An
intervention by Rowan Williams on our government and its "Big Society", that's what!
I must admit that I do enjoy reading the man's thoughts on mostly everything, even if I'm not particularly fond of him sitting on the fence for nearly a decade in the evil fundamentalists vs. cuddly liberals stalemate. In particular, I was massively impressed with his
thoughts on 9/11 which are still incredibly relevant today and well worth a read.
So now let's hear the key points from his New Stateman's piece (read the full text by clicking on my first link above):
'An idea whose roots are firmly in a particular strand of associational socialism has been adopted enthusiastically by the Conservatives'. 'Managerial politics [is] attempting with shrinking success to negotiate life in the shadow of big finance.''With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted.''While grass-roots initiatives and local mutualism are to be found flourishing in a great many places, they have been weakened by several decades of cultural fragmentation. The old syndicalist and co-operative traditions cannot be reinvented overnight and, in some areas, they have to be invented for the first time.''[There is] a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, nor by the steady pressure to increase what look like punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system.''There is [a] theological strand to be retrieved that is not about "the poor" as objects of kindness but about the nature of sustainable community, seeing it as one in which what circulates - like the flow of blood - is the mutual creation of capacity, building the ability of the other person or group to become, in turn, a giver of life and responsibility. Perhaps surprisingly, this is what is at the heart of St Paul's ideas about community at its fullest; community, in his terms, as God wants to see it.'
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