A MOST HAPPY, PEACEFUL AND PROSPEROUS 2006, TO ALL.

PROGNOSTICATIONS

The Office Pool, 2006
From Today's New York Times
We shall revisit this column come 30 December 2006.

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

HERE is your 32nd annual chance to Beat the Pundit. In each multiple choice, pick one, none or all. In a good year, a master prognosticator gets four right.
1. U.S. troops in Iraq at 2006 year's end will number: (a) current "base line" 138,000; (b) closer to 100,000; (c) closer to 90,000; (d) 80,000 or below.
2. Speaker of the House succeeding Dennis Hastert will be: (a) Mike Pence; (b) Rahm Emanuel; (c) Steny Hoyer; (d) Roy Blunt; (e) Nancy Pelosi; (f) Tom DeLay.
3. Best-picture Oscar to: (a) Woody Allen's comeback, "Match Point"; (b) Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain"; (c) James Mangold's "Walk the Line" (cashing in on Reese Witherspoon's performance); (d) Niki Caro's antisexist "North Country."
4. The Robertscalito court will: (a) in the Texas case disengage from involvement in states' redistricting; (b) go the other way in Oregon, holding that federal power to prohibit substances trumps a state's authority to permit physician-assisted suicide; (c) decide that federal funds can be denied to law schools that prohibit military recruitment on campus; (d) uphold McCain-Feingold, enabling Congress to restrict political contributions but not expenditures; (e) reassert citizens' Fourth Amendment protection from "security letters" and warrantless surveillance.
5. Nonfiction sleeper best seller will be: (a) "Never Have Your Dog Stuffed," by Alan Alda; (b) "Self-Made Man" by Norah Vincent, the new Steinem; (c) "In Search of Memory," by Nobelist Eric Kandel.
6. Fiction surprise will be: (a) "Eye Contact" by Cammie McGovern, about an autistic murder witness; (b) "The World to Come" by Dara Horn, about a museum heist; (c) a media murder mystery by Russ Lewis; (d) second novel by Scooter Libby about anything.
7. Israel-Palestine affected by: (a) political split in successful Hamas; (b) Mahmoud Abbas naming jailed Marwan Barghouti his Fatah successor; (c) dieter Arik Sharon's centrist Kadima party winning big in March and forming coalition with Labor.
8. Government report most likely to resist investigative reporting will be: (a) special prosecutor David Barrett's 400-page exposé of political influence within the Internal Revenue Service and Clinton Justice Department; (b) the 36-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee about the 2000 terrorist attack on the destroyer Cole, cleared for release by the C.I.A. but suppressed by the Senate.
9. Stock market will: (a) slump in midsummer, causing data-dependent Fed chief Bernanke to morph into "accommodative Ben"; (b) tread water while a barrel of oil gurgles down to $50 and media "convergence" zigs while corporate "disaggregation" zags; (c) finally reflect sustained 4 percent G.D.P. growth by Dow breaking through 12,000.
10. In Iraqi politics: (a) Shiite majority will refuse to amend the constitution to suit Sunnis; (b) disgruntled Sunnis will encourage terrorists to drive out Americans; (c) nationalist Iraqis and bridging Kurds will achieve a loose confederation and create a Muslim brand of democracy.
11. Vote-changing domestic issue in this year's U.S. elections will be: (a) wiretapping and computer intrusions on privacy; (b) extending reductions of dividend, capital-gains and estate taxes and reducing alternative minimum tax; (c) growth in economic inequality and need for pension protection; (d) journalist jailing by the new leak-plumbers.
12. Thinking outside the ballot box - the dark-horse line for the 2008 presidential race will pit: (a) Virginia Democrat Mark Warner against Massachusetts Republican Mitt Romney in the battle of centrist capitalists; (b) Dems' iconoclastic Senator Russ Feingold vs. the G.O.P.'s nonpartisan Mayor Mike Bloomberg to compete for evangelical vote; (c) the Dems' favorite Republican, Chuck Hagel, against the G.O.P.'s favorite Democrat, Joe Lieberman; (d) domestic centrists and foreign-policy hardliners Hillary ("You're a Grand Old Flag") Clinton against Condi ("I am not a lawyer") Rice.
13. Conventionally, inside the box: (a) Bill Richardson vs. Rudy Giuliani; (b) Hillary vs. John McCain; (c) Warner vs. Romney; (d) Joe Biden vs. George Allen.
14. As Bush approval rises, historians will begin to equate his era with that of: (a) Truman; (b) Eisenhower; (c) L.B.J.; (d) Reagan; (e) Clinton.
My picks: 1 (d); 2 (a); 3 (b); 4 (all); 5 (c); 6 (a); 7 (all); 8 (both); 9 (c); 10 (c); 11 (none); 12 (d); 13 (b); 14 (a). By no means save this column.
William Safire is a former Times Op-Ed columnist.

TOP TENS

Top 10 lists are a staple of a culture obsessed with ranking things, yet in recent years the ubiquitous best-movie, -book and -music lists have become so baffling it seems as though their only goal is to eclipse the Top 10 lists of other critics. Still, lists can tell us much about ourselves -- our obsessions, anxieties and passions. Our Top 10 List of Lists hopes to capture the essence of 2005 by compiling the year's most superlative, truly notable, absolutely blue-ribbon cultural bric-a-brac.
1. Words
Merriam-Webster Online has created a window into our national preoccupations by releasing the Top 10 most-looked-up words of 2005, in order of their most-looked-uppedness.
1. integrity
2. refugee
3. contempt
4. filibuster
5. insipid
6. tsunami
7. pandemic
8. conclave
9. levee
10. inept
Does this list prove that scores of people in the land know not the meaning of "integrity"? I don't think so. I think these people were perfectly confident they knew the meaning of integrity until certain others started throwing the word around like last Sunday's bagels, and so, head in hand, people went back to double-check, only to find that integrity was still integrity and in shorter supply than ever.
What the list actually proves is that no one really understands popular song lyrics. Apparently most of us are just mindlessly mouthing the words without the slightest idea of what Don McLean was doing when he drove his Chevy to the levee or what on earth it means to live, as Tom Petty implores us not to, like a refugee.
2. Birds
Everybody's heard about the bird / b-b-b-bird bird bird / bird is the word. Since "pandemic" was the year's seventh most-looked-up word, we were curious about the creatures that sparked this lexigraphical frenzy. Topping the list of most commonly reported birds of 2005 is the northern cardinal. The state bird of no less than seven states, this is the bird you think of when you hear the word, "bird." So far, not a single cardinal has been involved in any global pandemic.
3. Idiom
The Top 10 Global YouthSpeak Words is so fully fundoo that I encourage you to start the new year by using as many of these brill words as you can.
1. Crunk: A Southern variation of hip hop music; also meaning "fun" or "amped."
2. Mang: Variation of "man," as in "S'up, mang?"
3. A'ight: All right, as in "That girl is nice, she's a'ight."
4. Mad: A lot, as in "She has mad money."
5. Props: Cheers, as in "He gets mad props!"
6. Bizznizzle: This term for "business" is part of the Snoop Dogg/Sean John-inspired lexicon, as in "None of your bizznizzle!"
7. Fully: In Australia, an intensive, as in "fully sick."
8. Fundoo: In India, Hindi for "cool."
9. Brill!: In the U.K., the shortened form of "brilliant!"
10. "S'up": Another in an apparently endless number of "whazzup?" permutations.
4. Internet Hoaxes
By now everyone has encountered at least one of the Top 10 Most Commonly Encountered Hoaxes and Chain Letters. In 2005 the No. 1 most common internet hoax was the pernicious Hotmail chain letter. It is incredible that anyone would fall for something as badly written as:
"If you do not send this message to fifteen Hotmail users within 24 hours of recieving this message, your account will be PERMANETLY SHUT-DOWN. When and if you send this, we herebygrant that you will no longer recieve such messages as this one."
5. Baby Names
Trying to forecast the popularity of baby names is like trying to predict where the Dow Jones Industrial Average will close at year's end. The definitive list doesn't actually exist yet, because, as baby-name bigwig Laura Wattenberg writes on her blog, "Baby naming is the kind of business where you write your 'year in review' articles in May." However, this Top 10 Baby Names of 2005 list identifies the year's likely naming trends. For girls, Emma maintains a hold on the first-place slot; for boys, Aidan unseats the popular Jacob, which led the pack four years in a row.
6. Bad Jobs
Conservative politics positively screams from between the lines of Popular Science's 10 Worst Jobs in Science. Why is it no longer any fun to be a nuclear-weapons scientist? Because in 1999 the federal government tried Wen Ho Lee for espionage. Why does it suck to teach biology in Kansas? Because a gang of religious fundamentalists took over the state board of education, delivering a painful kick in the Bunsen burner to all Midwestern devotees of true science. Unfortunately, we can't blame everything on the right-wing; it is hard to believe that anyone ever enjoyed inspecting manure.
1. Human lab rat
2. Manure inspector
3. Kansas Biology Teacher
4. Extremophile Excavator
5. Nuclear-Weapons Scientist
6. Volcanologist
7. Semen Washer
8. Do-Gooder
9. NASA Ballerina
10. Orangutan Pee Collector
7. Lists
There are few more fascinating snapshots of the human soul than the private lists that people make. The Top 10 Grocery Lists of 2005, culled from grocerylists.org's collection of abandoned shopping lists, are comical, but they are also slightly sad and mysterious and oddly illuminating. Many of them read like compact haikus:
Wal-Mart:stockingsundergarments(for work--possiblyw/ red stripper shoes)
8. Computing
It is symptomatic of our times that while the events described in the Top 10 List of Data Disasters are personally catastrophic, they are also unremarkable: A man accidentally deletes all his child's baby pictures. A woman drops a ceramic pot on her laptop. Yet, among the mundane losses and recoveries, a darker reality is occasionally hinted at:
Data Disaster #2: A frustrated writer attacked her computer with a hammer. When the engineers received the computer, the hammer imprint was clearly visible on the top cover.
9. Old Books
Of the Top 10 Out-of-Print Books of 2005, Anirvan Chatterjee, founder of BookFinder.com, says, "Looking at demand for out-of-print books is a great way to tell what people are interested in when they're not swayed by marketing campaigns." That is true. What is also true is that it's impossible to tell anything else. Apparently, significant numbers of people are still fumbling with the Mylar wrapping around Madonna's infamous coffee-table book, "Sex." Sizable numbers of people are also still knitting.
1. Sex (1992), Madonna
2. Sisters (1981), by Lynne Cheney
3. The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel (1981), by Felicitas D. Goodman
4. Where Troy Once Stood (1991), by Iman Wilkens
5. The Principles of Knitting (1988), by June Hemmons Hiatt
6. General Printing (1963), by Glen Cleeton
7. The New Soldier (1971), edited by John Kerry
8. The Lion's Paw (1946), by Robb White
9. Dear and Glorious Physician (1959), by Taylor Caldwell
10. The Book of Counted Sorrows (2003), by Dean Koontz
10. Criminals
No list of Top 10 lists would be complete without the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives. You'll be relieved, or maybe incensed, to learn that Osama bin Laden is still there, perched in the right-hand corner. He used to occupy the left-hand corner, and I'm not sure if his lateral migration signifies a promotion or a demotion in his most-wantedness. But actually, bin Laden is no longer the most interesting fugitive on the list; that distinction goes to a gangster named James J. Bulger.
Bulger is no common thug, but a bookworm "known to frequent libraries and historical sites." While Bulger tours Gettysburg and Pompei, his female companion, Catherine Elizabeth Greig, "frequents hair salons." The pair "love animals and may frequent animal shelters." They take walks on beaches and in parks. They travel extensively. Reading the FBI's description of these lovers on the lam, it is easy to forget that Bulger and Greig are fugitives from justice and not members of Elderhostel.

