Beyond words | 19 January 2008

By the time you read this I shall have watched two days of the 3rd Test between India and Australia at the WACA in Perth, and given a paper on how important good Church music is in the context of modern worship. Both events will not be without their political sides: the novelty of an Indian being penalised for racist comments about an Australian, however mixed-race, has not escaped the attention of cartoonists in the local media; and my lecture topic is designed to rebut the pronouncements of the current Dean of Sydney, whose extreme evangelical views have been making waves throughout the global Anglican communion for some years now.

The fact that the Dean and the Archbishop of Sydney are brothers makes the situation for lovers of good music at Sydney’s Anglican Cathedral especially unfortunate. For the parishioners there is no escaping the hard-line and destructive opinions of these two, whose double-whammy reminds one of the accumulation of power by the Kaczynski twins in Poland.