Best moment on The Sopranos tonight (so far) is Tony Soprano yelling at an insurance flunkie who comes into his hospital room in an effort to get him out of there. She says that if emergency medicos hadn’t found an insurance card in their “wallet biopsy” on him in the ambulance, they would have dumped his ass at Martin Luther King Hospital. Tony sneers as her: “Get out of my room, you sick c***.” Spoken on behalf of insurance victims everywhere.
Second-best moment is Tony Soprano going up against a fundamentalist religious nut.
Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger interviews Bishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in a fascinating exchange.
Williams is not like our most visible religious spokesmen, for over here the fringes take over the pulpit of mass media — and media, in turn, go to these people as if they represent all our religious views — while mainstream clergy cower from the bright lights, acting for too long as if masses behind media were below them. (Though some people I know at Auburn Seminary are trying to change that with a program to bring more religious voices and viewpoints from the center into media.) In the UK, the mainstream church is the official church. So though Williams is publicity shy — this is a rare interview — he still has no choice but to act as a spokesman. He wears the cloak awkwardly, as he wades from one tempest to the next — the worldwide controversy and threat of schism over gays in Anglican clergy (neither side can decide where Williams will stand), creationism (he says here that he is against teaching it in schools), the war in Iraq — managing to disappoint both the left and the right.
What’s most interesting to me is Williams’ discussion of his role as a moral leader. He wears this cloak awkwardly as well. In fact, he argues that the church should not be, in Rusbridger’s words, “in the business of moral leadership.”
Was he really so averse to the idea that the Archbishop of Canterbury should offer moral leadership? “Leadership is, to me, a very, very murky and complicated concept,” he begins, sitting in an armchair in his Lambeth Palace office, his minder a watchful presence across the room.
“I think the question I always find myself asking of myself is, ‘Will a pronouncement here or a statement there actually move things on, or is it something that makes me feel better and other people feel better, but doesn’t necessarily contribute very much?’” …
“…I think there is a bit of a myth, if you like, that Religious Leaders – ‘capital R capital L’ – are, by their nature, people who make public pronouncements on morals.” Williams parodies this position as, “Why doesn’t the archbishop condemn X, Y, Z? Because that’s what archbishops do, you know, they condemn things. They make statements, usually negative, condemnatory statements.” It’s part of what he terms being “comic vicar to the nation”.
But still, don’t most people look to archbishops for some sort of revelation or guidance on the basis that they are unusually clever or holy or reflective? “I just wonder a bit whether, you know, when an archbishop condemns something, suddenly in, I don’t know, the bedsits of north London, somebody says, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be having premarital sex’, or in the cells of al-Qaida, somebody says, ‘Goodness, terrorism’s wrong, the archbishop says so. I never thought of that.’ I’m not sure that’s how it is.” …
Now isn’t that amazing? Here it’s so easy for anyone — ministers, movie stars, politicians, trumped-up organizations — to use media to claim higher ground. I find it most oxymoronic that politicians believe they are moral leaders — politicians are the last people we think of as moral. Yet there is the Archbishop of Canterbury, of all people, shying away from moral leadership.
Williams talks more like a statesman, a lower-case democrat, than many of our statesmen as he looks for common ground. Or perhaps he sounds like a Congregationalist, talking about the community’s discernment of the truth.
“…I’ve been given a responsibility to try and care for the church as a whole, the health of the church. That health has a lot to do with the proper and free exchange between different cultural and political and theological contexts: the people are actually able to learn from each other. And it’s got a lot to do, therefore, with valuing and nurturing unity, not, as I’ve often said, not as an alternative to truth, but actually as one of the ways we absorb truth.
“That means that, structurally speaking, in the church as I believe it to be, it really is wrong for an archbishop to be the leader of a party; in a polarised and deeply divided church it’s particularly important, I think, not to be someone pursuing an agenda that isn’t the agenda of the whole.” …
… “My conviction, my views, my theological reflections … they are things which I have to bring to that common process of discernment. It’s not as if I can say simply, ‘I know this is right, this is where we’ve got to go, come along, whatever the cost.’…”
It’s not as if he seeks unity above all; Anglicans are preparing to pick their sides in a possible worldwide schism over the gay bishop in their church in our country. And it’s not as if he seeks principle above all; it is not clear where he will stand, in the end, on gay clergy.