GREAT QUOTES 2005

'And Now, Quotations That Said It All . . .'
By Mark LeibovichWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, December 29, 2005; C01
What else to do this week but peruse the various year-end quote compilations of 2005? And, as always, what fun.
Among the menu items: Howard Dean hating Republicans, Pat Robertson calling for the head of the Venezuelan president, Dick Cheney swearing in -- not at -- reelected Sen. Pat Leahy, Dick Durbin becoming the latest pol to learn that Nazi comparisons never work, Kanye West saying George W. Bush doesn't care about black people, Bush saying we must fix Social Security ("or Rumsfeld may never retire") and Scooter Libby waxing pastoral about aspens turning in fall and how it was time for Miss Run Amok to return to her job (this was a few months before it was time for him to leave his).
Such lists fill space and turn pages in December -- like aspens turn in fall. The quotes run together, a blur of insurgencies in their last throes (Cheney) and victory notions in Iraq being "just plain wrong" (Dean).
There is no design to any of this, intelligent or otherwise.
Over time, most quotes will recede from memory. ("In a month," declared Trent Lott, "who will remember the name Harriet Miers?," etc., etc.) But some utterances will live on, concoctions of brilliance, intentional or not.
What were the best quotes of 2005? Oh, so many, according to our panel of experts -- a bipartisan group of Astute Washington Observers whose opinions we value greatly and, more importantly, who were responsive during a week when self-respecting AWOs are keeping their BlackBerrys holstered.
But this being zero-sum Washington, it's not enough to simply compile a "Best of" list. This town craves one winner, a front-runner quote that dominates all others. And that winner is . . . ohhh, not so fast.
By narrative convention, we'll start with the runners-up in a naked attempt to build drama and make you read to the end.
"Let me start by telli ng y ou this: I have never used steroids. Period ."
-- Chemically enhanced slugger Rafael Palmeiro to a congressional panel. The now-former Oriole tested positive for you-know-what a few months later.
But thanks for playing, Raffy. And extra credit for jabbing your finger in the air for emphasis.
"Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, you don't even -- you're glib. You don't even know what Ritalin is. If you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, okay? That's what I've done. . . . You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do."
-- Dr. Tom Cruise, in an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today" show.
Coupled with the sofa-jumping on Oprah as Scientology's leading man declared his love for Katie Holmes, this exchange fed an impression of a dude unhinged, or off his Ritalin.
Simply-Too-Good-to-Skip Dept.:
"I took a po o in th e woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome."
-- Drew Barrymore on MTV's celeb eco tour, "Trippin.' "
End of Simply-Too-Good-to-Skip Dept.
Partisan Inflammation Dept.:
" They all behave the same. They all look the same. It's pretty much a white Christian party."
-- Dean, now head of the Democratic National Committee, generalizing about Republicans.
Given that Dean is also on record as saying he hates Republicans ("and everything they stand for"), one can imagine some of them hate him right back.
But that would be wrong.
"It would be unfair not to give the honor to Howard Dean," says Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers, casting his vote for quote of the year. "He is probably the most quoted DNC chairman ever. Quoted by Republicans, that is."
"Dean is the gift for Republicans that will keep on giving into 2006," adds Ron Bonjean, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert. He's liking Dick Durbin's contribution, too: The Democratic whip compared the treatment of some prisoners in U.S. custody to something "done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime -- Pol Pot, or others."
" What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. So many people in this arena, here, you know, were underprivileged, so this is working very well for them."
-- Barbara Bush, while visiting Katrina evacuees in the Houston Astrodome.
"Gotta be Bar," says Democratic strategist Jim Jordan. "All you need to know about the worldviews of 41 and 43 is that the family matriarch believes, and says, that hurricane-ravaged poor folks, who've lost loved ones and what little else they have in the world, have caught a lucky break to be camping out in the Astrodome."
As a general rule, the most durable quotes don't require the media to keep replaying them (as was done with Dean's 2004 scream) or a hostile opposition to keep reminding everyone of them (as Bush did to John "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it" Kerry). Rather, they stand on their own absurdity, famous last words that hang naturally from the necks of their authors. All the better if they are uttered with conviction, from a bully pulpit.
This year provided another classic in the famous-last-words category. It is the slam-dunk, read-my-lips, I-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman 2005 doozie, a Cat 5 quote for the ages:
"Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."
-- President Bush, during his first visit to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, commending then-FEMA head Michael Brown.
Really, it was never even close. The president's vote of confidence had all the markings: Patently false, it came during a widely viewed event, was uttered by a prominent speaker, played to an unflattering caricature (of both people) and packed supreme irony: Within days, Brownie was no longer doing any job, never mind a heckuva one.
It also bestowed a belittling one-word nickname that would eliminate "Michael Brown" from any future discussion of the president's doomed Master of Disaster.
Plus: Brownie's white dress shirt was buttoned too high and pressed way too well for a hurricane.
Plus: Brownie's last job -- you couldn't invent a better one -- was commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.
Plus: Brownie's e-mails would eventually make him look like an even bigger boob.
"I got it at Nordsstroms [sic]," Brownie wrote of his outfit while Katrina was bearing down on the Gulf Coast. Then he added: "Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?"
Yes, yes and yes, Brownie.
But we digress. Back to the presidential money quote:
"I think for both concision and cluelessness, Bush wins hands down," says Ted Widmer, a professor of history at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., and a White House speechwriter during the Clinton administration.
"It's very efficient," Widmer says. "It packs maximal inaccuracy into minimal expression."
An added bonus of "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" is that it will live forever in the lexicon of disingenuous boss-speak. Who will ever hear the words "you're doing a heckuva job" again without half expecting to be frog-marched out of the office a few days later?
On that note, have a heckuva New Year, everyone. And watch what you say.

