Rowan has been busy lately. Thus is from the Guardian.Rowan Williams's remarks to the New Statesman on the issue of disestablishment were characteristically cautious, a pattern which many of his critics within the Church of England will recognise. He used to be in favour of the disestablishment of the Church of England before he became Archbishop of Canterbury, just as he was then rather more in favour of greater tolerance and understanding within the church for gay relationships.
More recently, conscious of his position at the head of a fissiparous church, he has been much more unsure. Maybe there's a touch of what, in other circumstances, he has described as "institutional double-think" - what outsiders (and some within the church) see as hypocrisy.
Actually, the archbishop knows very well that the dismantling of the Church of England's embedded position in the state is unlikely to happen under any current party - least of all a government which took seven years to abolish fox hunting, an extremely simple legislative matter compared with dismantling the complex web of historic legislation defining the church's position in the community, its rights and responsibilities.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/18/rowan-williams-disestablishment-new-statesman
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