The Spirit is blowin' all over

A friend sent a link to a new article and asked me to comment on it. (They think I'm an expert in things Anglican -- shows how much they know!) My comment was, "Amen! Preach it sister!"

The article by The Rev. Canon Marilyn McCord Adams of Christ Church, Oxford, starts out with the typical argument we've heard at Jake's place for far too long. Then it breaks out into some new territory. I didn't even get a second cup of tea because I was riveted to what Canon McCord Adams was saying.

My favourite bit is her expose of the primate's exaggerated sense of self-importance:

Not only has TWR-polity been set down on paper three times. Thanks to TWR’s tone of presumptive legitimacy, it has already had ‘a trial run’! The Windsor process against TEC and New Westminster gave TWR-polity a primate-dominant interpretation. If TWR spoke of submitting novelties to the instruments of (comm)union, it was the primates who acted at Dromantine to request that TEC and New Westminster explain themselves at Nottingham and to put TEC and New Westminster on probation. It was the primates who acted at Tanzania to override the report of the Joint Standing Committee and to reject 2006 General Convention’s responses to TWR. It was the primates who issued ultimata that TEC impose moratoria on ordinations and blessings of coupled homosexuals by 30 September 2007. It was the primates who declared foreign incursions (by one province into the turf of another) not to be on a moral par with North American breeches of faith. It was the primates who moved to set up a primatial council to handle appeals from TEC’s conscientious objectors. Even after the Joint Standing Committee had given TEC a passing grade for its New Orleans responses, it was the primates’ estimates that the ABC still sought. Thus interpreted in the enacting, TWR-polity seemed to mean veto power for foreign primates in no way accountable to the province in question.

Run, don't walk, to your nearest mouse and click on this link. When you’ve read the excellent paper, let me know what you think.