THE HARVARD CLASSICS

At year end, it might be good to take an annual literary audit. How long has it been since you have read some of these woorks chosen by Harvard as a representative selection of books with which well-educated persons should be familiar. It is also interesting to compare these with Mortimer Adler's Great Books. They can be viewed at:http://books.mirror.org/gb.home.html


The Harvard Classics

VOL. I.
His Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin Journal, by John Woolman Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
II.
The Apology, Phædo and Crito of Plato The Golden Sayings of Epictetus The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
III.
Essays, Civil and Moral & The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon Areopagitica & Tractate on Education, by John Milton Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne
IV.
Complete Poems Written in English, by John Milton
V.
Essays and English Traits, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
VI.
Poems and Songs, by Robert Burns
VII.
The Confessions of Saint Augustine The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis
VIII.
Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies & Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus Oedipus the King & Antigone of Sophocles Hippolytus & The Bacchæ of Euripides The Frogs of Aristophanes
IX.
On Friendship, On Old Age & Letters, by Cicero Letters, by Pliny the Younger
X.
Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
XI.
The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
XII.
Lives, by Plutarch
XIII.
Æneid, by Vergil
XIV.
Don Quixote, Part 1, by Cervantes
XV.
The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan The Lives of Donne and Herbert, by Izaak Walton
XVI.
Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
XVII.
Fables, by Æsop Household Tales, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Tales, by Hans Christian Andersen
XVIII.
All for Love, by John Dryden The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith The Cenci, by Percy Bysshe Shelley A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, by Robert Browning Manfred, by Lord Byron
XIX.
Faust, Part I, Egmont & Hermann and Dorothea, by J.W. von Goethe Dr. Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe
XX.
The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
XXI.
I Promessi Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni
XXII.
The Odyssey of Homer
XXIII.
Two Years before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
XXIV.
On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution & A Letter to a Noble Lord, by Edmund Burke
XXV.
Autobiography & On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh & Sir Walter Scott, by Thomas Carlyle
XXVI.
Life Is a Dream, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca Polyeucte, by Pierre Corneille Phædra, by Jean Racine Tartuffe, by Molière Minna von Barnhelm, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Wilhelm Tell, by Friedrich von Schiller
XXVII.
English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay
XXVIII.
Essays: English and American
XXIX.
The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin
XXX.
Scientific Papers
XXXI.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
XXXII.
Literary and Philosophical Essays
XXXIII.
Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern
XXXIV.
Discourse on Method, by René Descartes Letters on the English, by Voltaire On the Inequality among Mankind & Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, by Jean Jacques Rousseau Of Man, Being the First Part of Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
XXXV.
The Chronicles of Jean Froissart The Holy Grail, by Sir Thomas Malory A Description of Elizabethan England, by William Harrison
XXXVI.
The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli The Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper Utopia, by Sir Thomas More The Ninety-Five Thesis, Address to the Christian Nobility & Concerning Christian Liberty, by Martin Luther
XXXVII.
Some Thoughts Concerning Education, by John Locke Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists, by George Berkeley An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
XXXVIII.
The Oath of Hippocrates Journeys in Diverse Places, by Ambroise Paré On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, by William Harvey The Three Original Publications on Vaccination Against Smallpox, by Edward Jenner The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, by Oliver Wendell Holmes On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, by Joseph Lister Scientific Papers, by Louis Pasteur Scientific Papers, by Charles Lyell
XXXIX.
Prefaces and Prologues
XL.
English Poetry I: Chaucer to Gray
XLI.
English Poetry II: Collins to Fitzgerald
XLII.
English Poetry III: Tennyson to Whitman
XLIII.
American Historical Documents: 1000–1904
XLIV.
Confucian: The Sayings of Confucius Hebrew: Job, Psalms & Ecclesiastes Christian I: Luke & Acts
XLV.
Christian II: Corinthians I & II & Hymns Buddhist: Writings Hindu: The Bhagavad-Gita Mohammedan: Chapters from the Koran
XLVI.
Edward the Second, by Christopher Marlowe Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth & The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
XLVII.
The Shoemaker’s Holiday, by Thomas Dekker The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson Philaster, by Beaumont and Fletcher The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster A New Way to Pay Old Debts, by Philip Massinger
XLVIII.
Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works, by Blaise Pascal
XLIX.
Epic & Saga: Beowulf, The Song of Roland, The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel & The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs
LI.
Lectures on the Harvard Classics

The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction
Bibliographic Record General Introduction Index to Criticisms and Interpretations
VOLS. I & II.
The History of Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding
III.
A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
IV.
Guy Mannering, by Sir Walter Scott
V & VI.
Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray
VII. & VIII.
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
IX.
The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot
X.
The Scarlet Letter & Rappaccini’s Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Rip Van Winkle & The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving

Three Short Stories, by Edgar Allan Poe

Three Short Stories, by Francis Bret Harte

Jim Smily and His Jumping Frog, by Samuel L. Clemens

The Man without a Country, by Edward Everett Hale
XI.
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
XII.
Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Marie Hugo
XIII.
Old Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac

The Devil’s Pool, by George Sand

The Story of a White Blackbird, by Alfred de Musset

Five Short Stories, by Alphonse Daudet

Two Short Stories, by Guy de Maupassant
XIV. & XV.
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship & The Sorrows of Werther, by J. W. von Goethe

The Banner of the Upright Seven, by Gottfried Keller

The Rider on the White Horse, by Theodor Storm

Trials and Tribulations, by Theodor Fontane
XVI. & XVII.
Anna Karenin & Ivan the Fool, by Leo Tolstoy
XVIII.
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
XIX.
A House of Gentlefolk & Fathers and Children, by Ivan Turgenev
XX.
Pepita Jimenez, by Juan Valera

A Happy Boy, by Björnstjerne Björnson

Skipper Worse, by Alexander L. Kielland

UNDER REPORTED STORIES

George Bush is already a lame-duck president. There's usually a year or two grace period after the president is elected for the second time, when he can point to his second election victory as vindication for his policies and use it to get some important legislation passed. Bush has squandered his election victory. All the major initiatives he wanted to pass in Congress this year, from the privatization of Social Security to the permanent renewal of the USA Patriot Act provisions, have gone down in flames, even with a solid Republican majority in both houses. The most basic budget bills have failed to pass because Bush couldn't get a consensus within his own party. Meanwhile, members of his administration are leaking stories of Bush administration misdeeds every week. Three more years of this and the Republican Party may never recover.
The United States is becoming a torture regime. It is no longer a secret that the US tortures prisoners. But numerous aspects of this abomination remain undercovered. The year was full of shocking revelations about how far the Bush administration has taken us into totalitarian atrocities: the NSA listening to and reading US citizens' foreign telephone calls and email without warrants; the Pentagon spying on peace groups; the rendition of prisoners to secret CIA detention centers in Eastern Europe; the testimony of former prisoners at Guantanamo and victims of rendition that they were brutally abused while in prison; more evidence that the US maintains secret detention centers around the world; the Guantanamo Bay hunger strikers; dozens of deaths of "war on terror" prisoners in US custody; the Graham Amendment, which voids habeas corpus for suspects in the "war on terror"and renders moot a Supreme Court challenge to Bush's military tribunal system; the Army's newly expanded list of permissible interrogation techniques; the evidence that the decision to employ torture began at the highest levels of the White House--the list goes on and on.
Iraq is spinning out of control. Ethnic and sectarian hostilities have turned into open street battles between Shiite religious factions, battles between factions of the Sunni insurgency, mass killings of Sunnis by Shiite death squads, secret arrests, government-sanctioned torture of prisoners, and mass migrations of people between neighborhoods, cities, and provinces--an outright Balkanization of Iraq. Iraq's oil fields are rapidly deteriorating from a combination of sabotage and neglect. Oil exports are down drastically, leaving the Iraqi government without the money to pay salaries to teachers, doctors, police, and other civil servants. Meanwhile, corruption is rampant at high levels in the Iraqi government, while smaller, local governments run on extortion and bribery (a matter of basic survival when they're not getting paid a regular salary). And security analysts note that the insurgency is as healthy as ever and becoming more efficient, and more deadly, in its attacks.
Say, where is Osama bin Laden, anyway?
The Downing Street Memos. Ignored for weeks by US media until the blogosphere buzz became simply too loud, these early revelations of "fixing the intelligence around the policy" have now gone down the memory hole again. But their content has been completely corroborated by subsequent revelations.
Bush wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera headquarters in Qatar. This British report was squelched by the Official Secrets Act, but not before it caused a sensation around the world due to its detailed plausibility--except in the US, where corporate media dismissed the allegation out of hand.
The economy is balanced on a knife-edge. The Bush administration would like you to forget that the US has a record trade deficit, a record budget deficit, and that the housing market--the one thing that's kept the US economy afloat for the past three years--is beginning to cool a little too quickly for comfort. Republican attempts to balance the budget on the backs of poor people while trying to make Bush's tax cuts permanent have garnered little attention from the press. And so has the fact that China and Japan own most of our public debt. While Bush's approval ratings rise and fall with the price of oil, a very cold winter is hitting Americans in the pocketbooks, and the press can only talk about the economy "steaming full-speed ahead." Uh huh.
The Bush administration's continued attacks on the environment. From criminal attempts to stop the implementation of the Kyoto global warming treaty and a possible successor to the privatization of public lands to drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the US press hasn't cared much about Bush's shocking attempts to pillage the environment the same way his administration has pillaged the public treasury.
Republican corruption scandals. Some four dozen Congressmen, mostly Republican, have been confirmed as taking money from Jack Abramoff or his clients at about the same time they took legislative action favorable to Abramoff or his clients. Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff are just the tip of the iceberg, but our compliant press has trouble seeing even that much. Now the Supreme Court is reviewing the Texas redistricting scheme that helped the Republicans win a bigger majority in the House--a scheme that was undertaken by the Republicans after their own Justice Department had ruled it unconstitutional. This should be a much bigger scandal than it currently is.
Failures of Homeland Security: Hurricane Katrina, racism, and the gutting of FEMA. This was a huge story that, while briefly covered extensively by the US press, disappeared from the mix far too quickly and without enough analysis. And both the corruption of rebuilding contacts and the complete subsequent abandonment of New Orleans by the feds have received virtually no attention.
Likewise, the devastating earthquake in Kashmir received very little coverage. Kashmiris, of course, are used to the West not caring much about them. But we shouldn't prove them right.
Our government's global covert propaganda campaign. Armstrong Williams and the Lincoln Group in Iraq were just the start. All over the world, among countries friend and foe, the Pentagon is running an unprecedented, massive propaganda and disinformation campaign, including the planting of stories designed to find their way back into US media. The planted stories are never identified as being written by the US government. Rumsfeld said after 9/11 that he would continue to lie, and he was telling the truth.
The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and its fallout on Israeli and Palestinian politics is more important to Middle Eastern peace than anything happening in the War on Terror, yet the US press has difficulty covering Israeli and Palestinian politics beyond the latest suicide bombing. Likewise, the Palestinian elections, with the split in the Fatah Party and electoral gains by Hamas, have received almost no coverage here, nor has Ariel Sharon's split from Likud (the party he co-founded). Major shifts are happening in a very important part of the world, and Americans are oblivious. And the passive White House enabling of whatever Sharon wants to do has also received no attention.
The right-wing radicalism of Samuel Alito is no secret; it's just been deeply ignored by a too cautious press. Likewise, John Roberts' portrayal as a moderate was simply mind-boggling.
The biggest labor news in decades, the AFL-CIO split and the formation of the new Change To Win Coalition, passed with hardly a whimper in the US press. It's time to start unionizing a few more media outlets.
A sweet victory for small communities--POCLAD passing legislation in Pennsylvania to stop the construction of megachain stores in local communities--was so far off the radar that you almost had to know someone working on the campaign to have heard about it. That's shocking. Fortunately, with the Internet, it's easier than ever to find out what inspired activists across the country, and the world, are doing.

