There wasn’t much information in the official communique after Pope Benedict and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams met at the Vatican on Saturday. The terse text mentioned “cordial discussions” about challenges facing Christians, the need to cooperate and their intention to continue bilateral theological dialogue. The only reference to the issue of the day, Benedict’s offer to take alienated Anglicans into the Catholic Church, was mentioned in passing as “recent events affecting relations between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.” Hmm, pretty thin pickings….
The Pravda-like opaqueness of the communique (read it here) prompted me to zoom in on the photographs we got from the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano for any other clues there. Let’s see if they help as we go along. The “pope’s paper” (here in PDF) published the communique at the bottom of its front page, below two articles on the pope’s meeting with artists and one on Iran’s nuclear program. An interesting hint at the Vatican’s priorities that day.

Given this thin statement, our news story led off: “The archbishop of Canterbury and Pope Benedict agreed the need for closer ties between their churches on Saturday, in their first meeting since last month’s surprise Vatican offer to disaffected Anglicans.” Read the whole story here.

Williams later spoke to the BBC (starting at 33:19) and Vatican Radio. He told the BBC that the meeting “went as well as I could have hoped, really.” He said he expressed Anglican concerns at the way the pope’s offer — officially called an “apostolic constitution” — was handled and the two then looked ahead to future ecumenical discussions.

On Vatican Radio, he said at the start of the interview: “Clearly, many Anglicans, myself included, felt that he put us in an awkward position for a time. Not the content so much as some of the messages that were given out. So I needed to share with the pope some of those concerns and I think those were expressed and heard in a very friendly spirit.” The pope’s main message to him, Williams said, was “that the constitution did not express any change in the Vatican’s attitude towards the Anglican Communion as such.”

“The presentation of the constitution as a kind of dawn raid on the Anglican Communion misunderstands the process that happened and the actual nature of the constitution. People become Roman Catholics because they want to become Roman Catholics, because their consciences are formed in a certain way and they believe this is the will of God for them. I wish them every blessing in that. But I don’t think it’s a question of the Roman Catholic Church, as it were, trying to attract by advertising or by special offers. I don’t see that as the purpose at all. In that sense, I don’t particularly worry about it.”

Williams said they didn’t talk about the ordination of women bishops, the issue that has prompted some orthodox Anglicans to consider “swimming the Tiber”. This is all the more curious because he delivered a provocative speech on Thursday at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in which he stood up for women’s ordination and asked whether the Vatican should consider it the roadblock to greater unity that it does.  Our news story on it said:

“Roman Catholics should look beyond the divisive issue of ordaining women to see how much they share with the world’s Anglicans and work toward greater Christian unity, the head of the Anglican Communion said on Thursday. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, whose own Church is split over female priests and bishops, said the Vatican’s ban on ordaining women was not as solidly grounded theologically as the core Christian doctrines the two denominations agree on.

Williams said decades of Catholic-Anglican dialogue had achieved wide consensus on core Christian teachings and left only lesser issues of church organisation and authority open. “The question … is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally Church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain … Do the arguments advanced about the ‘essence’ of male and female vocations and capacities stand on the same level as a theology derived more directly from scripture and (our) common theological heritage?”

The speech is quite interesting for its theological reflections on the nature of ecumenical dialogue. Read the whole text here.

Williams said he gave Benedict a copy of the speech but they did not discuss it. Although the Vatican photos show him gazing with appreciation at the gift of a golden pectoral cross from the pope, none of the nine shots that we ran show Benedict thumbing through — or even holding — the text of the archbishop’s challenge to Rome’s all-male clergy.

They ended up with the standard pose, the one photographers call the “grip-and-grin” shot. Apart from not  showing the pope holding the Williams text, I’m not sure we’ve learned much more from these pictures. Or have I missed something?

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(Photo: Archbishop Vincent Nichols, 21 May 2009/Kevin Coombs)

Those disaffected Anglicans in England and Wales who think they can take up Pope Benedict's offer and switch to Rome with a "pick and choose" attitude should think again, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols has said.

Many Anglicans unhappy with women's ordination and gay clergy cannot just convert to Roman Catholicism as a way out, but must accept Catholic doctrine  wholeheartedly, he said.

