise of ordained ministry removes from the [cleric] the right to exercise … spiritual authority as a minister of Word and Sacraments conferred in ordination.”

Thus, although the ontological effects of ordination remain, the juridical effects are rendered null and void. The perhaps more familiar Roman Catholic term for this is laicization.

Mr. Harvey has relinquished his ministry, and therefore ought no longer to be referred to by a clerical title.

He is, for all practical purposes, a layperson. Or are you implying that Mr. Harvey acted dishonestly, either when he relinquished his ministry or when he repeatedly swore an oath to obey the canons?

Alan T. Perry

The editor responded:

Editor’s response: Consulting with the chancellor, Ronald Stevenson, he writes: “In the relinquishment document prescribed by Canon XIX, the cleric says he or she has voluntarily relinquished the exercise of the ministry in the Anglican Church of Canada to which he or she has been admitted. The cleric does not relinquish his or her orders/ ordination.

“Although Bishops Harvey and Malcolm Harding (retired bishop of the diocese of Brandon) have relinquished the exercise of episcopal ministry in the Anglican Church of Canada, they may well be recognized and accepted as bishops in another church even though they ignore the traditional rule that a bishop does not minister or interfere in another bishop’s jurisdiction.”

Alan Perry is attempting to make out, both in 2008 and now, that the bishops and priests who have joined ACNA have no authority to minister. The response from the ACoC chancellor, Ronald Stevenson, is clear: they have. A priest’s relinquishing his license in the ACoC is not the same as relinquishing his orders, ordination or the right to exercise “spiritual authority as a minister of Word and Sacraments conferred in ordination”.

Obviously Alan Perry didn’t pay much attention to the ACoC chancellor in 2008; I don’t suppose he will now, either, but it does appear that he has got this all wrong.

The battle of the sexes

My 8 year old granddaughter informed me this evening that Seth, in school, is in love with her. He just doesn’t know it yet. I knew that Seth had been outmanoeuvred and his fate sealed.

After many years of trying to understand women,  an endeavour I abandoned at least 20 years ago, I couldn’t help thinking that this astute summation of my granddaughter’s impending relationship with Seth has set the stage for all her future dealings with men. Indeed, she has captured the Platonic essence of the relationship between the sexes, something that P. G. Wodehouse depicted so brilliantly in his Jeeves and Wooster novels.

Suicide of the West

The luminous Theodore Dalrymple:

The secularization of Europe is hardly a secret. Religion’s long, melancholy, withdrawing roar, as Matthew Arnold put it, is a roar no longer, and hardly even a murmur. In France, the oldest daughter of the Church, fewer than 5 percent of the population attend Mass regularly. The English national church has long been an object of derision, and the current Archbishop of Canterbury succeeds in uniting the substance and appearance of foolishness and unworldliness not with sanctity, but with sanctimony. In Wales, where nonconformist Christianity was the dominant cultural influence, most of the chapels have been converted into residences by interior decorators. Vast outpourings of pietistic writings molder on the shelves of secondhand booksellers, which themselves are closing down daily. In the Netherlands, some elements of the religious pillarization of the state remain: state-funded television channels are still allotted to Protestants and Catholics respectively. But while the shell exists, the substance is gone.

Perhaps it is Ireland that offers the most startling example of secularization because it was a late starter. Late starters, however, are often apt pupils; they catch up fast and even surpass their mentors. When I first went to Ireland, the priest was a god among men; people stood aside to let him pass. No respectable family did not count a nun among its members. As for the Archbishop of Dublin, his word was law; the politicians might propose, but he disposed.

In the historical bat of an eyelid, all that has gone, beyond any hope (or fear) of restoration. It would hardly be too much to say that the Church is now reviled in Ireland. I suspect that if you performed a word-association test using the word “priest,” it would more often than not evoke a response of “pedophile,” “child abuser,” or (at best) “hypocrite.”

The whole article is well worth reading, but I highlighted the above because it provides an outsider’s assessment – Dalrymple is an agnostic – of the state of the institutional church. This is not mere Dawkinesque arrogance and bluster, but considered insight from one of our culture’s keenest observers.

To the outsider, the Anglican church is the home of buffoonery with a leader to suit, and the Catholic church, the home of pederasty. Is it any wonder that neither one can garner much respect amongst unbelievers.