Method in his madness

    I always start with the assumption that when someone does something, it has to be for a reason.  That can be a wrong assumption, but it is a good default position, or so I have found.  So how to deal with the comments of Rowan Williams about Sharia law as an alternative legal system in Britain?  Yes, yes, it was actually a nuanced lecture, but even he has to recognize that holding the position as the titular head of the Anglican Communion he is no longer free to give lectures that he might have given when he was an Oxford don.  The row it has prompted could easily cost him his job.
    Hold on, what was that again?  The row it has prompted could easily cost him his job.  My goodness.  That is it.  The penny has dropped.  He wants to be fired.  He wants out.  Now.  Not after the debacle that is sure to be Lambeth.  He wants to be gone, without having to resign over the disintegration of the Communion.  He doesn't want to have either side given the pleasure for having kicked him out.  He knows that he has made a hash out of his job and he has found his way out.
    I knew he was brilliant but he has been a horrible, dreadful Archbishop.  He knows that too.  He wants to give lectures like he just gave.  To do that he needs to take off the vestments of an Archbishop and reurn to the simple scholar's gown of a professor.  He has found the way to do that.

Comments

[Mark Edington]

Hmm. Archepiscopal suicide by cop? "Stop me before I peccadillo again"? I'm not sure. Maybe. If Williams were to resign under fire now, the near-certain failure of this year's Lambeth meeting to reverse the slide toward disintegration would surely be laid at his feet in the eyes of history. I think that isn't something he's eager to guarantee.

I'm much reminded of Benedict's pronouncements on Islam of September '06. Granted, his perspective could not be more different, but the effect was head-scratchingly the same -- what >was< he thinking? -- as was the defense; he was only giving a lecture, doing what he has long done as a scholar, not issuing a statement of doctrine.

Williams' argument was more nuanced than it's received credit for (see http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1581 ), but his delivery made it easy for a remarkably wide range of folks in the British chattering classes to pounce on him -- a thing he seems remarkably talented at making possible.

[emsl]

I think it is just the pan-European tone-deafness by certain classes -- particularly the liberal elite -- to the implications of what they are saying. These are the same people who spent 70 years making excuses for the soviets, who said that Hitler didn't really mean what he said, who continue to assert that Castro is a good guy. The Archbishop spends so much time being sensitive and multicultural that he has lost any moral compass or common sense.