Word: archbishop
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...Archbishop's office is arguably ill-equipped for that challenge. A job sometimes described as "first among equals" now looks more like lion-tamer-minus-whip. Some think Williams should step back and let the rift happen. "No one is up to this, however gifted they may be," says Chris Sugden, executive secretary of the group Anglican Mainstream. Then again, Mainstream is a very conservative group that might prefer an immediate split; and if the Communion disintegrates, it is not Sugden who could be known forever as its last Archbishop of Canterbury. Says Bishop Idris Jones, Primate of the Scottish...
...Back in 2002, Rowan Williams was something of a prodigy. At 52, he became the youngest Archbishop of Canterbury in 200 years. "And," wrote one observer, "perhaps the cleverest," a man who had quickly established himself as one of Anglicanism's most gifted preachers and probably its pre-eminent theologian. He was a self-professed "hairy lefty," a Christian socialist arrested in a 1985 protest at a U.S. air base in England, who now criticizes the Iraq war. And he once also had a controversial stance on the theology of sexuality. In 1989 he delivered a lecture to Britain...
...elected as their presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who had supported Robinson's elevation. Today Williams calls Robinson's election - absent any prior general decision allowing the ordination of people in same-sex relationships - "bizarre and puzzling." "His heart is where it's always been," says Welsh Archbishop Barry Morgan, a good friend. "His natural sympathies and theological understanding are on the side of those who are gay." And yet Williams insists that churches should not outpace the Communion's consensus...
...British gay-rights activist snapped: "I hope he likes his newfound friends." But in fact, he has few on the right. "He's a very courteous man," says Morgan. "Sometimes the nuanced way in which he says things is lost on people." Certainly it is lost on archconservative Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, who has said that God regards homosexuality as the equivalent of humans having sex with various animals, and who has commented, "We don't have to go through Canterbury to get to Jesus." He also set up his own Anglican body in the U.S. - the Convocation of Anglicans...
...Archbishop is weary of being pushed around. The pusher-in-chief, of course, especially since the founding of cana, has been Akinola. "I've said to him privately and publicly I don't think that [cana] was an appropriate response," says Williams. He is also bothered by the unwavering support by Akinola's church of a proposed Nigerian law, now lapsed, that would have assigned a five-year jail term not only to open homosexuals, but to those who supported them. Williams says he is "very unhappy" about the situation, "and I've written to the Archbishop about...