Interesting.  But I'm having a difficult time discerning exactly what he
means by "morality."  He seems to be picking and choosing what it is that he
wants to identify as a social breakdown.

MLW+
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Clavier+" <anglican@...>
To: "pfb" <pfb@...>; <faithandlife@...>; "Michael L.
Ward" <mward@...>; <frchad@...>
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 11:25 AM
Subject: [FaithandLife] Fw:



----- Original Message -----
From: Fr. Tony- The Prairie Parson
To: All Saints Anglican Church
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 10:59 AM


From The Times of London


THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, last night launched an
impassioned plea for church leaders to put morality back at the heart of
society and public life.

In an agenda-setting speech, his first since taking up office at the start
of the month, Dr Williams showed the depths of his determination to advance
an intellectual agenda and make the Church of England a powerhouse at the
centre of the debate about politics and morality.

The speech, delivered to an audience of politicians, academics, church
leaders, newspaper editors and other opinion formers in Central London, was
one of the most intellectually ambitious and far-reaching speeches from an
Archbishop of Canterbury for 30 years.

In his speech, the Dimbleby Lecture, which will be broadcast on BBC One
tonight, Dr Williams argued that without religion "our whole politics is
likely to be in deep trouble".

He said it was inevitable that governments can no longer deliver in terms of
setting out a moral basis for ordinary citizens to live their lives by.

While governments are successful at encouraging enterprise and consumerism
to an unprecedented degree, they are no longer capable of guaranteeing
long-term security.

He made it clear that he believes that in a post-September 11 world, it is
God that has to define how we live rather than our political leaders.

At the press conference to mark his nomination earlier this year Dr Williams
spoke of his determination to "recapture the imagination of our culture for
Christianity". His lecture was an indication of how he intends to set about
doing that.

Dr Williams took as his starting point The Shield of Achilles, a seminal
work describing how the traditional model of the nation-state is being
superseded by the market-state, by the American academic and former White
House adviser, Philip Bobbitt.

He said that we were living in a period "where the basic assumptions about
how states work are shifting." He said: "The idea that's being increasingly
canvassed is that we are witnessing the end of the nation-state, and that
the nation-state is being replaced in the economically-developed world by
what some call the market-state."

A new form of political administration has arisen in which the idea of being
a citizen and a politician has changed. Where the job of those who ran the
state was once seen as guaranteeing the general good of the community, the
state no longer has the power to keep its side of the bargain. The
international power of the markets and consumers meant that any one country
is unable to guarantee employment - one indication of how things have
shifted.

In addition there are "sinister implications" in the revolution in
electronic communication, with international conspiracy harder to detect and
frustrate. "Al-Qaeda and similar networks inhabit a virtual world, not an
identifiable headquarters in a single place."

The deregulation involved in the new political mode has meant "the
withdrawal of the state from many of those areas where it used to bring some
kind of moral pressure to bear," he said.

Dr Williams described how the educational system, despite the best efforts
of teachers, is empty of vision.

He said: "It means that government is free to encourage enterprise but not
to protect against risk, to try and increase the literal and metaphorical
purchasing power of citizens, but not to take for granted anything much in
the way of agreement about common goals or social good."

One "worrying sign" of this underlying philosophy was the way successive
governments have dealt with education, with the emphasis on parental choice
and the publication of results. He conceded these in themselves were not
"social evils". But he said: "They also fit all too neatly into the consumer
model and allow the actual philosophy of education itself to be obscured
behind a cloud of sometimes mechanical criteria of attainment."

Dr Williams, a fan of The Simpsons, illustrated his connection to popular
culture with a reference to how a society without deeper meaning behind its
culture can lose itself in repetitive behaviour from which it never learns.
"Groundhog Dayis a comic horror, but a real enough one: we know how easily
we can get stuck in repeating patterns."

This was a further argument for society's need for Christianity because it
gave people the historical background and morality not to be forever
repeating mistakes.

Dr Williams said that modern politics was about sating consumer needs. "The
unspoken model of political expectation now is increasingly the consumerist
one: the individual confronts the state, asking for what is promised -
maximal choice, purchasing power to determine a lifestyle. Policies that
restrict lifestyle choices are electoral suicide." He accused politicians of
only concentrating on the short term, bouncing from one election to the
next.

Religious belief could fill the vaccuum, he said. "If specifically religious
tradition has a place here, it is because of those elements that only
religious conviction seems to secure in our sense of what is human. To see
or know anything adequately is to be aware of its relation to the eternal,"
he said. "Without that relativising moment, our whole politics is likely to
be in deep trouble."

The challenge for religious communities is how to offer a vision as a way of
opening up some of the depth of human choices, he added.




Fr. Tony Clavier
Trinity Episcopal Church, Watertown,  SD 57201
www.tecwatertown.org
605-886-4167 (O) 605-886-3639 (Fax)

"My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters
get in the wrong places."  ~Winnie-the-Pooh (1926).