Living the Gospel in its purity is easier said than done. Since Eden at least, there’s never been a golden age free from ambiguity and imperfection. Indeed, in large measure, that’s what the Incarnation is all about. Without removing the world’s imperfections, God subverts it from within.
Not since the days of Cranmer and Laud has an Anglican archbishop suffered the ultimate penalty for his faith and Luwum has therefore a special place in the history of the whole Anglican communion. He has been remembered in a chapel dedicated to modern martyrs in Canterbury Cathedral
Though the bolts are not drawn across the door; though your windows are not barred, yet what bolts or bars could hold you faster than your sickness. Your house is your prison, or your room in the hospital is a cell in the prison; and you yourself are a prisoner of God. Now, in order to profit by your imprisonment, consider first this one great truth, which is revealed to your senses in this your sickness.
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When there’s language about God’s call in Scripture, we may want to resist our contemporary inclination to read everything individualistically and consider that in the context of the story, being called and chosen is usually about becoming part of ( or even leading) a new kind of human community, bearing the cost of this, and becoming in some way an example to the world on God’s behalf.
On the eighth day of March 1699, Dr. Thomas Bray, and four other excellent men, met at London, under the sanction of Bishop Compton, to consult upon the best method of promoting Christian knowledge; and formed a little society for that purpose. In a few years, their numbers increased so greatly, and the sphere of their operations became so widely extended, that it was found necessary to separate the institution into two distinct branches.
America, the Jesuit weekly, carried this report on its blog In All Things last week:
Believing that God wants you to be famous actually improves your chances of being famous. What’s helping these stars is not so much religion as belief—specifically, the belief that God favors their own personal, temporal success over that of almost everyone else.
It seems to me that Rowan Williams is making slow but significant progress toward assembling a center that he can then play off against the left (constituted by us, the Brazilians, the Scots and maybe the Welsh) and the right (constituted by Nigeria, Uganda, the Southern Cone and a few others.)
The Anglican Communion Office has at last responded to a letter that the Rev. Lesley Fellows of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury more than two months ago–if you can call a perfunctory reiteration of evasive boilerplate a response.