Hieronymus
1yr ago
One more minor bikeshed: modhatted comments have the poster's username in white on bright red, apparently regardless of theme. While this makes sense for bans and such, the median mod comment on TheMotte has a much mellower tone. I'd suggest either changing the color to the traditional green or dialing back the amount of red color, e.g., underline the username and set it in red with no background.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I know a lot of people are asking for less whitespace, but please consider adding a little more vertical space between top-level comments. It would help to visually distinguish subtopics within the weekly threads.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Seeing the new title of King Charles’ wife, the queen consort, on Queen Elizabeth’s death has left me a surprised and befuddled American. I would love to hear about the Church of England’s role in modern British public life from those who know about it.
The Backstory
As a child I was taught in school that King Henry VIII founded the Church of England because he wanted a divorce from his wife, which Roman Catholic doctrine would not allow. But this is misleading. What Henry sought from the pope was in modern terms an annulment; Henry’s wife Catherine was the Holy Roman Emperor’s aunt, and the pope’s political and military situation was precarious, so the pope stalled. This led Henry to claim supremacy over the church and get the English clergy to grant his annulment. The Church of England still regarded divorce per se, dissolving the valid marriage of two living spouses, to be impossible.
Fast-forward four hundred years to 1936. The new King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom proposed to marry Wallis Simpson, an American in the process of divorcing her second husband. The prime ministers of the Commonwealth realms were not prepared to accept a disreputable queen, and publicly flouting the church of which Edward was in principle the head threatened to create a constitutional crisis. He decided to give up his throne and his responsibilities to marry her anyway. His brother became King George VI, and George’s daughter Elizabeth became the heiress presumptive.
Prince Charles’ Reprise
In 2002 the Church of England decided to allow the divorced to remarry in church – depending on the circumstances and the pastor. In other cases it may be possible to have a church blessing service after a civil wedding.
This is what Charles, Prince of Wales, did when he married Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. His ex-wife having died, his divorce was presumably no impediment to the marriage, but her ex-husband was still living. Neither of his parents attended the civil wedding, though they did attend the blessing afterward. Queen Elizabeth acknowledged the awkwardness by announcing that Camilla was to be known as Duchess of Cornwall rather than Princess of Wales while Elizabeth lived and as princess consort rather than queen afterward.
The constitutionality of this decision was disputed, and it wasn’t clear whether Charles would follow his mother’s wishes once he was king. So I was surprised when, on Queen Elizabeth’s death, references to Camilla as queen consort occasioned no commentary. It turns out that in February Elizabeth changed her mind and spared Charles the trouble.
What does this imply about the Church of England?
It’s nothing new for the powerful or influential to demand that Christian churches capitulate, and it’s hardly unprecedented for unprincipled pastors to grant those demands. It may be that Elizabeth’s piety and Charles’ sense of duty were the only things that kept him from a church wedding in the first place. But I can’t escape the impression that the Church of England has ceased to be a legitimacy-granting institution beholden to God, at least in principle, and has come to have its own legitimacy judged by how well it follows the Zeitgeist.
Representatives of the Church of England’s laity narrowly turned down a measure in 2012 that would have allowed women to become bishops; some of those voting against the measure were conservatives who opposed the change and some were progressives who thought the measure didn’t take a hard enough line against the conservatives. (The change went through in 2014.) The Archbishop of Canterbury said at the time:
“Whatever the motivations for voting yesterday … the fact remains that a great deal of this discussion is not intelligible to our wider society. Worse than that, it seems as if we are wilfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of that wider society.”
Where does all this leave the Church of England? I’m interested in insights from anyone who has them, but I would particularly love to hear the perspectives of English Anglicans and other members of state churches.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Your hypothesis has some parallels to commentary on modern villains by YouTube movie reviewer the Critical Drinker. He concludes that writers are often forced into this kind of arc by conventions that won’t let the heroine be portrayed at a disadvantage to a male antagonist.
Is it more common to have a classic hero’s journey when the heroine faces a villainess?
I didn't read Neuromancer until the twenty-first century, so maybe my view is skewed, but I doubt it was ever a good story. There is no internal logic to the matrix at all; it's just deus ex machina after deus ex machina. It would have been fine, even more fun, if it had used an internal logic unlike that of real computers; that's part of the charm of cyberpunk. But when everything is arbitrary there can be no dramatic tension.
For atmosphere Neuromancer is unparalleled. As a yarn it isn't that great.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
That explains so much. I remember being excited to see PCM have a shot at moving off-site, but the number of PCM users who joined was dwarfed by the number of rdrama users who did, so the culture was very different.
I would distinguish pressure to conform to the culture, which all churches experience, from conformance as a source of legitimacy. Women’s ordination sure does look like the latter, though. I don’t know the terms of the debate over the word obey, but I would be interested to learn them; I recall reading Legg’s work at one point, and he writes largely in terms of precedent.
I am pretty sure that the Anglo-Catholics (whether they remained Anglicans or swam the Tiber) made their arguments against their low church brethren in other terms than conformity.
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