"Nothing is envisaged in this provision that the Pope has put in place is a kind of minimalist approach to picking bits of the Catholic faith that I like and then seeing myself as it were contained as a quasi-Catholic, not a real Catholic, under the umbrella of this constitution," he said, referring to a "buffet approach" to the faith that some Catholics dismiss as "cafeteria Catholicism."

It is still unclear how many Anglicans will convert, but the invitation, in the form of what's called an Apostolic Constitution, has opened up old wounds between the Vatican and Lambeth Palace.

It has also crystallised divisions within the Church of England, the Anglican mother church.

A debate is raging over whether the Pope's offer was an act of undisguised poaching, tapping into discontent among some Anglicans. or whether it was an act of generosity, responding to calls of help.

It has also raised questions about the approach adopted by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion, towards the offer - details of which he did not know until two weeks before the announcement. Some say he has been too soft, while others say he has been judicious.

A meeting between the pope and the archbishop this weekend was said to be short but courteous - though the BBC pointed out the pope spent more time with artists visiting the Sistine Chapel than he did with Williams.

(Photo: Archbishop Williams and Pope Benedict, 21 Nov 2009/Osservatore Romano)

One thing that is clear is Nichols' call for complete devotion to the Roman Catholic Church.

"I clearly want to say unambiguously that anybody who seriously wants to perhaps take up the initiative that Pope Benedict has put in place needs to do it out of a conviction that this is the context in which they desire, long to live their Christian discipleship," he said.

"It therefore must be a positive desire in their heart, and one that centres around not questions of the ordination of women to the episcopate, not questions of sexual ethics, but must centre around an understanding of the role of the office of the Bishop of Rome...in the ongoing life of a Christian.

"So a person must be embracing of that concrete aspect of Catholic life which is the authority of the Holy See in the person if they are hoping to make this journey with integrity."

Williams seemed to say the same thing when, in an interview with Vatican Radio, he stressed that Anglicans who switch to Rome should do it because they genuinely want to become Roman Catholics, not out of protest against something in Anglicanism. "People become Roman Catholics because they want to become Roman Catholics, because their consciences are formed in a certain way and they believe this is the will of God for them. I wish them every blessing in that," he said.

Archbishop Nichols's comments came as he announced that a commission of Catholic bishops and advisers had been set up to consider in detail the next steps with regards the Apostolic Constitution. It will liaise with the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and offer advice to diocesan bishops.

It will be interesting to see whether his comments influence the number of Anglicans wanting to switch.

It is rare that religion and science find agreement, but that is what happened when Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spoke at a meeting on saving the earth from climate change.

“The great Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson published a book in 2007 called “Creation”, subtitled An Appeal to Save Life on Earth,” Sacks told leaders of all the major faiths meeting at Lambeth Palace in London on Thursday.

(Photo: A partially dried reservoir in Yingtan, Jiangxi province, China, 29 Oct 2009/stringer)

“I thought that was a very good book. E.O. Wilson is known not to be religious, but what this book was was a call to religious people and scientists to call off the war between religion and science and work together for the sake of the future of life on earth.

“And I felt that was a very generous and appropriate call by a non-religious scientist.”

He said “that science and religion despite their apparent friction actually converge on a profoundly scientific and at the same time religious idea that there is a kinship of life and hence a covenant of life”.

Not only did such a high-profile religious figure agree with the scientific world, but faith leaders found harmony among themselves at the same meeting.

Sitting next to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the Anglican Church, was the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, who only days earlier had delivered the Pope’s offer to disaffected Anglicans the chance to convert to Rome.

Also attending were faith and community organisation leaders including Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Baha’i, Jain and Zoroastrian.

(Photo: Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, 23 July 2006/Paul Hackett)

Organised by Williams, the leaders issued a joint statement in which they “recognised unequivocally that there is a moral imperative” to tackle the causes of global warming.

They agreed to work together to raise awareness about the effects of “catastrophic climate change”, saying it was the poor and vulnerable who most suffered from the ensuing droughts, floods, water shortages and rising sea levels.

Quoting from the book of Genesis, Sacks said man was placed on earth to serve it and protect it. “Man was a guardian, not the owner using and abusing the good things on earth,” he said.

“We are taken from the earth and therefore owe it a sense of kinship and responsibility. We believe our very existence as human beings come wrapped up in environmental imperatives and ecological responsibility.”

Drawing on the story of Noah’s Ark where all animals, including the lion and the lamb, had to survive side by side, he said we would all drown if we failed to work together.

