Birthday post!

Happy birthday sammee42! Hope you have a great day, and that the year to come brings health and happiness.

Am nervously awaiting news of the General Synod vote on women bishops

And on the other hot button issue of the day, an interesting consideration of Hooker and the Anglican approach to the uses and abuses of the Bible in defining ethical laws, with particular reference to homosexuality from the Archbishop of Armagh. From which I chiefly take that the authentic Anglican response to many an apparently black-and-white dilemma is not precisely 'we must produce an artificial grey in compromise!' as simply 'actually, it's more complicated than that'. An attitude which I think is fairly admirable, because what matters is finding the truth and following it, rather than jumping to conclusions, though I admit it's not the sort of attitude which makes it easy to gather a large party of followers - or indeed to rapid decision making. But you're never going to get that within the Anglican communion anyway, because it's too decentralised. The Anglican communion doesn't have a Pope-figure, however much some people seem to wish that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be one (how much they'd actually like it if they got it is debatable) - actually, if it's comparable to any mediaeval model, it's that of the Eastern church, where the various Patriarchs didn't out-rank each other and could not force decisions on each other's churches, even if Constantinople did sometimes come close to being the leader they didn't have...

ETA: The Bishop of Buckinghamshire sums up pretty much exactly what I feel at the moment. I don't want there to be a schism, and I'll be sad to see some of the antis I know personally walk out, if that's what they do - but the situation simply cannot go on as it is, because it is stopping the church doing what it's there for, to show God's love to the world.

Something completely different

Dear Deutsche Bahn,

it's awfully nice of you to send me an e- birthday card-cum-prize-competition - but couldn't you have done something which doesn't involve a pretty small girl in an old fashioned frock with a lovely balloon, thus giving me screaming flashbacks to Sister of Mine in Human Nature?

Love,

a slightly traumatised tree_and_leaf.


On another note, I'm trying not to post about the DW season finale until I've actually seen it, but this has not stopped me starting to write (sort of fix it) Donna fic, which I will hopefully have the self control not to post. Don't worry, though, however bad it is, it definitely won't involve a sentimental death scene in which our heroine expires, damp eyed, in a sparkle of gold and her poor aching head in Ten's lap...