TRY THIS OVER THE HOLIDAY!

From the FT, a real puzzler for the Christmas weekend. http://news.ft.com/cms/s/380f65be-717e-11da-836e-0000779e2340.html Try it, you might win some nice champagne!

Ah, Humbug

Christopher Hitchens
Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2005

I used to harbor the quiet but fierce ambition to write just one definitive, annihilating anti-Christmas column and then find an editor sufficiently indulgent to run it every December. My model was the Thanksgiving pastiche knocked off by Art Buchwald several decades ago and recycled annually in a serious ongoing test of reader tolerance. But I have slowly come to appreciate that this hope was in vain. The thing must be done annually and afresh. Partly this is because the whole business becomes more vile and insufferable—and in new and worse ways—every 12 months. It also starts to kick in earlier each year: It was at Thanksgiving this year that, making my way through an airport, I was confronted by the leering and antlered visage of what to my disordered senses appeared to be a bloody great moose. Only as reason regained her throne did I realize that the reindeer—that plague species—were back.
Not long after I'd swallowed this bitter pill, I was invited onto Scarborough Country on MSNBC to debate the proposition that reindeer were an ancient symbol of Christianity and thus deserving of First Amendment protection, if not indeed of mandatory display at every mall in the land. I am told that nobody watches that show anymore—certainly I heard from almost nobody who had seen it—so I must tell you that the view taken by the host was that coniferous trees were also a symbol of Christianity, and that the Founding Fathers had endorsed this proposition. From his cue cards, he even quoted a few vaguely deistic sentences from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, neither of them remotely Christian in tone. When I pointed out the latter, and added that Christmas trees, yule logs, and all the rest were symbols of the winter solstice "holidays" before any birth had been registered in the greater Bethlehem area, I was greeted by a storm of abuse, as if I had broken into the studio instead of having been entreated to come by Scarborough's increasingly desperate staff. And when I added that it wasn't very Tiny Tim-like to invite a seasonal guest and then tell him to shut up, I was told that I was henceforth stricken from the Scarborough Rolodex. The ultimate threat: no room at the Bigmouth Inn.
This was a useful demonstration of what I have always hated about the month of December: the atmosphere of a one-party state. On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy. Time wasted on foolishness at one's children's schools. Vapid ecumenical messages from the president, who has more pressing things to do and who is constitutionally required to avoid any religious endorsements.
And yet none of this party-line unanimity is enough for the party's true hard-liners. The slogans must be exactly right. No "Happy Holidays" or even "Cool Yule" or a cheery Dickensian "Compliments of the season." No, all banners and chants must be specifically designated in honor of the birth of the Dear Leader and the authority of the Great Leader. By chance, the New York Times on Dec. 19 ran a story about the difficulties encountered by Christian missionaries working among North Korean defectors, including a certain Mr. Park. One missionary was quoted as saying ruefully that "he knew he had not won over Mr. Park. He knew that Christianity reminded Mr. Park, as well as other defectors, of 'North Korean ideology.' " An interesting admission, if a bit of a stretch. Let's just say that the birth of the Dear Leader is indeed celebrated as a miraculous one—accompanied, among other things, by heavenly portents and by birds singing in Korean—and that compulsory worship and compulsory adoration can indeed become a touch wearying to the spirit.
Our Christian enthusiasts are evidently too stupid, as well as too insecure, to appreciate this. A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit. The Fox News campaign against Wal-Mart and other outlets—whose observance of the official feast-day is otherwise fanatical and punctilious to a degree, but a degree that falls short of unswerving orthodoxy—is one of the most sinister as well as one of the most laughable campaigns on record. If these dolts knew anything about the real Protestant tradition, they would know that it was exactly this paganism and corruption that led Oliver Cromwell—my own favorite Protestant fundamentalist—to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.
No believer in the First Amendment could go that far. But there are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as "churches," and they can also force passersby to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them everyone.

The Times
December 23, 2005
Misanthropy and whingeing has replaced mistletoe and wineNotebook by Mick Hume

THIS YEAR I take the theme of my godless, atheistic Christmas sermon from Luke ii, 14. For those unfamiliar with the pre-Disney original of the Nativity story, this is the bit where the multitude of the heavenly host is supposed to deliver unto the shepherds the classic Christmas message: “On Earth peace, goodwill toward men.”
We know that the world has only paid lip-service to peace on Earth since 1914, despite Yoko Ono’s claim that she and John Lennon ended the Vietnam War by endlessly droning “Merry Xmas — war is over”. These days, however, the notion of goodwill toward men (and women) seems just as distant. To revise the famous lyrics sung by St Cliff, the mean spirit of Christmas appears less about mistletoe and wine than misanthropy and whingeing.
Take, for example, the merry Christmas tale of a ban on “coughers” on public transport. From now until the spring, one carriage on commuter trains into Fenchurch Street station, London, will be designated a “cough-free zone”, following on from smoke-free trains and mobile-phone-free carriages. Perhaps they should simply introduce a people-free zone, where one can avoid the risk of mixing with one’s disgusting fellow passengers altogether.
This ridiculous initiative is backed by Benylin, the cough medicine manufacturer, whose survey found that 47 per cent of commuters welcome a cough-free zone. One consumer healthcare expert says it is good that “commuters can travel in an environment where coughers are outside their personal space”. This raises the ticklish question of whether “coughers” should be made to emulate smokers in pubs, and hang around outside the train door if they are gasping for one.
The crusade against smoking in public places has become the most familiar vehicle for official warnings that Other People Are Ruining Your Life. But a similar spirit of bad will towards men lurks behind other health and lifestyle campaigns this Christmas. Look again at the panicky plans to deal with a hypothetical avian flu pandemic by banning football matches and closing public transport. Or the latest warnings about somebody spiking your drink in the pub — not just with drugs, but with alcohol. Or the moves to stop children sitting on Santa’s knee. The message this panto season is: “They’re behind you!”
Our society lost faith in God many Christmases ago. Now we are in danger of losing faith in our humanity. It is not only that we mistrust others. We hardly seem to trust ourselves to cope with life. That is why we are bombarded with all those patronising “if the turkey doesn’t get you, the tinsel might” health and safety warnings.
We are at the end of the year when the public response to the Asian tsunami and the London bombings reminded us that the true spirit of solidarity is alive. Yet many in authority seem determined that we should look upon each other — be we smokers, binge-drinkers or coughers — as if we were suspected suicide bombers. Anyone for a bile-free zone this Christmas?
THERE WAS another flap after Gordon Ramsay helped to slaughter six turkeys, which he had reared in his garden, on Channel 4. The chef said he wanted his children to know where their Christmas dinner came from. Compassion in World Farming agreed that people should know “what animals go through” to feed us. But People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protested: “There is nothing compassionate about slaughtering an animal so Ramsay and his family can dine on its decomposing body parts.”
This tastes like a supersize helping of overcooked nonsense all round. I don’t want my young children to be too squeamish about killing poultry or pests. But neither do I hold with all this “back to nature” stuff. It is a good thing that we have moved away from a peasant economy where people kill chickens in their own gardens, to a civilised division of society’s labour where we buy them from professional poultry farmers. Our children should know the facts of life and death. But I would be perfectly happy if, when asked if they know where their turkey comes from, they replied: “Tesco.”
A MERRY Christmas to us all. Eat, drink and be merry.

