David Simon on Journalism

Flipping my 16 basic cable channels the other night, I stumbled by sheer luck across David Simon (producer of The Wire, genius) giving testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet Hearing on the Future of Journalism. He gives a stunning report to John Kerry and the rest of the committee on the fate of journalism after the internet. He makes a great point about the inability of the amateur blog to perform anything more than repetition and aggregation, thus leaving the critical role of journalism in holding public officials accountable unfulfilled at the present time:

Understand here that I am not making a Luddite argument against the internet and all that it offers. But democratized and independent though they may be, you do not – in my city — run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at City Hall, or in the courthouse hallways or at the bars and union halls where police officers gather. You do not see them consistently nurturing and then pressing sources. You do not see them holding institutions accountable on a daily basis.
Why? Because high-end journalism – that which acquires essential information about our government and society in the first place — is a profession; it requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending. For a relatively brief period in American history – no more than the last fifty years or so – a lot of smart and talented people were paid a living wage and benefits to challenge the unrestrained authority of our institutions and to hold those institutions to task. Modern newspaper reporting was the hardest and in some ways most gratifying job I ever had. I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying or from whom they are withholding information.  The idea of this is absurd, yet to read the claims that some new media voices are already making, you would think they need only bulldoze the carcasses of moribund newspapers aside and begin typing. They don’t know what they don’t know – which is a dangerous state for any class of folk – and to those of us who do understand how subtle and complex good reporting can be, their ignorance is as embarrassing as it is seemingly sincere. Indeed, the very phrase citizen journalist strikes my ear as nearly Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

Also, if you haven’t seen Simon’s hour-long interview with Bill Moyers, check that out here.

Truth, Conflict, and Community

More thoughts on the topic begun in the last post:

Taking conflict seriously is the only way to take other people seriously. It is love, not hate, that will sustain arguments when there seems to be no solution, especially when we don’t particularly care for the person with whom we are arguing. If we take the other seriously as a fellow inquirer into the truth and as a fellow brother or sister following Christ, we will not be shy about letting them know when they are wrong, and will ask them to be so bold with us as well. It is out of love, then, that Luther calls Eck “a notable enemy of Christ.”

Yoder observes in his chapter on “Binding and Loosing” in Body Politics (which is probably my favorite book of his) that in the New Testament guidelines for moral discernment and reconciliation in Matt 18 that

We have here a fundamental anthropological insight into the relationship of conflict and solidarity. To be human is to have differences; to be human wholesomely is to process those differences, not by building up conflicting power claims but by reconciling dialogue. Conflict is socially useful; it forces us to attend to new data from new perspectives. It is useful in interpersonal process; by processing conflict, one learns skills, awareness, trust, and hope. Conflict is useful in intrapersonal dynamics, protecting our concern about guilt and acceptance from being directed inwardly only to our own feelings. The therapy for guilt is forgiveness; the source of self-esteem is another person who takes seriously my restoration to community. (9)

This orientation towards conflict grows out of Yoder’s Anabaptist conviction that the discernment of truth and the Lord’s will is a communal activity, in which each member has some gift to bring to the table. The Spirit moves in our dealings with one another. What this means in practice is hearing out people I may take to be fools, philistines, or dogmatists. For I know that when Paul said “professing to be wise, they became fools”, he was writing about me. This, of course, entails conflict if we are honest in our dealings. Yet conflict is only violent when it is not attended by patience. (Thus, if we want to talk about an agonistic ontology, it seems to my mind that those pressing for immediate judgments in church conflicts are the ones who would be more guilty of this.)

It’s hard to think of any better work dealing with these issues since Bonhoeffer’s miraculous Sanctorum Communio. There dealing with this very question of the bellum omnium in omnes he arrives at the Hegelian insight that community is not a denial, but an overcoming of individuality. It is not around but through the differences of our individuality that we arrive at community. He writes,

Whatever kind of unity of will exists, one must never conclude any kind of unity of the willing persons in the sense of fusion…. Community of will and unity will only build upon the inner separateness of I and You…. The person who is united with me in common intention is structurally just as separate from me as the one who is not so united. Between us lies the boundary of being created as individual persons. The Christian notion of community with God can be realized only on the basis of this interpretation of community. Otherwise, community with God becomes unification in the sense of transgressing the boundary of the I-You-relation–that is, mystical fusion.

