The bird in the hand

The bishops u-turn on a u-turn with LLF, but is the conservatives' counter actually better than what's already on offer?

Hello! This time next week hundreds of other Anglicans (and yours truly) will be reluctantly joyfully clambering aboard trains and trudging heading to York for the next meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England. The agenda is packed full of stuff (I wrote a summary for the Church Times here) but let’s be honest, what we’re most interested in is same-sex relationships. This week we dive deep into the new proposals from the bishops on how they hope to cut the Gordian knot they are caught up in. And then we consider the reactions from the conservatives. Spoiler alert! They don’t like them. There’s a lot to get through so buckle up, but at the bottom we do just have space for my latest podcast (an interview with the former bishop Richard Cheetham on how to get more science into our church culture) and a long list of interesting links from around the internet.

As you will see, The Critical Friend is not short this week and it’s taken me a while to draw it all together (and then…