Of course, if everybody kept the Sabbath, when nobody drove cars, flew by plane, or switched on any electrical appliances, the environmental problem would be solved, he said.

But more realistically, a new set of rituals would have to be devised that recognise the importance of the environment.

“What religion allows us to do is take the big ideas and translate them into daily rituals,” he said.

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One can guess what Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will say to Pope Benedict when the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion travels to the Vatican later this year. The more interesting question might be what  Queen Elizabeth is likely to say when she hosts the pope next year.

(Photo: Queen Elizabeth, 13 June 2009/Luke MacGregor)

The timing of the trips couldn’t be more intriguing, especially the second one. The pope is due to visit Britain in September 2010 and is expected to preside there over the beatification of the late Cardinal John Henry Newman, a famous 19th-century convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism.

The queen is, after all, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, many of whose flock the pope is seeking to poach with his offer last week allowing Anglicans to convert en masse while keeping many of their traditions. And among her honorifics is “Defender of the Faith.” While that sounds impressive, it pales in comparison to Benedict’s long string of titles including “Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles and Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church.” But oneupmanship is a British sport, so one never knows how these things can turn out.

It is unclear how many CofE traditionalists, upset at moves to ordain women bishops and the issue of homosexuality, will move over to Rome, but the conservative Anglican group Forward in Faith suggested 12 Church of England bishops may switch - more than a quarter of their total.

It was suggested by the Daily Telegraph newspaper earlier this month, before the Vatican effectively sabotaged decades of dialogue between the two churches, that the pope would receive a warm welcome at Buckingham Palace. “The warmth of her welcome will come as no surprise to the pontiff,” it said.

Citing sources speaking to the Catholic Herald weekly, the Telegraph said the queen has “grown increasingly sympathetic” to the Roman Catholic Church over the years while being “appalled,” along with her son and heir Charles, at developments in the Church of England.

(Photo: Pope Benedict, 11 Oct 2009/Max Rossi)

The Sunday Telegraph in July said the queen had told the heads of a traditional group that she “understood their concerns” about the future of the 77 million-strong global church.

But whether the warmth will stand up to the pope parking his tanks on her lawn, as Ruth Gledhill described it in The Times — especially Buckingham Palace’s lawns — would be astonishing.

As head of her faith she must defend her church, and can do so on an equal footing in both political and spiritual terms, Vicki Woods of the Telegraph wrote. “When Pope John Paul II met the queen on his visit to Britain, he was for once wrong-footed,” she pointed out.  “She spoke to him not as a fellow head of state but as a fellow head of the church: her church. Her faith. Which she defends. He was quite taken aback.”

It is not only her church’s clergy and laity which are up for grabs, but possibly also the buidlings.

And it was Queen Elizabeth I, after all, who so staunchly defended the English Reformation introduced by her father Henry VIII in 1534 in his dispute with Rome over his desire to divorce one wife and marry another.

The queen has already potentially been slighted by her Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who it has been reported in the media, apparently personally invited the pope to visit Britain during a private audience last February.

“He should read Carla Powell’s diary in The Spectator,” Woods wrote.  “Gordon Brown says he invited His Holiness, which if true would represent a gross breach of protocol. Only the queen can invite a head of state to Britain.”

(Photo: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, 11 Feb 2009/Kieran Doherty)

The queen, needless to say, has said even less than her archbishop. The older royals don’t often leave themselves open to be quoted. On one of the rare occasions they have, the late queen mother was reported to have only commented that church services should not last beyond an hour. The archbishop has barely said much more in response to the pope other than he did not see it as “an act of aggression” and that it would not derail dialogue between the two churches.

But when you become the focus of general sympathy, you must know that you have probably been dealt a rum deal.

The fact that the archbishop was only notified two weeks before the pope revealed just how far he was prepared to go in accommodating the Anglo-Catholics must have left him “starting to wonder if he has any friends left,” Gledhill wrote in the Times over the weekend.  “He is like the academic boy at school who no one wants to play with because he doesn’t understand the rules of fisticuffs,” she added.

Many religious figures have been indignant at the way the Vatican has behaved towards Williams, with his predecessor George Carey urging him to protest at its “appalling” injustice.

The Vatican is expected to reveal more details about the offer in the next week or two. The conservative Anglican group Forward in Faith debated the offer in London at the weekend and decided its members would be consulted, with a decision due in late February after the CofE general synod.

