Gratuitous Episco-Blogging

The PeeBee her own self is interviewed by that apostle of the middlebrow (to borrow National Review's term), Bill Moyers.

The thing is a puff piece, starting off with some goo about how KJS, having found peace and inner beauty with the squids, now seeks to savor that same serendipity in the rest of God's Creation, regardless of size, shape, color, behavior or number of appendages. And when Moyers gets into the Anglican crisis, he simply sends down a series of slow, underhanded lobs, which Her High Priestessness gently dinks into short field.

From what I've seen and read of her, this is the PeeBee's style. She doesn't seek to confront or overpower with emotion or reason. Instead, she's very serene, delivering her talking points with an arch, sidelong look and peppering them with lots of soothing little murmers and sighs. If you can manage to shake off this Old Man Willow treatment, however, her substance is really rather horrifying. It's long been said that the Anglican Faith could be thought of as a tripod supported by the three legs of Scripture, tradition and reason. For a while now, I've been saying that the problem was that the leg of reason has got too long, thereby tipping over the tripod. But listening to KJS now, it seems a more apt metaphor to say that she is simply sawing off the tradition leg. To her, apparently, Truth is completely contextual, constantly shifting depending on time and circumstances. So as a matter of course, we enlightened, progressive Westerners are going to see things differently from, say, the Ancients, or from modern Africans. (The Peeb is good enough to opine that this can't really be helped - the African Church's "Truth" is of course influenced by the pressure of Radical Islam and other factors, and therefore naturally not the same as ours. The unspoken undercurrent, I strongly expect from the couple of jabs she takes at PeterAkinola, is that we can't expect very much from people who still believe in the ju-ju.)

This sort of Biblical deconstructionism plays beautifully with the Left's universalist agnosticism. Take the story of David and Jonathan, which the Peeb mentions. Traditionally, their relationship has been looked on as a supreme example of love, but never with any sexual overtones. KJS doesn't attack that traditional view head on. Instead, she says it really doesn't matter - we live in a time of heightened awareness and acceptance of same-sex sexuality, so it's perfectly right that we should view them that way. The Truth we derive from this story is just as valid as the Truth anybody else gets from it, even if these two Truths are incompatible with each other.

When Moyers asks the Peeb what she thinks about people who can't accept this kind of incompatibility, she sighs and smiles and says she's saddened that such people are "uncomfortable". She uses this expression a fair bit. See, there's nothing wrong with what she's saying - all of the tension lies within the hearts of those knuckle-dragging traditionalists who can't or won't come to terms with themselves and with the world around them. At one point, Moyers (clearly implying that he isn't a religious person) asks, "Why are religious people so uptight about sex?" The Peeb responds that it's a combination of ignorance and fear, ignorance because such people haven't been sufficiently educated about the Wonders of Nature n' stuff, and fear because they're uncomfortable (there's that word again) with things that are new or not understood. She also laments what a shame it is that all this gets in the way of the real mission of the Church, which is to do Good Works.

The latter part of the interview is taken up with the standard talking points equating the current issues with those of Women's empowerment and slavery. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

At one point, KJS goes off on an odd tangent about how the Greeks are to blame for the blinkered thinking of traditionalists, how we've been ingrained with a need to look at everything in terms of opposites: black and white, off and on, right and wrong. Make of that what you will. She also gets in a little rant about how the Early Church Fathers felt compelled to stomp on growing female power and influence, apparently out of fear that them wimmins was a'gonna take over everything and ruin it. (I've never read the book, but I was under the impression this was a central theme of The Da Vinci Code.)

One other thing I noticed - In the early days of her High Priestessnesship, KJS sounded a lot like the psycho-stalker-soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend when talking about traditionalists within the ECUSA. "If you demure, we will engage. If you move away, we'll hug tighter. If you walk, we'll run after you. We're going to love you and there's not a damned thing you can do about it!!" That's all changed now, probably because the 815 miscalculated the number of secessionsts out there. Now the line is "We'll leave the lights on." I should think that for a Church so keenly progressive on the matter of environmentalism, this would be monstrously irresponsible, seeing that the odds of very many people coming back once they've left are, oh, about nil.

Be sure to check out the original posting over at Stand Firm Faith. Also, Baby Blue has an excellent live-blogging post and some feisty comments.

Yips! to the Colossus for sending all this along. (And sooper-sekret message to the C - received the package and thanks very much. Proper gratitude is on its way via snail mail.)