Friday, February 15, 2008

Rowan Is Rowing With One Oar

The gathering storm
An archbishop's outburst highlights a broader crisis in his church

“ANGLICANISM, it seems, is coming apart. It is ceasing to be, it is disintegrating...” Those cheery words, uttered two weeks ago by an American bishop, Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, drew cries of approval from traditionalists across the world who have little sympathy with the efforts of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to hold together the 80m-strong worldwide Anglican Communion.

The American prelate went on to predict that out of the fall of the “Elizabethan settlement” (the 16th-century bargain between the Tudor monarchs and England's national church) something truer to Christianity's roots would emerge, presumably based on an alliance between America's conservative minority, the Africans and evangelicals in other places like Australia.

Go here to read the rest. It almost reads as an obituary. Does that mean Rowan gets 72 virgins or a comped date with Sharia?