Some women priests say that timing is cynical, based on emotional blackmail.

“It is beginning to sound like an abusive marriage,” said the pro-women ordination spokeswoman Reverend Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, chaplain at University College, Durham, in northern England. She suggested the disaffected will threaten to leave unless concessions are made on the possible ordination of women bishops, which is due to be discussed at the synod.

(Photo: Rev. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes)

The Vatican made moves 17 years ago to attract Anglicans when the ordination of women priests was being discussed.  “They could say we will leave unless you do this and that,” she  said.

What do you think? Will Queen Elizabeth surprise Pope Benedict and defend the faith, as she did with Pope John Paul? Or will diplomacy prevail?

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Pope Benedict has made it easier for disaffected Anglicans to convert to Roman Catholicism.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the Anglican Church, and Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster and head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, stressed dialogue would continue between the two churches.

They were at pains to say it was not a comment on the Anglican Communion, but a response to requests from traditional Anglicans from all over the world.

Williams said he did not see it as an act of aggression, but he had no input in the new "Apostolic Constitution" and was only told about its details two weeks before it was disclosed at the offices of the Roman Catholic Church in London. A simultaneous press conference was held at the Vatican.

The head of the Anglican Church has been trying to keep together the liberal and conservative wings of the church, divided since the consecration of openly gay U.S. Bishop Gene Robinson in 2003 and the blessing of same sex marriages in Canada.

The Church of England has also experienced disagreement over the issue of women bishops.

Details of the legal framework were limited, but the constitution allows groups to join the Roman Catholic Church while maintaining some of their own traditions.

It allows for the ordination as Catholic priests of married former Anglican clergy, but not bishops.

It would allow the appointment of leaders, usually bishops, to oversee communities of former Anglicans who become Catholics and recognise the pope as their leader.

They may be able to eventually develop their own liturgy which would have to be approved by the Holy See.

The constitution poses serious questions for both churches.

For the Anglican Church, will it weaken its status? Will it clear the way for women bishops?

For the Roman Catholic Church, will it reopen the issue of celibate priesthood?

The Church of England should shed its "booted and suited" middle-class image, a British bishop says.

"Even today I meet people who think you have to be highly educated or suited and booted to be a person who goes to church" the Reverend Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Reading, in southern England, said.

The comments come as Christian churches throughout the UK and other parts of the world launch a week-long "back to Church Sunday" campaign, an attempt to encourage people of all social classes to go to church this Sunday.

Up to 16,000 Church of England churches as well as Churches Together in Scotland, the Church in Wales, Baptist, Methodist, United Reformed, Salvation Army and Elim Pentecostal churches will be taking part as will Anglican churches in Australia, Argentina, New Zealand and Canada.

A poll in 2007 showed the social breakdown of congregations in Britain was evenly spread, but drawing on a shopping analogy, the Bishop likened the church's image to that of middle-class Marks & Spencer rather than the more downmarket supermarkets Asda and Aldi.

"How did it come to this, that we have become known as just the Marks and Spencer option when in our heart of hearts we know that Jesus would just as likely be in the queue at Asda or Aldi? " he asked.

"That's so frustrating. Jesus got us started with church simply. Like this: sitting us down in groups on the grass and telling simple stories. Not simplistic. But certainly not complicated. All his first disciples were down-to-earth people who wanted to know what life was all about."

He said churches were places of "warmth and honesty...Not a hobby but a way of life".

"Church: it’s definitely not about how you look, what you do, how you sound, how well you sing. Just come as you are," he added.

A YouTube invitation has been posted by the Bishop of Sheffield, the Revd Steven Croft, and local radio adverts have been placed, while a Nottinghamshire bishop, the Revd Tony Porter, will be donning his biking leathers and setting off for a Territorial Army barracks to deliver the invitation.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the spiritual head of the Anglican Church, backed the campaign, saying the church had a responsibility to welcome all comers.

Bankers, auditors, money-market speculators and regulators all came in for criticism at the Church of England's General Synod during a discussion on the implications of the financial crisis and the recession.

The City had lined its pockets, regulators had not done their job properly and auditors had signed off financial deals that should not have seen the light of day, the synod heard at its meeting in London.

The result is a deep recession, the first since the early 1990s, with Britain suffering a shrinking economy, rapidly rising unemployment and falling output.