He could simply be confused or wishy-washy or scared. Or he could be the kind of moral leader we really do need — the kind who is not sure and leads his people to lead.
The Episcopal Diocese of D.C. has started a blog of Daniel to deal with the attacks on not just the show but also on the church from other, well, competitive sects. I see this via Daniel (no relation) Radosh. I love this post from the church’s blog about comments left there by people calling themselves Christian:
I am always struck by how entirely those who claim to know Christ are betrayed by the self-indulgent quality of their rhetoric. Many of this morning’s posts are far more offensive than anything you will encounter tonight on “Daniel”–not because of what they say, but because of they way they say it.
It is always bracing to be told one is going to hell, that one’s Church is the tool of the devil, etc., and while I appreciate many of the poster’s seeming concern for my soul, I wish they would show similar concern for other people’s feelings. It is possible to tell someone you disagree with them strongly in a way that allows them to hear it. Give it a try, eh?
When is media going to learn that just because somebody calls himself religious, or even a religious leader, that doesn’t mean he speaks for or leads all the other people who call themselves religious?
Pat Robertson is a hateful nutjob. Once in a while, when he says something particularly hateful and nutty — like arguing that Sharon’s stroke is God’s punishment for subdividing the holy land — media put the spotlight on it and even if they don’t say he’s a bilious bozo, the attention they give implies it. So one wonders why they ever treat him as a religious leader.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is another alleged religious leader and the media get how dangerous he is when he says that Israel should be “wiped off the map” and that he hopes Sharon dies. You don’t hear media dare to suggest that he represents all Islam.
But when fringe extremists like the so-called American Family Association and the self-annointed Parents Television Council decry what they think is indecent or try to stop us from seeing a show they don’t approve of, media — not to mention the FCC — treat them as spokesman for the religious in a predominately religious nation. They are not.
I go to church every Sunday (well, not this Sunday) and call myself a Christian and Pat Robertson, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the AFA, and the PTC do not speak for me and have nothing to do with my view of religion, of God, or of decency.
My sister, the Rev. Jarvis, forwarded a column from an Anchorage paper written, I believe, by Elise Sereni Patkotak (I can find no link) about the nonissue of stores wishing us happy holidays:
As the debate over Christmas in stores continues, I have what I think is a great suggestion. Why don’t we put Christmas back in church and ask the stores to butt out altogether?
…I have no problem with a midwinter festival. But let’s call it that. Let’s have all the traditions and ceremonies we want surrounding it. Buy expensive gifts for your loved ones or get drunk at parties or overeat at sumptuous meals – whatever works for you. But let’s not pretend this has anything to do with the birth of a child two thousand years ago who came with a message that is the antithesis of the celebration we now claim to hold in his name….
So I don’t want Christmas back in the stores. I think saying happy holidays there is just fine.
What strikes me most about the so-called “intelligent design” hooha is that the religious right is hiding God. Yes, of course, that’s their trick: If we don’t call God God but instead call his work “intelligent design,” then we can sneak him into curricula because the nonbelievers are just too stupid, or so goes their rationale. Nobody — save George Bush and the 700 members of the 700 Club — is buying it. The good citizens of Dover, Pa., turned out the fanatical school board members who tried this trick. And yesterday, a federal judge called it for the sham it am. An excerpt:
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy….
The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.
And that’s the essence of what is shocking: By trying to insist that this is faux science and not religion, the religious right behind this alleged movement are denying God to sell God, lying about the Bible to drive the Bible. By trying to hide God, it is almost as if they are ashamed of him but I think he would be ashamed of them.
Ah, the conspiracy against Christmas continues: Yesterday, I was decorating the church — the church — and when the florist left after delivering the poinsettas and Christmas trees, he said, “Happy holidays.” Another Christmas killer!
The highest court in the United Methodist Church yesterday defrocked a lesbian minister in Philadelphia and reinstated a Virginia pastor who had been suspended for denying a gay man membership in his congregation.
The nine-member Judicial Council also rejected a declaration by Methodists in the Pacific Northwest that there is a “difference of opinion among faithful Christians regarding sexual orientation and practice.” The court said the declaration was a “historical statement without prescriptive force” and had no bearing on church laws.
