Café contributor Adrian Worsfold, known online as Pluralist wonders whether Bishop N. T. Wright actually deserves his reputation as a scholar.
It isn’t necessary to embrace Worsfold’s entire critique to believe that the bishop is so frequently lauded for his Biblical scholarship, that it obscures the hackneyed anti-modernism that mars much of his political and social commentary. Nor to lament the fact that if the Anglican Communion succeeds in institutionalizing its homophobia, via the proposed Covenant, Wright will have been among the primary archtects of this structural sin.
The bishop beings a book tour of the United States in late April, and one wonders whether those who attend his appearances will ask him why he has worked so hard to exclude gay and lesbian Christians from the sacraments of the Church. One also wonders whether Episcopal churches will continue to sponsor events to benefit a man who has worked so hard to disenfranchise them in the councils of the Anglican Communion.