MAY EVERYONE ENJOY A MERRY, HAPPY, JOYOUS & QUITE PEACEFUL HOLIDAY!

Decoding Christmas Dinner

Decoding Christmas dinner
From Bush politics to iPod playlists, why chatter during the holidays isn't like the old days.
By Garrison Keillor

Dec. 21, 2005 | The best part of Christmas is just before it starts, when all the preparations are done or it's too late to worry about them, and after you run a vacuum around the living room you can sit down and close your eyes and let old Christmases come winging back from the Olden Days of Yore, before credit cards, when parents were cautious about lavishing money on children for fear of spoiling them rotten.

Money does not grow on trees, as we know. You were permitted to wish, but you weren't encouraged to expect success. You hoped for a pair of six-guns and a copy of "The Royal Road to Romance" by Richard Halliburton, and you got a green plaid flannel shirt and a New Testament.

Men didn't venture into the kitchen then. The women whipped up the monumental dinner as a choir sang on the radio, and they reminisced about their childhoods in the big white frame house on Longfellow Avenue, and they tasted the food. Meanwhile, my dad and uncles lounged in the living room and discussed cars. They had grown up with the Model T and so were well grounded in mechanics. As a matter of pride, they got under the hood and changed spark plugs and fan belts and adjusted the carburetor. It took a keen eye, but they had always bought excellent used cars — bought them for a song — and they knew men who had walked into a showroom and paid a bucket of money for a pile of headaches. My father's loyalty to Ford was steadfast, so between him and the Dodge and Pontiac uncles there was always food for discussion. And talking about cars segued into pleasant memories of car trips to New York and Florida and the West Coast.

For Christmas one year I was given a toy garage, the Acme Car Garage, with an island of gas pumps and a rooftop parking ramp with a hand-cranked elevator to take the cars up and down. There was a hoist, too, for grease jobs, but no grease. I also got a printing press with movable rubber type, and that was so much more fulfilling. You could print official notices (This Room Off-Limits Until Further Notice) and letterheads (G.E. Keillor, Esq.) and even a short story of 50 words or so ("The Mysterious Interloper"). And so the twig was bent, and I abandoned auto mechanics for the pleasure of tinkering with sentences. It all happened one Christmas.

My father may have been disappointed. It wasn't anything we talked about. My father didn't go in for sweeping statements, especially not about people. So I went to college, where nobody knew about cars except that they needed one that worked. I was of the '60s generation that hung on in college so as to avoid the draft and not go to Vietnam. We weren't intellectuals, not really, but we pretended to be, out of self-preservation, and mastered the jargon and plodded through graduate school, and we became the overeducated generation. A lot of us who would have been happier as mechanics went into management. With auto mechanics, there is such a thing as competence. With management? I don't think so.

The men who gather in the living room on Christmas this year don't have the easy common language that my uncles had. In Minnesota, you have the weather for conversation, but that's only good for an hour or so. Sports is not the common ground it used to be; nobody has the time to be a fan and develop the expertise that makes arguments possible. There's politics, of course, but that's a topic for pontificating and harrumphing, which isn't the same as conversation. We can compare laptops and cellphones and iPods, I guess, but that's really about money, which is not a fit topic. To talk about our children is rather delicate, comparisons are inevitable, and if your child is in advanced kindergarten, the French-immersion one, and mine is still figuring out shapes and colors, it can be painful. Theology is treacherous ground, and we don't discuss sex, and around Christmas we try to avoid vicious gossip, so what's left? Cars. But you can't fix cars yourself anymore unless you've been to car college, and the loyalties aren't so strong as my dad's feelings for Fords.

So we gaze out the window and we say things like, "I was reading a column in the paper today about men not having a common language anymore." Oh, really. Who wrote that? "I forget." Oh. End of discussion.

HERE, FROM THE ECONOMIST ARE SOME INTERESTING THINGS TO CONTEMPLATE ABOUT OURSELVES AS ONE YEAR ENDS AND ANOTHER COMMENCES.........

IN THOSE parts of the planet that might once have been described as “Christendom”, this week marks the season of peace on Earth and goodwill towards men. A nice idea in a world more usually thought of as seasoned by the survival of the fittest. But goodwill and collaboration are as much part of the human condition as ill-will and competition. And that was a puzzle to 19th-century disciples of Charles Darwin, such as Herbert Spencer.
It was Spencer, an early contributor to The Economist, who invented that poisoned phrase, “survival of the fittest”. He originally applied it to the winnowing of firms in the harsh winds of high-Victorian capitalism, but when Darwin's masterwork, “On the Origin of Species”, was published, he quickly saw the parallel with natural selection and transferred his bon mot to the process of evolution. As a result, he became one of the band of philosophers known as social Darwinists. Capitalists all, they took what they thought were the lessons of Darwin's book and applied them to human society. Their hard-hearted conclusion, of which a 17th-century religious puritan might have been proud, was that people got what they deserved—albeit that the criterion of desert was genetic, rather than moral. The fittest not only survived, but prospered. Moreover, the social Darwinists thought that measures to help the poor were wasted, since such people were obviously unfit and thus doomed to sink.
Sadly, the slur stuck. For 100 years Darwinism was associated with a particularly harsh and unpleasant view of the world and, worse, one that was clearly not true—at least, not the whole truth. People certainly compete, but they collaborate, too. They also have compassion for the fallen and frequently try to help them, rather than treading on them. For this sort of behaviour, “On the Origin of Species” had no explanation. As a result, Darwinism had to tiptoe round the issue of how human society and behaviour evolved. Instead, the disciples of a second 19th-century creed, Marxism, dominated academic sociology departments with their cuddly collectivist ideas—even if the practical application of those ideas has been even more catastrophic than social Darwinism was.
Trust me, I'm a Darwinist
But the real world eventually penetrates even the ivory tower. The failure of Marxism has prompted an opening of minds, and Darwinism is back with a vengeance—and a twist. Exactly how humanity became human is still a matter of debate. But there are, at least, some well-formed hypotheses (see article). What these hypotheses have in common is that they rely not on Spencer's idea of individual competition, but on social interaction. That interaction is, indeed, sometimes confrontational and occasionally bloody. But it is frequently collaborative, and even when it is not, it is more often manipulative than violent.
Modern Darwinism's big breakthrough was the identification of the central role of trust in human evolution. People who are related collaborate on the basis of nepotism. It takes outrageous profit or provocation for someone to do down a relative with whom they share a lot of genes. Trust, though, allows the unrelated to collaborate, by keeping score of who does what when, and punishing cheats.
Very few animals can manage this. Indeed, outside the primates, only vampire bats have been shown to trust non-relatives routinely. (Well-fed bats will give some of the blood they have swallowed to hungry neighbours, but expect the favour to be returned when they are hungry and will deny favours to those who have cheated in the past.) The human mind, however, seems to have evolved the trick of being able to identify a large number of individuals and to keep score of its relations with them, detecting the dishonest or greedy and taking vengeance, even at some cost to itself. This process may even be—as Matt Ridley, who wrote for this newspaper a century and a half after Spencer, described it—the origin of virtue.
The new social Darwinists (those who see society itself, rather than the savannah or the jungle, as the “natural” environment in which humanity is evolving and to which natural selection responds) have not abandoned Spencer altogether, of course. But they have put a new spin on him. The ranking by wealth of which Spencer so approved is but one example of a wider tendency for people to try to out-do each other. And that competition, whether athletic, artistic or financial, does seem to be about genetic display. Unfakeable demonstrations of a superiority that has at least some underlying genetic component are almost unfailingly attractive to the opposite sex. Thus both of the things needed to make an economy work, collaboration and competition, seem to have evolved under Charles Darwin's penetrating gaze.
Dystopia and Utopia
This is a view full of ironies, of course. One is that its reconciliation of competition and collaboration bears a remarkable similarity to the sort of Hegelian synthesis beloved of Marxists. Perhaps a bigger one, though, is that the Earth's most capitalist country, America, is the only place in the rich world that contains a significant group of dissenters from any sort of evolutionary explanation of human behaviour at all. But it is also, in its way, a comforting view. It suggests a constant struggle, not for existence itself, but between selfishness and altruism—a struggle that neither can win. Utopia may be impossible, but Dystopia is unstable, too, as the collapse of Marxism showed. Human nature is not, to use another of Spencer's favourite phrases (though one he borrowed from Tennyson, his poetical contemporary), red in tooth and claw, and societies built around the idea that it is are doomed to early failure.
Of the three great secular faiths born in the 19th century—Darwinism, Marxism and Freudianism—the second died swiftly and painfully and the third is slipping peacefully away. But Darwinism goes from strength to strength. If its ideas are right, the handful of dust that evolution has shaped into humanity will rarely stray too far off course. And that is, perhaps, a hopeful thought to carry into the New Year.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL

In these ever so politically correct times, may I take this opportunity to wish you ALL a most happy and merry CHRISTMAS! I am quite mindful that most of my friends and colleagues are not Christian. But to believers, I try to remember to wish each a solemn holy day or a joyous eid. And to my atheist and agnostic friends......well, pop the corks, it won't get any better than this! To me, Christmas is a wonderful and nostalgic time, whatever its religious significance, so in wishing everyone a happy time, I am not proselytizing.....just hoping to spread some good cheer, love and warmth to a world that needs them badly.