But the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, suggested everybody was to blame.

"We have all worshipped at the temple of money," he said. "We have been guilty of idolatry: the worship of God falsely conceived - which is deadlier than either heresy or sin, for it is the prolific source of each. It is this idolatrous love of money, pursuing profit without regard for ethic, risk or consequence, which has led us from orientation to dis-orientation."

He said the solution lay not only in economics and politics, but also a "deeper vision".

"It is not about what governments can do for us but what we can all do," he said.

Various suggestions were put forward by synod members, including working with counsellors, supporting credit unions, donating 10 percent of salary and opting for a gentler life.

They sympathised with the near 2 million unemployed and recognised that some of their own communities were still suffering from the economic downturn of the 1980s, with generations of families still unable to find work.

But the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, while empathising with the 150,000 people in his diocese who are likely to lose their jobs, said some may feel relief from being made redundant.

"It is difficult to know whether to sympathise more with those who have lost their jobs or those who are left carrying even greater loads with higher targets and fewer colleagues," he said. "Sometimes indeed people seem to be relieved to get off the treadmill and to be given an opportunity to reconsider what they really want out of life.

"One of the great implications of this turbulence for us is to re-boot our sense of what a truly flourishing human life consists of. The Crack-berry culture is dangerously addictive and coming off is notoriously difficult."

The comments were less strident than those made since the onslaught of the financial crisis.

Sentamu in September had accused short-sellers, those who speculate on falling share prices, of being "bank robbers and asset strippers". While the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in December said the credit crunch was a reality check, a reminder that "fairy gold is just that".

He also criticised the government's fiscal stimulus package, likening it to "an addict returning to a drug".

But there were still criticism from synod members.

"It is very ironic that we have got to the point now where we have massively bailed out big banks, and bailed out car manufacturers in the States doing to them what we have not done for many nations in the Third World," the Bishop of Durham, Thomas Wright, said.

"We are in severe danger of the very rich doing to the very rich what they have failed to do for the very poor, and that is shameful."

But not everybody was angry with the financiers.

Susan Cooper, from the London diocese, said she was "a little disconcerted" by some of the comments.

"These are people too alongside the rest of us and they do not need vilifying at this stage. Some of them are members of our congregations," she said.

The financial crisis so dominates the news these days that reports on a meeting of the Christian and Muslim religious leaders and scholars pictured here zero in first on what they said about the economy. These men and women of faith would readily admit they look like anything but a group of portfolio managers, but comments on the crisis now get top billing no matter where they come from. We grabbed the crisis angle too, breaking out the economic statement from the final communique yesterday as our first item on this meeting. With that done, let me go back to look at the rest of the news from the latest Common Word dialogue meeting in Cambridge and London on October 12-15.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this meeting was how both sides — 17 Muslims and 19 Christians — worked to understand the other’s faith and find ways to spread that understanding within their communities. For example, in his opening address, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tackled the problem of how to deal with the the two faiths speak differently about God. “While what we say about God is markedly different,  irreducibly different in many respects,” he said, “we recognize in each other’s language and practice a similarity in the way we understand the impact of God on human lives, and thus a certain similarity in what we take for granted about the nature or character of God.” 

Meeting in Cambridge, they held sessions in the “scriptural reasoning” practiced at the university’s Inter-Faith Programme. In these sessions, Christians, Muslims and Jews read passages from their scriptures together and then explain them to each other. David Ford, an Anglican theologian from Northern Ireland who is director of the Inter-Faith Programme, told me he attended one such session with a British Anglican bishop, a German Jesuit priest, a Muslim sheikh from the Emirates, a Libyan Islamic theologian, a British Methodist theologian and an Iranian ayatollah.  “We were all studying together and dealing with important issues,” he said. “Some of the Muslim scholars were doing this for the first time with Christians,” said Aref Ali Nayed, a senior advisor to the Inter-Faith Programme.

Nayed told me the theological issues they discussed included the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the way canons of scripture are established, the question of prophesy, the notion of a convenant with God and various aspects of hermeneutics, or how to analyse scripture. At their last meeting at Yale University in July, both sides explained how they understood concepts like love, compassion and mercy. The question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God was also discussed and that dialogue continues, he said.

