From The New Yorker-
If you don’t like living in a drafty palace, being Archbishop of Canterbury is a no-win job. Rowan Williams—who earlier this month decided that he would leave that palace for the cozier precincts of Magdalen College, Cambridge, in December—would probably admit to knowing this when he took the job, ten years ago, with a flock already on the brink of schism.
He wanted to mend fences, and he was famously respectful, or, as he called it, “democratic.” He said repeatedly that Lambeth Palace was not the Vatican, and that he was “not a pope.” He was being accurate. He may have been the head of the Church of England (Primate of All England is the official title), not to mention the spiritual leader of an international Anglican Communion of eighty million Christians, but he liked to remind you that his only formal authority was in his own Archdiocese of Canterbury and its cathedral. The rest, he told me, during a particularly bad moment in the church’s battle over elevating women bishops and ordaining openly gay priests, was guidance. No one was forced to listen.
Williams is a scholar (philosophy and theology), a teacher (Oxford and Cambridge), and a writer (more than thirty books, including a poetry collection, a biography of Dostoyevsky, and a luminous reflection on the nature of art and love, called “Grace and Necessity”), as well as a priest. In other words, he is a thinker in a world of increasingly harsh theologies. His critics liked to compare him to Barack Obama, because he saw “three sides of any argument” and, as often as not, chose none. The comparison was apt, because, like the President, Williams “reached out” across the aisle—or the transept—to the people most likely to ignore him. He believed that with reason, compassion, and accommodation, he could reconcile a warring clergy.
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/03/rowan-williams-resignation.html#ixzz1qJjOVRfa
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