May I also offer the eloquence of the Archbishop of York:


Weeks and weeks ago, before I arrived in York, a leaflet dropped through my letterbox with the slogan "Christmas begins at Homebase". Sure enough, long before Christmas, the store's shelves had been cleared of gardening equipment, to be replaced by toys, fairy lights and Christmas trees. But in the store Christmas would only be seasonal. Here today and gone tomorrow.
By the time the turkey bones are being turned into soup and the wrapping paper put out for recycling, that kind of Christmas will seem a thing of the past - until the pre-Christmas frenzy begins all over again next year. It doesn't have to be like that.
We must not be taken in by the expression "the season of goodwill" - as though you only need be nice to your neighbour for a few days. Christmas is here to stay. It demonstrates God's persistence with the human race. Christ's presence with us is permanent even though He can no longer be seen. His resurrection from death is God's statement that He does not give up on us, even when our attention to Him is fickle and forgetful. The so-called "season" of goodwill is on offer until the end of time, not because we have adopted it, but because God wills it so.
The first Christmas may seem long ago and far away, but is actually remarkably contemporary. Jesus was born into a country under a foreign occupying power where taxation was high and inflation was raging. Justice was spasmodic and acts of terror common. Political and religious groups were divided by intrigue. There was a huge gulf between the "haves" and the "have-nots". The picture we all have in mind of the baby in a manger, with Mary and Joseph and "no room for them in the inn" resonates with those the world over who experience lack of care, unconcern, brutality and being forever pushed to the margins.
\r\nIn that poignant portrait of a baby lying in a cattle drinking trough, we have a snapshot of the everlasting and all-powerful God, coming to visit us in clothes of powerlessness and humility. The picture has no caption, but speaks volumes: it tells us that God is approachable because He has made the first move; that He is so concerned for our eternal welfare He will pay this price to be alongside us and lead us to our ultimate destiny. What was true in Bethlehem then, is true now in Bristol, Brisbane, Barbados and the world over, until the end of time. Its significance knows no bounds.\r\n\r\nAs a child in Uganda, Christmas meant staying up all night, gazing at the stars in the sky and singing "Glory to God in the highest, peace and goodwill to all people" (thinking especially of people in our village - some of whom were not neighbourly at all!). My mother would tell the stories of how each of us - we were 13 - came into the world; and then say: "In the same way that is how the Saviour of the world came into the world. You have shared in His birth."\r\n\r\nOur family is looking forward to our first Christmas in York. I shall be presiding and preaching in York Minster on Christmas Day. Then I hope to cook lunch, as I have done every Christmas. In the afternoon, we shall keep to our usual custom of watching the Queen deliver her Christmas message.\r\n\r\nFor some, this Christmas will be a poignant reminder of loss when others are celebrating. This year has had its share of tragedies. The unabated suffering in Iraq: when I hear of suicide bombings, the abuse of prisoners, the death and injury of our soldiers and Iraqi people, my heart is wracked. We cannot forget the London bombings: the sheer wickedness of random executions masquerading as acts of devotion to a higher ideal. Then the so-called "natural" disasters: the Tsunami, the earthquake in Kashmir, the hurricanes in the Caribbean and along the American coast.\r\n\r\nAll the dead and injured have families. I think of the murder of teenager Anthony Walker, one more victim of racism. Yet I remember too his remarkable parents, who repudiated the venom of hatred and instead gave us the Christ-like example of what it means to forgive when your heart is broken by grief. And Abigail Witchells, who wished her attacker no harm and thanked God for the care she received after her near-fatal stabbing. People like this light a candle in the dark for all of us.

In that poignant portrait of a baby lying in a cattle drinking trough, we have a snapshot of the everlasting and all-powerful God, coming to visit us in clothes of powerlessness and humility. The picture has no caption, but speaks volumes: it tells us that God is approachable because He has made the first move; that He is so concerned for our eternal welfare He will pay this price to be alongside us and lead us to our ultimate destiny. What was true in Bethlehem then, is true now in Bristol, Brisbane, Barbados and the world over, until the end of time. Its significance knows no bounds.
As a child in Uganda, Christmas meant staying up all night, gazing at the stars in the sky and singing "Glory to God in the highest, peace and goodwill to all people" (thinking especially of people in our village - some of whom were not neighbourly at all!). My mother would tell the stories of how each of us - we were 13 - came into the world; and then say: "In the same way that is how the Saviour of the world came into the world. You have shared in His birth."
Our family is looking forward to our first Christmas in York. I shall be presiding and preaching in York Minster on Christmas Day. Then I hope to cook lunch, as I have done every Christmas. In the afternoon, we shall keep to our usual custom of watching the Queen deliver her Christmas message.
For some, this Christmas will be a poignant reminder of loss when others are celebrating. This year has had its share of tragedies. The unabated suffering in Iraq: when I hear of suicide bombings, the abuse of prisoners, the death and injury of our soldiers and Iraqi people, my heart is wracked. We cannot forget the London bombings: the sheer wickedness of random executions masquerading as acts of devotion to a higher ideal. Then the so-called "natural" disasters: the Tsunami, the earthquake in Kashmir, the hurricanes in the Caribbean and along the American coast.
All the dead and injured have families. I think of the murder of teenager Anthony Walker, one more victim of racism. Yet I remember too his remarkable parents, who repudiated the venom of hatred and instead gave us the Christ-like example of what it means to forgive when your heart is broken by grief. And Abigail Witchells, who wished her attacker no harm and thanked God for the care she received after her near-fatal stabbing. People like this light a candle in the dark for all of us.
The baby in the manger ended His life on a cross. Christmas endures beyond the actual season, because the baby grew up. He descended on the human scene with an uncompromising message of love. He must have been the only teacher who has practised what He preached without faltering or failing. People who came close to Him, except for those who shut their eyes and ears, found themselves close to God Himself. Most were very ordinary people - and not particularly good ones at that.\r\n\r\nThe ones He chose for His followers were an extraordinary collection: every one had a "history" and none became a saint overnight. They offered Him their willingness to change and in return He persevered with them, guiding, forgiving, encouraging - and sometimes reprimanding, too. It\'s the same now. Modern-day disciples, exactly like them, carry invisible "L-plates": we continue to be learners and never actually graduate this side of Heaven. You could be one.\r\n\r\nWe are so lucky in this country to have churches that are nearer our homes than most supermarkets. I encourage you to take advantage of that this Christmas. If you are not a regular churchgoer, it may feel a bit strange at first; church services will be unfamiliar. Please persevere. Don\'t go to be entertained, go rather to do something. \r\n\r\nYou and I owe Christ our worship, so we take that duty with us to church. It is a little like making a journey to show respect to a famous person whom we admire; or taking time and trouble to demonstrate affection to someone we love. Of course mere churchgoing is not enough, but it\'s a start. Don\'t let this Christmas pass without letting God start something new in your heart. You may like to think through these challenging words from a 17th century mystic: "Had Christ a thousand times, Been born in Bethlehem, But not in thee, thy sin Would still thy soul condemn."\r\n\r\nJesus Christ is God\'s present to us. What can I give Him in return? The answer is in a Christmas carol: "What I can I give Him - give my heart."

The baby in the manger ended His life on a cross. Christmas endures beyond the actual season, because the baby grew up. He descended on the human scene with an uncompromising message of love. He must have been the only teacher who has practised what He preached without faltering or failing. People who came close to Him, except for those who shut their eyes and ears, found themselves close to God Himself. Most were very ordinary people - and not particularly good ones at that.
The ones He chose for His followers were an extraordinary collection: every one had a "history" and none became a saint overnight. They offered Him their willingness to change and in return He persevered with them, guiding, forgiving, encouraging - and sometimes reprimanding, too. It's the same now. Modern-day disciples, exactly like them, carry invisible "L-plates": we continue to be learners and never actually graduate this side of Heaven. You could be one.
We are so lucky in this country to have churches that are nearer our homes than most supermarkets. I encourage you to take advantage of that this Christmas. If you are not a regular churchgoer, it may feel a bit strange at first; church services will be unfamiliar. Please persevere. Don't go to be entertained, go rather to do something.
You and I owe Christ our worship, so we take that duty with us to church. It is a little like making a journey to show respect to a famous person whom we admire; or taking time and trouble to demonstrate affection to someone we love. Of course mere churchgoing is not enough, but it's a start. Don't let this Christmas pass without letting God start something new in your heart. You may like to think through these challenging words from a 17th century mystic: "Had Christ a thousand times, Been born in Bethlehem, But not in thee, thy sin Would still thy soul condemn."
Jesus Christ is God's present to us. What can I give Him in return? The answer is in a Christmas carol: "What I can I give Him - give my heart."
My heartfelt wish for you is that you have a Happy Christmas this year and the abiding knowledge of Christ in your heart for ever. May God bless you.

