Day: July 22, 2008

Anglicanism at risk

It’s  the “Summer of Schism” in Anglicanism worldwide, says Christianity Today.  “It’s all over but the lawsuits,” a west suburban Chicago-area priest told the magazine, which commented, “She may just be right.”

“The 400-year-old Anglican project appears over” to “evangelical” bishops attending the decennial Lambeth Conference, its correspondent, George Conger, wrote.

At issue is primarily the ordination in 2003 of the gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, who was asked not to attend the decennial Lambeth Conference, a 20–day affair that began July 16.

So were disinvited a Zimbabwean bishop, for his ties to Robert Mugabe, and American bishops who have been ordained for breakaway conservative U.S. jurisdictions overseen by Africans, such as the Anglican Mission in the Americas, led by Rwanda, and the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), led by Nigerians,

American and Canadian bishops who ordained Robinson have not been banned, however; and bishops from four African countries will not be attending in protest.  Neither will the bishops of Sydney, the largest diocese in Australia, and other evangelical bishops — all in protest of these exclusions and inclusions, for a total of 200 to 250 recusants, of 880 bishops in all.

“Humanely speaking [sic], there is little hope for even a peaceful separation” between the liberal and evangelical Anglican wings, Bishop Gregory Venables from Argentina told the magazine.

The conference will not attempt to settle disputes, however.  Rather, it will try to encourage “the building of relationships” with a view to coming to terms with each other eventually, Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury told the conference.

But Bishop Venables’s telephone has not been ringing, he said.  “[N]o one has called me to say, ‘Let’s talk this over.'”

What has worked in the past for Archbishop Williams, asking conservative bishops to hold back in honor of the union, has been turned on its head this time, when Williams will be asking pro-gay Americans to hold back, says Conger.  But they are not willing to do so.

Nor were Williams’s own English bishops, who this month In their General Synod rejected his pleas to provide “legal safeguards for opponents of women bishops,” said Conger.

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A book for our age

This fellow has it right: “Right wingers love Friedrich Hayek.”  I do.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher cited his ideas as central to the social revolutions they hoped to spark.

Did not know that but am glad to hear it and am not surprised.

Antigovernment ideologues admire him as one of those few who kept Adam Smith’s fires burning during the dark reign of John Maynard Keynes in the West; his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, has sold more than 350,000 copies in the United States alone.

I bought it.  If that be ideologuism, make the most of it.

And the modern right has enlisted Hayek as a political weapon: Why can’t those loony lefties acknowledge the simple and obvious truths that he understood?

Wait.  This too is news to me.  Hayek is not quoted much in what I read.  As for why loony lefties don’t buy H., it’s because they are stupid, that’s why.

This fellow — Jesse Larner, author of Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered (Nation Books, 2002) and Forgive Us Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the Left (Wiley and Sons, 2006), writing in Dissent for Winter 2008 — has been reading up on Hayek, he said, “much as, in my twenties, I decided I really ought to read the Bible [because it’s] influential, whether I it or not.”

He has found him “a surprise, in several ways, nowhere near as extreme as his ideological descendants.”

But he makes “a powerful and far-ranging critique of state control of economic life.”  What makes for serfdom, in Hayek’s argument.

Keynes called it “a grand book.”  Orwell found in it “a great deal of truth . . . collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.”

But in Road, says Larner, Hayek “thoroughly, eloquently, and convincingly demolishes an idea that virtually no one holds nowadays.”

In 1944, however, when it was published?  The conventionally wise were horrified at it then and condemned it right and left.  In the U.S., nonetheless, it sold immensely well, because it shot down conventional (Keynesian) wisdom.

And today there are governmental meddlers who want so much to run things, thinking they know best, which they do not.

It’s a relatively simple, small, moving book, a sort of catechism or introduction to free-market thinking, based on the revolutionary notion that human nature “is what it is,” to use a catch phrase of our day, meaning you can’t get away from it.

Try reading it here.  Or buying it here or here.

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