This would be the sort of false harmony–the harmony of manufactured sameness that cannot abide difference–referenced in the quotation from Kant: “Human beings want harmony; but nature knows better what is good for their species. It wants discord.”

How can we reconcile such a condition with the obvious eschatological injunction of peace?

This means, however, that strife is recognized as a fundamental sociological law and basically is sanctified. Concretely, this  implies the necessity and the justification of partisanship in every community relation. Genuine life arises only in the convlict of wills; strength unfolds only in strife. This is an old insight.

Only since the fall has there been no concrete and productive conflict in the genuine sense. Hence the very notion of such a development has to be condemned as evil. But even in conflict that has been rendered unholy through an evil will, the most intimate social bond of the human spirit becomes visible. In conflict the other will is not ignored and negated; rather, one seeks to force it into one’s own will and thus overcome it. This opposition of wills is resolved only in the cooperation of wills…To be sure, this is just as valid for the relation between God and human beings as it is for that between persons. Through conflict the will of the sinful human being is forced into the holy will of God, and thus community is established.

This flows from Bonhoeffer’s insistence that community is only real when it is telling the truth about itself:

Only the cross as God’s truth about us makes us truthful. Those who know the cross no longer shy away from any truth…. There is no truth toward Jesus without truth toward other people. Lying destroys community. But truth rends false community and founds genuine fellowship. There is no following Jesus without living in the truth unveiled before God and other people.

And living in the truth, in addition to practices of confession and forgiveness, requires submitting ourselves in patience to conflict and dialog.

Rowan Williams on Whether He is Nietzchean

I had more to say than a comment thread would sustain, so I repair to my own blog. In a recent post dealing with Rowan Williams and the current Anglican controversy over the ordination of homosexual bishops, Craig Carter makes the following assertion:

Essentially, the point made in this article is that by fighting for unity, delay, conversation, listening and political accommodation, Williams is fighting for the liberal agenda of revision in general. I think this is basically correct. To say that we should think further about how to respond to the general cultural acceptance of homosexuality is structurally the same thing as the Serpent said to Eve in the Garden when he asked “Did God really say?” Of course, God really did not say “from any tree in the Garden” but by asking the question and getting Eve to respond the Serpent was able to draw Eve into in a “conversation” that eventually resulted in the Serpent having an opening to deny God’s veracity and, in that situation Eve, who had already surrendered moral clarity, finally was tempted to give in to doubt. Eve made the mistake of dialoguing with an enemy who only wanted to destroy her, not debate with her.

After that astounding two-part assertion that (1) homosexuals are Satan and (2) not immediately and unequivocally condemning homosexuality equates to a full blown endorsement, Carter continues his invective with the following:

Rowan Williams seems to have gone to the school of postmodern philosophy in which the ultimate undecideabilty of things is rooted in the agonistic nature of reality, which is at bottom nothing other than the will-to-power. In that school, nature is not created by God with its own peaceful and good intelligibility; it is raw material for the will. If you wonder what it is that Anglicans are waiting for, listening for and trying to discern, it has more to do with whose will to power is going to triumph than any soft wisperings of the Holy Spirit. The school of Nietzsche is a harsh and brutal school, like so many public schools in the modern West, and you don’t learn about dragons in such places.

Here, the assumption seems to be that in order to exibit any patience with a conflict without forcing it to an immediate conclusion is to endorse an agonistic ontology. Now, it seems to me that Carter has entirely misunderstood the situation if he is calling Williams Nietzschean. From “The Body’s Grace”–his most direct exploration of human sexuality—he does acknowledge the legitimacy of homosexual expression. The fact, however, that he has tarried with this long process of debate shows that he insists upon not foising his will upon the communion at large when it has not arrived at the same point of view as himself.

In Carter’s view, the question of homosexuality is a settled matter, and anything other than direct action to expell the immoral brother betrays a morality of laissez-faire limp-wristedness. (You can only wish such certitude in judment could be expressed toward greedy pastors, or gossips!) For me, how homosexuality relates to Christian discipleship is a question that is far from settled, and so I have no qualms with RW’s course of action. But leaving that aside, I want to take up the matter of conflict, namely with regards to the sort of ontology you can be charged of having if you are willing to abide extended periods of decision making.

Of course on may hold the belief that there is no truth, and that the only honest way to live is to be straightforward with advancing your own agenda. These, to me, are the people who reject dialog, and aim only to organize their base in order to force their will on the minority through an enforcement of majority rule. This, again, is decidedly not what RW is doing.