My heartfelt wish for you is that you have a Happy Christmas this year and the abiding knowledge of Christ in your heart for ever. May God bless you.

So, to all a very Merry Christmas!

ANGLICANS WITHOUT GOD

When the former foreign secretary Robin Cook died, he was given a service in St Giles Cathedral, in his native Edinburgh, one of the historic worshipping places of the Church of Scotland. The former Episcopalian Primate of Scotland and Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, took the service. He smiled broadly as he described it - “Here was I, an agnostic Anglican, taking the service in a Presbyterian church, for a dead atheist politician. And I thought that was just marvellous.” He added: “Of course, he was a Presbyterian atheist, which means he distrusted authority - even that of atheism” (one could add of Cook, as of many Presbyterians, that he distrusted an authority that was not his own).


Holloway had long been seen as a man living and ministering at the very edge of where religion meets benign disbelief. He publishes a slim volume of reflections most years; the latest is an effort at reconciliation of the human with what he calls “the massive indifference of the universe”. He addresses himself to, and puts himself among, those “who are living Out There, in the place where God is absent”. In an earlier, less bleak book he writes that if the “truth” of Christianity (and of other great religions) can never be proven, still its moral challenge should not be renounced - an abandonment of the form to save the core. In another he writes that many thinkers “admire the way religions at their best produce people who are benefactors of humanity, servants of the poor and champions of the weak. While they may no longer practise religion themselves, they like the way it continues to challenge human folly and cruelty.”
Holloway’s vision is what Christianity in Britain tends to become: a repository of presumed goodness and wisdom which has no, or at best a very distant, God, but owes a lot to Him. (This, of course, excepts Northern Ireland, where a struggle for religious-cum-national supremacy between the two main religions remains unforgiving.) He is in a line of doubting prelates: infamous in the 1960s was another Anglican bishop, John Robinson, whose book, Honest to God, sought the same “Out There” space as Holloway. Since this was at a time when it was still thought important that bishops believe in God, it provoked a storm of controversy because of its insistence that God had (perhaps) become unnecessary.
Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote of it in an essay three years ago that it posited a world in which “the question of what distinguishes a believer from an unbeliever is quite hard to answer except in terms of intensity: the believer has no different conception of the good, but does have a more profoundly engaged relation to it”. That is what the British have come to expect of the Christians among them: that they are probably decent and probably show it a bit more, but are, and have no fundamental claim to be, no more decent ex officio than anyone else.
The reign of Rowan Williams is likely to mark something of a climactic point for the Church. He faces acute differences within Anglicanism worldwide, particularly on the ordination of women and homosexuals. Holloway, who says he was “revolted” by the bigotry he met among some of his fellow bishops at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, which decided to bar homosexuals from the priesthood, sees a Church whose many mansions have now become hostile to each other, most likely without any hope of reconciliation.
Arguments and breakaway individuals or groups are common within Churches - most organised faiths of any size experience them, even as they are growing. The deeper question about faith in Britain is this: has its moderation, reasonableness, resolute refusal to be too obviously spiritual and the relegation of the Church to blessing births, deaths, marriages and national occasions led it to a position where the two main “national” Churches - the Church of England and the Church of Scotland - as well as many of the non-conformists, and even the mighty Roman Catholic Church, have run out of road?
That decline is not a steady line downwards: indeed, in 2003 - the latest figures available - there was a rise of 1 per cent in the number of people who attend church and cathedral worship each month - to 1.7 million people - and 1.2 million attended each week. The “usual Sunday attendance” measure, however, showed a drop of 2 per cent to just over 900,000. The Reverend Lynda Barley, head of research and statistics for the Archbishops’ Council, commented that while “the Church continues to be a valued part of everyday life... the wider community is dependent on a declining core of committed church members”.
This decline is significant for Britain, even if most of its citizens don’t actively care, for two reasons. First, there has never been an organised, non-Christian challenge to the established Churches on their own territory before. Judaism, itself declining in the UK, was never much interested in converts and is determinedly patriotic: no synagogue service is complete without wishes for the health of the monarch and the government. Now, however, the established Churches face in Islam a faith that is militant, self-confident, fundamentalist (even where it is, by its own lights, moderate) and linked to communities of largely recent immigrants that are growing while the older established communities of the UK are shrinking. On one estimate, there will be more Muslims in mosques than Christians in churches by 2013. It is presently the faith of the future: it grows through rising birth rates and through conversion, including among the young urban poor to whom Christianity still ministers and does much to assist, but does not appeal. Yet unlike the other faiths, it has little interest in dialogue or even understanding, has many adherents who are militantly anti-Semitic or anti-Hindu and it links Christianity to the oppression of the Muslim and, above all, the Arab world.
Second, care or not, the thought that the Christian religion will actually dwindle into real insignificance is a sobering one. What then becomes the standard for morality? Politics? But political parties are themselves declining and their ideologies are no longer convincing as moral poles, even to themselves. Civic duty might sustain a working morality; so too might feelings of charity, or pity, or remorse. But these latter emotions have come to us through Christianity, even if we have secularised and bureaucratised them. If what sustained them is, or becomes, too weak to continue the tradition, what happens to them? Fear of a moral abyss is what unites the faithful with many of those who have none. “Apres nous le deluge” could be the common slogan. Of all the major states in the world, Britain is the closest to that flood.
This is in very large part British Christianity’s own doing. Of all major religions, Anglicanism is the most open to the shifting tides of the times, because it has always defined itself as pragmatic. It was formed for reason of state and dynasty after Henry VIII’s breach with Rome. After the Civil War it was consolidated as a distinct form of Christianity, but as a theological compromise - a position much mocked by those of more rigid faiths on all sides of it. And it was national - also a cause of mockery, indeed hatred, from Rome and from the later non-conformists, who saw in its fidelity to the state a diversion for eyes which should always be upwards drawn to God.
The genius of this compromise was Richard Hooker, a late 16th-century theologian whom Williams describes as the inventor of “that distinctive Anglican mood called ‘contemplative pragmatism’... a mood that embraces a fair degree of clarity about the final goal of human beings and the theological conditions for getting there, but allows room for a good deal of reticence as to how this ought to work itself out, and scepticism as to claims that we have found comprehensive formulations”.
Holloway also brings up Hooker, stressing his pragmatism. “He created a triangular schema: scripture, tradition, reason - three cords which, twined round, became a rope. None to the exclusion of the other. He allowed Anglicanism to be flexible. Now of course, it tried to be a monopoly religion, but it early recognised it couldn’t be, and it had it in itself to accommodate and live with diversity. It became a national Church. And so the country came to terms with it.”
Establishing a national Church was, nonetheless, a cruel business: much beauty, and perhaps much faith, was destroyed. After I left Holloway, I went north to St Andrews, the medieval university town on the north Fife coast. It was the centre of Christianity in Catholic Scotland; now, its most prominent landmark is the ruin of a great medieval cathedral, built over many decades on a promontory looking out to the North Sea. Sacked by an anti-Catholic mob inflamed by John Knox’s sermon in the nearby Holy Trinity church, it has declined to ruins, the gaunt fragments of towers and walls recalling how complete was the excision of the old religion. As Eamon Duffy writes in his The Stripping of the Altars, “a great cultural hiatus... a ditch, deep and dividing” was dug between the Catholic masses of these islands, and their past.
St Andrews has retained a famed divinity school, a few hundred metres from the cathedral ruins. There I went to see Ian Bradley, Reader in Practical Theology, who thinks about contemporary Christianity. An enthusiastic man in his fifties contained in a small, overstuffed office, Bradley is in no doubt why British Christianity is moderate, and why it is likely to remain so, even at the cost of further decline. “It is simply because it’s established. When you establish a Church, it’s for everyone. It’s for the believer and the unbeliever. It’s also a kind of monopoly - no one else but the Church of England in England or the Church of Scotland in Scotland can be established, so there’s not the same competition that you get in the US, where everyone is shouting his wares and the tendency is to get more extreme - you got religion, I got more religion. Oddly, a state Church keeps religion out of politics; and politicians, even believing ones, are very clear on that. The “we don’t do God” reply when Downing Street was asked about Blair’s faith is right: it’s private. There’s almost a tacit understanding, you might say, that the Church will not promote fundamentalism.
“The question about all that is, though, how can we avoid becoming a besieged sect? The C of E is riven by faction; the Church of Scotland too, if less so. Does tolerance, which we have plenty of, become indifference? Tolerance is, I think, the English virtue: but we see in Islam a religion which is much more engaged. You don’t see many Anglicans breaking off work or play for prayer. And though there is dialogue, it’s not much, nor easy.
“The trouble may be that many of us are not fussed by decline, and by the lack of strong doctrine. I like the fuzziness; I like marrying people who are not churched. I like it that people can come into church and sit alone, thinking whatever, and not be disturbed in their thoughts. My view is that decline is liberating. Are we in a secular society? I would put it this way. I think we’re in a spiritual, ethical, moral society. I think the Church has done its job - it’s provided the public model of morality.”