If those terms seem overly academic, consider what an agreement could mean down at the level of the average church or mosque. If Muslims understand how Christians understand the Trinity, for example, then imams might not stoke tensions by preaching that Christians are polytheists.  By the same token, priests and pastors might not condemn Islam as a false religion if they believed Christians and Muslims worshipped the same God and valued love, compassion and mercy in similar ways.

As Egypt’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Ali Gomaa put it: “We want to listen in order to correct misconceptions, to dissolve the ice, to find what is common, and to cooperate for the sake of worshipping God, engaging in positive development and purifying the human soul … we reject this constant provocation that generates hatred and accordingly instability and division.” 

But how do you get from here to there? The meeting addressed that in its communique:

“Looking towards the future, mindful of the crucial importance of education and inspired by our presence in a great seat of learning, we have also been keen to identify specific ways in which our encounter might be broadened and deepened.  We have, therefore, committed ourselves to the following over the coming year:

· To identify and promote the use of educational materials, for all age-groups and in the widest possible range of languages, that we accept as providing a fair reflection of our faiths

· To build a network of academic institutions, linking scholars, students and academic resources, with various committees and teams which can work on shared values

· To identify funds to facilitate exchanges between those training for roles of leadership within our religious communities.”

“I sense in this meeting a feeling of urgency, especially on the Muslim side, that we need to show our communities that dialogue does bear fruit and improve their lives to some extent,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America. The way to do this is to have leaders of each faith speak out when the other is under attack. The communique denounced the persecution of Iraqi Christians in Mosul: “These threats undermine the centuries-old tradition of local Muslims protecting and nourishing the Christian community, and must stop …  We find no justification in Islam or Christianity for those promoting the insecurity or perpetrating the violence evident in parts of Iraq.”

Mattson, a professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary in the United States, told me U.S. Muslims want to hear similar statement from Christian leaders condemning “the dehumanisation of Muslims, like these public attacks on Islam that you see with the distribution of the DVD ‘Obsession’.”

The communique also mentioned another aspect of inter-faith dialogue that the Common Word declaration originally did not address but participants feel they must include. It said the scriptural reading sessions had “given us each a greater appreciation for the richness of the other’s heritage as well as an awareness of the potential value in being joined by Jewish believers in a journey of mutual discovery and attentiveness to the texts we hold sacred.” In contrast to the Yale meeting, there were no Jewish participants in Cambridge, but Nayed said one session held a conference call with a Jewish scholar to discuss ways of involving them more in future.

To return to the financial theme this post started with — the “trickle-down effect” is under fire these days for not being an efficient way to spread wealth in an economy. In the context of inter-faith dialogue, however, it seems like the best way to proceed. Ford, Mattson and Nayed all stressed to me the importance of having Christian and Muslim scholars get to know each other and discuss issues in person. Nayed said agreement reached at such meetings could trickle down through the communities: “To have top Muslim theologians become personal friends of top Christian theologians has a monumental effect because they all have graduate students who will teach other students who will become preachers in mosques and churches. This is really important.”

Meetings of theologians don’t usually make news. But trends can make news. A series of meetings can start to show some direction the participants’ thinking is going in. If it’s a new direction, and one with potentially positive results, then we journalists on the Godbeat take notice.

The “Common Word” conference now underway at Yale Divinity School in the United States is at the heart of a trend towards increasingly frequent and detailed discussions among Christian and Muslim scholars and leaders. This trend is a reaction to September 11 and other Islamist attacks in Western countries. To our 24/7 news culture, this sounds like a very slow-fused reaction indeed, but changing attitudes and building trust takes time.

Just about every conference participant I’ve spoken to has stressed that work towards greater understanding between Christians and Muslims was now moving ahead on several fronts. “There’s definitely something in the air,” remarked Miroslav Volf, a Protestant theologian who runs the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. As University of Cambridge theologian David Ford put it, “People were almost waiting for an initiative around which they could gather and which generally gave some way forward for Muslim-Christian engagement. Many initiatives were on the Christian side before but this was a Muslim initiative. It’s had the desired effect.”

We’ve blogged a lot here about the Common Word dialogue appeal last October by 138 Muslim scholars to Christian leaders. That appeal prompted Volf and three Yale colleagues to write a welcoming response signed by about 300 theologians and church leaders, mostly Protestants in the United States. It led to a meeting at the Vatican in March that agreed on a conference and meeting with Pope Benedict in November and a regular Catholic-Muslim forum. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams also hosted a meeting of Christian theologians in June to write another response that will be discussed at another Common Word conference at the University of Cambridge in Britain in October.