However, we can also view patience through conflict as an acknowledgment of the fallenness of creation. This is not an endless deferral of the truth, but rather an awareness that since we live in a world of lies, truth is hard to come by. And if there are good people disagreeing on what the truth is, we are not wise to dismiss one or the other of them. As RW writes in his essay, “The Discipline of Scripture,” embracing conflict is not a denial of truth, but rather a denial of the presupposition that we already know what the truth is: “Concern with the literal, the diachronic, is a way of resisting the premature unities and harmonies of a non-literal reading (whether allegorical, existentialist, structuralist or deconstructionist)” (On Christian Theology, 47). And later on, dealing with the use to which scripture is put in the current church conflicts (including homosexual partnerships), RW explicitly rejects notion of tolerance as a solution:

Honest compels the admission that none of these questions is likely to be ’settled’ in the foreseeable future, certainly not by appeal to what is commonly taken to be the ‘literal sense of scripture’ (i.e. particular clusters of quoations). Yet peaceful co-existence in an undemanding pluralism is an inadequate response when the matters at issue seem to relate to basic questions about how the qospel can be heard in the struggles of contemporary social existence…. There can be an exacting patience in the debates of Christians; the confidence (if that is the right word) that it is worth struggling for the life of the Church in and through the awkwardness of dissidence and conscientious protest imposes the discipline of ’staying with’ the public life and liturgy of the tradition, rather than seeking the shortest solution of a newly constructed community of the perfect. (57).

Terry Eagleton on Jesus’ Work Ethic

Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerilla fighter. He respects the Sabbath not because it means going to church but because it represents a temporary escape from the burden of labor. The Sabbath is about resting, not religion. One of the best reasons for being a Christian, as for being a socialist, is that you don’t like having to work, and reject the fearful idolatry of it so rife in countries like the Unites States. Truly civilized societies do not hold predawn power breakfasts. (Reason, Faith, and Revolution , 10-11)

You’re the Smell of Apple Pie to the Blind

This isn’t exactly a review, just a commendation of the most beautiful and unique voices I’ve ever heard, and share some lyrics from a songwriting talent that is simply unparalleled in modern country music. I’ve been listening to Martha Scanlan like crazy lately. She started out with a band called the Reeltime Travellers, which was more of a git-down bluegrass operation, and after writing the gorgeous “Like a Songbird That Has Fallen” for Cold Mountain, she went solo and made an album called “The West Was Burning” that is one of the best pure country albums I’ve ever heard, and I think stacks up to anything in the singer-songwriter spectrum.

“The West Was Burning” is a simple yet intricate musical affair, with just banjo and guitar on most songs, with occasional steel guitar and drums on a few songs. Scanlan is a story teller who is concerned less with getting a plot across than with transporting you to a place that doesn’t exist anymore, preserving a certain setting in a song. Namely, the mountains and wheat fields of Montana maybe 100 years ago.

My favorite song on the album is her cover of Dylan’s “Went to See the Gypsy.” Dylan wrote the song about Elvis, imaging a meeting between them that never took place. It is a perfect song for the album, contrasting the tentativeness and fragility of human relationships with the constancy of nature, which is a theme that continually shows up in Scanlan’s songs.

I went back to see the gypsy,
It was nearly early dawn.
The gypsy’s door was open wide
But the gypsy was gone,
And that pretty dancing girl,
She could not be found.
So I watched that sun come rising
From that little Minnesota town.

A lost love or broken life is contrasted with the stubborn repetition of nature. “Up on the Divide” tells the story of a widowed rancher whose wife died shortly after marriage, but whose grief does not deter the coming of spring:

Been twenty-two years since I gathered the stones Twenty-two more years since I made her my bride
And the springtime’s a-coming up on the divide.