Unlike Bradley, many religious people are very fussed by decline. They see it as a rationale for defeatism, and there are many individuals and centres, in and out of the established Churches, that fight - sometimes furiously - against this view. One of these is Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University. He believes that the silencing of the Christian voice - a rather embarrassed assumption by both the religious and the irreligious that it should be seen, in architecture, monuments and art, but not heard - must be reversed, or the Church is doomed. “A Christian voice needs to be heard,” he says.
When Christianity is discussed, the US is almost always mentioned as an exception among rich nations. For there, Christianity is booming - especially in the vast, evangelical mega-churches that have developed an adroit blend of showmanship, marketing and devotion. The model is now being adapted to British use. Among the most prominent and successful of these is the Anglican church of Holy Trinity, in London. It’s an unremarkable, dowdy, large Victorian city church, tucked away behind the Brompton Oratory, a little way west of Harrods in London’s Knightsbridge.
I went one Sunday evening at five - the third of four services. I arrived, as did several others, more or less on time; we were told by the friendly young ushers that the body of the church was full, and that we should go through the crypt to emerge in the choir stalls. I wondered how this could be - what about the choir? The priest at the altar? - to discover that there was no choir, no altar and, apparently, no priest. The audience, spread out in front of us and in the gallery above, was already singing happily - happy was the name for it, with a lot of rhythmic waving of lifted arms. In my fifties, I was probably the oldest person there. A couple, a man and a woman in their twenties, were on stage, dressed in jeans - he with long hair and a beard - talking about the Church and making some announcements. On the dais where the altar had been was a rock band, which then played a song about Jesus’s love, the words of which unrolled on video screens placed throughout the church. The young crowd sang, fervently, many with their arms stretched, palms held out as if showing them to the Lord. After some more of this, Paul Cowley, a young man in chinos and a polo shirt who is one of the team of curates, came on stage and began to talk about God and the truth. He included a long and well-told story about finding, when a child, a casket in his father’s desk containing white powder, which he thought was his grandfather’s ashes. Opening it clumsily, the powder fell out - “Oh no: Grandad all over the carpet!” After an inner struggle, he told the truth and found out it wasn’t his grandfather’s ashes after all. The story was meant to illustrate that God sees and knows everything. Cowley was wholly in command of the audience: every so often he would tell a joke, occasionally he would illustrate his talk with a clip from a film - the Monty Pythonesque comedy, Eric the Viking, was one - which was cued in smoothly to the screens. His style wasn’t the (to British ears) overdone hectoring of the American evangelist: more like an after-dinner speaker, without the blue jokes. But he was practical, funny and plain-spoken. He was pleasant to listen to.
Holy Trinity’s basic units are little groups of about 20 people who meet for prayer and fellowship in each other’s homes all over London (on the church’s well constructed website, there is a map showing how many groups are in which London boroughs). The spine of the church is the Alpha Course, a staged curriculum for opening the individual up to Jesus, designed by Nicky Gumbel, Holy Trinity’s vicar. A slim man in his forties and wearing a sweater and jeans, Gumbel had been a benign presence, but he did not take the service. However, he closed it after another number from the band, sending the congregation away “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost” - the only conventional C of E part of the whole affair. People were coming forward, at his invitation, to pray with other priests or more experienced members of the congregation. The service didn’t really end; rather, it dissolved into cheerful, prayerful, milling about. In the crypt, as we of the choir stalls retraced our steps to the exit, there were little groups in side rooms discussing, planning, and organising; others were browsing through a bookshop - a world away from Ian Bradley’s solitary figure in an empty pew, communing with herself.
The man who has the mitre and the staff of Canterbury is a scholar and a Welshman. He spent much of his adult life in universities and seminaries and he leads a Church - both the national C of E and the worldwide Anglican communion - which usually makes the news for its internal dissent. At one point in our talk, Rowan Williams said that he “bears the scars” to show his struggles with both “liberals” and “conservatives”. He does not give many interviews, but the subject of decline, and the position of the Church in society, interested him. We spoke in his workroom in Lambeth Palace, just across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament - a room large and austere, with no signs of power, but with a mantelpiece full of religious icons.
Williams speaks with a melodious, deep timbre that gives sonority to what he says and he speaks - rapidly - in sentences and paragraphs. Like his writings and speeches, his talk is pitched at an intellectually very high level: he is not only a studious, but a very clever man, a poet and a translator of poems from German and Welsh. His programme of lectures in the past year has included the annual Clark lectures in Cambridge - four densely argued talks on “Catholic Philosophy and the 20th Century Artist”; lectures on sustainable communities, on child rearing, on Islam, Christianity and the challenge of poverty; on “the media, public interest and the common good”; on “the gifts reserved for age” - as well as many sermons, addresses, interventions in debate in the House of Lords and articles, all this beside a programme of meetings, formal occasions, travel and, of course, worship.
It seems characteristic of him that, when asked about the Church’s decline, he goes back to history, and to literary interpretations. He points to the series of revivals within the Church in the 19th century and says that “if there had never been any challenge from dissent - from Methodism, let’s say - it’s possible that the worst of the 18th century Church would have drifted into what you do see in parts of the 18th century, which is the Church as part of the state. Revivalism outside the established Church prompts a kind of revivalism within the established Church. But it’s never an absolutely free market.”
He’s not necessarily in favour of a Church as established as it is now: rather, of a “Church of first resort”, one to which people naturally turn for the minimal things they still wish it to do for them, such as birth, marriages and deaths. “You end up, as it were, franchising all kinds of odd or not very committed behaviour; you end up exploited by communities that want religious servicing - and yet it can be genuinely a door into a more committed practice.”
When I asked him if he continued to favour establishment, he said: “Establishment remains. Whether formally and legally or just as a sort of cultural memory - yes. One of the paradoxes in Wales is that in spite of legal disestablishment the cultural place of the Church is pretty much what it is in England - it remains the Church of first resort... the model seems to be a clear core of commitment with rather fuzzy edges. The fuzzy edges are necessary. But what we have been reminded of is the need for the committed core. Some clarity about where all these values and traditions are coming from - I don’t see that as prescribing a wholesale doctrinal liberalism. So it’s a matter of what someone years ago called ‘affirmation without exclusivity’, saying: this is where I stand, describing precisely where you are going to stand and what your journey into the centre would retain.”
When I asked him if he shared Pope Benedict XVI’s sense of a Church surrounded by a culture that was inimical to it, he broadly agreed - “though I think I’m coming at it from a different kind of political ancestry, from a particular kind of pluralist tradition. I would see the Church and religious bodies in that sense as almost civil society, which are pressed by a centralised or bureaucratising or whatever trend. It is hard to say if it’s getting worse. I think in Britain we sort of wobble along... on a tightrope. In Europe, there is certainly a much more pronounced anti-clericalism rather than a pragmatic secularism, as here.”
Was he upset that a mention of Christian roots would not have been part of the European constitution? “I don’t think that putting Christianity into a EU constitution is a ditch to die in - though I also think it is odd that if you’re doing a constitution which is specifically setting out the historic roots of Europe, not to mention [Christianity] seems to me just... rather silly. Mentioning it doesn’t mean you have to revert to Christendom.” He doesn’t share Benedict’s sense - articulated before he became Pope - that the Church should, in Europe at least, resign itself to becoming smaller, but in the process become purer, more militant. Laughing ruefully, Williams said: “I think it’s a bit dangerous to say that a smaller Church is the aim - [it is] all too readily achieved!” Rather, he sees the possibility of moral exhaustion in the modernist project: a realisation, by non-believers, that the moral bases of society need religion, if not as a present guide then at least as a past structure.
Two days after we spoke, Williams received a letter from 17 (of 38) archbishops of the worldwide Anglican Communion, most of them from Africa - where the Church is growing most strongly - and Asia. It reminded him that the 1998 Lambeth Conference had declared that homosexual practice was incompatible with scripture and, recognising that he was not sympathetic to this decision, urged him to “rethink [his] personal view and embrace the Church’s consensus”. Williams is, as Richard Holloway described him, “struggling to keep the show on the road”. A split in the Church would in part be one between the rich and the developing worlds, but it would also cleave through the C of E, and could see the evangelicals form an open or de facto Church of their own, using the techniques of Holy Trinity, and a more fervid expression of faith to re-Christianise a country that has drifted away from them.
As Christmas approaches and the most insistent messages are not what joy may be kindled by the celebration of the birth of Jesus but what pleasure may be had from extra consumption, the skeletal nature of Britain’s faith stands exposed once more: a faith that still marks the seasons but, even with such a consummate priest as Williams at its head, falters at giving them meaning.
John Lloyd is the FT Magazine’s contributing editor.