Alternative reaction to Rowan Williams

I was more than a little suspicious of the feeding frenzy in the media over the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent lecture: Civil and Religious Law in England: a religious perspective. I printed off his lecture and read it quickly. My first impression was that this was a serious attempt to address a genuine problem of post-enlightenment positivism in law, and that it could have important implications for Catholics as well as Muslims. There certainly seemed to be little justification for the tabloid headlines.

I am not a canon lawyer so I thought I would leave it alone until I had a chance to chat with Fr John Boyle about it. When he arrived at Ampleforth, he said that the train had wifi and so he was able to read the lecture and write about it on the journey up.

His post is a common sense appraisal of the issue and I agree with him. See Bishop Burkha or Williams the Wise?

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