The title track relates a lover’s dream during the fires of the summer:

Was the year the west was burning, I
was on a mountain sleeping I
woke up a-dreaming
about you
I was walking down a road of dust and bones and ash and following a burning set of tracks that led to you

I still see the fire in your stare
I still think I coulda burned up there

The most haunting song on the album, “Seeds of the Pine” is so good, I’m just going to put the whole song up:

Rains fell cold through June
grass is up to my thigh
say if it dries up it’ll burn just like the moon
say it opens up the seeds of the pine

I only want to dream about you
the dollar I could spend but I should save
just to see my fingers in your hair
the golden wheat around us and
beneath us where we lay

You’re a slow ride down a country mile
you’re the smell of apple pie to the blind
you’re the last light on a July western sky
you’re the center of the watermelon,
you’re a sweet, sweet smile

Cottonwood a-shakin in the breeze
surrounded by a starry sky
easy to forget the things we need
easy to stumble around mostly blind

I could tell you not to come in from the storm
I could tell you not to be so kind
I could tell you not to close the door
I could say I never wanted you for mine

Rains fell cold through June
grass is up to my thigh
say if it dries up it’ll burn just like the moon
say it opens up the seeds of the pine

say it opens up the seeds of the pine
say it opens up the seeds of the pine

The power of the set of metaphors in the middle is the fact that refrains from comparing nature to other things elsewhere in the song. She just tells about it, and it is enough that it is there, continuing in its rhythms and violent constancy as our lives come and go, as we make our awckward attempts at love.

The great temptation of memory is sentimentality. Scanlan is aware of it, and attmepts to resist by restraint. She knows that memory only works when used sparingly. “I only want to dream of you / a dollar I could spend but I should keep / just to see my fingers in your hair.”

Martha slows it down in the middle for a waltzy Patsy Cline-esque breakup song, to which her voice is perhaps not perfectly suited, but it is a terrific gettin-left song, in which she sits at home alone, drinking the beer her lover left in the fridge, thinking of him.

And somehow packing up your things
didn’t seem to bring
the peace that I’d hope to find
cause what you you can’t put in the truck
what you can’t pack up
is the space that you leave behind

Above all else, “The West Was Burning” is a probing of that space that is left behind when they leave: whether the death of a wife, the leaving of a husband, or the murder of Anna May Aquash on the brutal heavy-hitting protest song Isabella, these songs are memory in the truest sense: emptiness, the absence of what was once there. An emptiness that would be so much worse without good songs to sing about it.

The Politics of Resentment

I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Craig Carter. He wrote a couple of good books–one on John Yoder directly (which was helpful, though well critiqued by Chris Huebner for its attempt to systematize Yoder’s thought), and then a revision of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture categories, drawing heavily on Yoder’s old book, The Christian Witness to the State. Any appreciator of these works has likely been as perplexed as myself at the content to be found on Carter’s blog over the course of the past year or so. When he brought his blog back, he changed the title to “The Politics of the Cross Resurrected“, which refers to his bringing it back, but also seems to reference a shift in his thinking–according to the sidebar, away from Yoder and “modernity” and towards Augustine and Aquinas, the apparent cure for modernity.

A more worthy title for the blog, however, would have been “Craig Goes All First Things on Everybody’s Ass.” The blog is now basically a rant on the Liberal takeover of the Americas, from the homosexuals’ conspiracy to poison the minds of our children and force evangelical ministers to marry them, to Obama’s determination to kill as many unborn babies as he can, to socialism being the enemy of the church, and so forth, with some smattering of Augustine, Aquinas, David Bentley Hart, and the quasi-catholic extolations of the recent popes mixed in. His taking on the mantle of Neuhaus seems to be losing all reservations as in places he seems now to relegate pacifism to the church in a Lutheran sort of two kingdoms paradigm that would leave the state free to enforce justice as it sees fit. He seems to be relegating the view that Christians, rightly called, cannot kill people, to liberal pacifism. And now he is at work on a non-liberal reading of Yoder. Who on earth has actually found a kindred spirit in Yoder who could reasonably be called a liberal? Nate Kerr? Romand Coles? Chris Huebner?

At any rate, I recently spent an evening re-reading Rethinking Christ and Culture, looking for the sources of Carter’s recent demise, and was largely unsuccessful However, I do think an argument could be made that his attempt to reappropriate Niebuhr’s categories for “non-christendom” bears in it the seeds of his current outlook.