An interesting twist has been the burst of interfaith activity by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, whose strict Wahhabi sect of Islam came to be seen as a stumbling block to better relations between Islam and the West after it turned out that 15 of the 19 9/11 attackers were Saudis. Abdullah paid a surprise visit to Pope Benedict at the Vatican in November and announced he wanted to promote interfaith understanding. This was initially greeted with scepticism, including on this blog, because it looked like this might be more a PR exercise than a serious initiative. But Abdullah held an interesting meeting in early June of Muslim scholars — Sunnis, Shi’ites and others — to win approval for his project. He then convened a surprising interfaith conference in Madrid this month that brought together Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and others.

Has interfaith dialogue become a bandwagon that Abdullah felt he had to jump on? Is he trying to compete with the Common Word? It might look like that, but conference participants here don’t think so. They think more initiatives only help the trend and don’t see Abdullah’s more diplomatic approach taking anything away from the theological discussion the Common Word is proposing.

A few comments from Muslim participants:

Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, said many people thought the Madrid conference would only be a showcase for the Saudis, but she felt it had an important symbolic value. “I think it was a bold step and a good step. I don’t think it will be important programmatically. I think it’s important in opening minds.” Just by being the Saudi king, Abdullah can set a tone,” she said. “He can get people excited and then they’ll go off and figure it out themselves. That’s what I’m looking for, not for big initiatives to come out of it.”

Mustafa Ceric, grand mufti of Bosnia, said “I am glad that we now have from the Muslim world many movements of dialogue and interaction with the West. Each one has its own merit. King Abdullah wants to say something and I think we should listen to him.” The Common Word project, he said, “is based on the more intellectual and spiritual aspects of something everlasting. It is not temporary, it is not a political thing, it is based on a deep intellectual desire to understand the depth of the Christian-Jewish-Islamic message, or the Ibrahimic tradition.”

Ibrahim Kalin, director general of the SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research in Turkey and spokesman for the Common Word at the Yale conference, said “we don’t see any rivalry with other initiatives. We wish them well.” Abdullah’s efforts were good for improving contacts and communications between Christians and Muslims. “If you place our initiative in the context of Islam-West relations, it is helpful in countering and correcting misperceptions. There is nothing like face-to-face interaction. You can read all kinds of books and write all kinds of articles, but it’s never the same as sitting with that person for a day or two discussing things.”

The Lambeth Conference, the once-in-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops from around the globe, has come up with what it hopes will be the perfect solution for avoiding any mud-slinging.

No news could be said to be good news for the beleaguered church right now and the organisers of the Anglican summit in the English cathedral city of Canterbury may well have the Zulus to thank for that.

Anglicanism has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons as conservatives and liberals lock horns in an increasingly bitter war of words over the ordination of gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex unions. Up to a quarter of the bishops have stayed away from Lambeth in protest, a move that has shaken the Anglican Communion but, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Willliams says, will not lead to a schism.

Lambeth organisers have come up with a solution to keep the angry rhetoric to a minimum, hoping that their gathering will be given much more anodyne coverage.

The bishops are being split up into “Indaba” groups of about 40. Indaba is a Zulu word for “a gathering for purposeful discussion.”

But the organisers, explaining the concept, warned that even after two weeks of the bishops putting their heads together on every subject from evangelism to transforming society, “Indaba is not shaped for producing a communique, an encycical letter or a text.”

“Indaba is open-ended conversation,” they explained. Open-ended, but not open to the media — we can’t attend the sessions and report on how they actually work.

As the procedure was explained to us, each Indaba group, after much soul-searching together, appoints a “listener” who will help to put together a final “reflective document.” So there will be no messy fights over resolutions like the debate over homosexuality that dominated the 1998 Lambeth Conference.

Little wonder then that Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the 450-year history of the Anglican church, does not expect any fireworks at the conference — to which he has not been invited.

In an interview with Reuters before Lambeth, Robinson forecast that the Anglican summit “will drive the press crazy. There will be be no resolutions, no proclamations, no lines drawn in the sand, no up or down votes to report the count.”

“This is the place where the Archbishop got it exactly right. What we need at the moment is deepening conversation,” he said.

The Anglican Communion website has its own Lambeth Daily with news from the Conference, including soundbites and cartoons.