Speaking of categories, I propose to identify one which I call resentment. Resentment here is the political posture which believes that some entity out there controls the destiny of your self, community, or nation, and is controlling it in an undesirable fashion. Yet how can you be resentful when you have voluntarily chosen other than affiliation with that power (whether this is still the case with Carter seems hard to tell)? Here then is what Zizek describes as envy, which is the bane of most attempts at true fundamentalism. Envy names the attempt to withdraw from the world, yet all the while constantly measuring up to the world to ensure that we are really living a better life than them. Examples of this are found where someone renounces one path, yet constantly references the life he could have had as though he actually possessed it in some parallel present. For instance, the youth pastor who rejects an NBA contract to enter the ministry; the minister who used to get in bar fights but now just wears chokers, no undershirt, watches MMA, and could totally mess you up if it weren’t for Jesus; the teenage purity advocate who is addicted to porn; in general, the conservative who is obsessed with what the liberals are doing. This envy undercuts the claim to have become a part of the community that bears the true witness to the meaning of history; the constant references to what the liberal government is doing, what the gays are plotting, what the teachers’ union is going to implant in our kids’ heads are all just indicators that the psuedo-fundamentalist believes deep down that it is the powers of this world that control our destiny.

Ultimately, though, obsessing over every turn our fallen world takes is just exhausting. And boring: like Thoreau says, once you’ve read the news for a year, you’ve got the idea of how things go–each day is just a variation on the theme. My basic point here, then, is that we will know the true fundamentalist by her fretting. If she genuinely believes that Christ is the lord of history, then she will live simply, enjoy life with her friends, and trust providence.

Gregory on the Abolitionism of the Resurrection

J. Kameron Carter’s intricately structured book, Race: A Theological Account, is divided into three sections by a pre-, inter-, and postlude on Christology and race in which he interrogates three church fathers on the significance of their theology for overcoming the modern racialization of humanity. In his interlude on the abolitionism of Gregory of Nyssa, Carter asks how it is that Gregory came to feel a divine imperative for human freedom that was denied by equally apt readers of scripture such as his brother Basil, Augustine, or Gregory of Nazianzus.  Carter traces the source of Gregory’s abolitionism to his refusal to abstract Christ from the Jewish flesh which he conceives of as the very Image of God–the concrete universal in which all creatures participate as images of God. Thus, if Christ is the Image of God set free from death by the Father, so also must all who are made in the image of God be set free from the penultimate forms of death such as slavery.

Today the whole world can be seen gathered like one household for the harmony of a single song and neglecting every ordinary business, refashioned as at one signal for earnest prayer…. And truly the present day is well compared with the coming day which it portrays: both are days of human gathering, that one universal, this partial.  To tell the absolute truth, as far as gladness and joy are concerned, this day is more delightful than the anticipated one, since then inevitably those in grief will also be seen when their sins are exposed, whereas the present pleasure admits no sorrow.  The just man rejoices, and the one whose c onscience is not clear awaits the restoration which repentance brings, and every sorrow is put to sleep for the present day, while none is so distressed that relief does not come from the great splendour of the feast. Now is the prisoner freed, the debtor forgiven, the slave is liberated by the good and kindly proclamation of the church, not being rudely struck on the cheek and released from beatings with a beating, nor being exhibited to the mob on a stand as though it were a show, getting insult and indignity as the beginning of his freedom, but released and acknowledged with equal decency…. You masters have heard; mark my saying as a sound one; do not slander me to your slaves as praising the day with false rhetoric, take away the pain from oppressed souls as the Lord does the deadness from bodies, transform their disgrace into honour, their oppression into joy, their fear of speaking into openness; bring out the prostrate from their corner as if from their graves, let the beauty of the [Easter] feast blossom like a flower upon everyone.

- On the Holy Pasch, 7-8 (Quoted in Carter, 244)

Wilson-Hartgrove, Vanier, and Hauerwas

It’s great to see Jean Vanier and the L’Arch communities getting so much attention in the blogs lately.  Notable is Jonathan Wils0n-Hartgrove’s interview of Vanier and Stanley Hauerwas on their recent book, Living Gently in a Violent World, in the April edition of Sojourners.

Wilson-Hartgrove: You write in Living Gently in a Violent World about the gap between the so-called “normal” world and the world of people who have been unjustly pushed to the margins. How can responding to that gap draw people into community?

Vanier: It’s easier to say why the gap exists. The gap is created by fear. The gap is what pushes us to create bigger gaps. You feel lost in front of the one who is different because you don’t know his language, you don’t know how to respond, you don’t know if you’ll be accepted. Many people reject people with disabilities because they just don’t know what to do. Myths are created—the disabled are dangerous or sexually perverse. So there is fear.

But what breaks down the fear? That is the big question: What creates transformation? We meet someone. St. Francis said he always held lepers in repulsion. Then one day the Lord led him to the lepers. He said, “When I left them I had a new gentleness in my body and in my spirit. From then on, I wanted to follow the Lord.” When you meet the leper and you listen to him, you realize that he’s just a human being. From very deep inside of one, there arises a compassion for life.

…

Wilson-Hartgrove: Stanley, you write that L’Arche is not a solution but a sign. When so many people want solutions, why do we need signs?

Hauerwas: Because we’re Christians. Christ­ianity is fundamentally a sign that enables you to live when you know no solution. Solutions will always kill people. So we need signs that are witnesses to help us know we’re not abandoned. That’s a politics. It challenges the politics of power which says, “I need to do a violent act now in order to achieve peace in the future.” There is no peace in the future through violence.

The Bush Doctrine’s 6th Anniversary

“We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and to restore control of that country to its people….The dangers to our country and to our world will be overcome.”

Today marks the sixth anniversary of George W. Bush’s speech in announcement of the Iraq invasion, which for many people marks the advent of a shift in American foreign policy named as the “Bush Doctrine.” In short, this is the license of the President to unilaterally wage “preventative” war against bodies that have not yet attacked the U.S., but pose a foreseeable threat to do so. Tied up with this is the notion that the military has the capacity to create a situation in which danger does not exist. This, of course, finds no place within even the loosest interpretations of Just War theory, making the prerogative for war-making conditional upon no external moral standard; the only condition for war is the existence of a threat in the perception of the President.

Why is it, though, that we have named this doctrine in honor of Bush? As Andrew Bacevich never tires of pointing out, this has been the standard use to which the military has been put at least since Vietnam. George W. may be the apogee of a line of commanders in chief who believe in the power of military intervention to solve international tension, build democracy, and secure peace, he is not its founder. Iraq gets our attention because it has not gone as we had hoped, but it is not of another category than our smaller-scale interventions in Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and so on.

The Velvet Reformation

Paul Elie’s article on Rowan Williams in this month’s Atlantic is a welcome exception to much of conflict-hungry headlines surrounding the appointment of the openly gay and non-celibate Gene Robinson to bishop of New Hampshire, and the ensuing escalation of tensions between conservatives and progressives in the Anglican Communion.

Elie, while he claims to have read Williams’ works, does not pursue his biographical piece on the Archbishop from the perspective of his theology, which I think is a mistake if the intention is to understand him as a person and in how his theological convictions demand he handle the conflict as he has. (The one exception to this is a fine insight from The Truce of God).  Nevertheless, it is a fine piece of journalism, which expresses Elie’s genuine admiration for a man who seems to have few admirers outside of the academy lately.

Elie is particularly fascinated and frustrated by Williams’ refusal to take stands and lay down ultimatums on the issue.  Whereas the less-enthralled, whether conservative to liberal, move from Williams deference to castigate him as weak, cowardly, or just bumbling, Elie’s endearment for the Archbishop allows him no such easy dismissal, forcing him rather to seek some coherent explanation for why Williams has handle the issue as he has.  The answer he receives from Williams, to me, points to some very profound, and perhaps courageous, convictions on the relation between the offices of theologian and priest, and on a deeper level the nature of the process of communal decision making in the church:

“Never in my career did 5,000 words make such a tempest,” he said, and went on to distance himself from the essay—but not really. “I wrote it as a professor of theology contributing to an increasingly tense debate in the Church of England. I didn’t think, I’d better be careful what I say, in case I become a bishop one day. When people ask have I changed my mind, I can only answer, ‘Well, the questions I raised there are still on the table. They’re still questions. And I still think they’re worth addressing.’ That essay is my contribution, made in good faith at that time. Now my responsibilities are different. The responsibility is not to argue a case from the top or cast the chairman’s vote. It’s to hold the reins for a sensible debate—and that’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

Couldn’t it be that all the questions having to do with homosexuality were actually being pushed off the table—pushed by him?

“They’re not going to go away, and we shouldn’t pretend that they are,” Williams said. “But my question as archbishop of Canterbury is: How do we address this as a church, not just a group of local religious enthusiasts here and there? The ordination of Gene Robinson had effects that were extremely divisive because people elsewhere felt it committed them to a position they had not arrived at themselves. So part of my job becomes to ask: If there is to be any change, how do you decide what change is appropriate? And that leads to the characterization of being indecisive and all the other things that everybody always says.”