Justin welby

Rod Liddle: Neknominations – this is what the internet is for

Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone behaved much as you behave? If everyone expressed themselves similarly? Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. Take the case of Torz Reynolds. You are almost certainly not called Torz and I would guess, too, that you count few people within your circle of friends who abide under that name. I don’t know where it comes from, Torz. A shortening of Victoria, I would guess, although it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was actually christened Torz, much as people these days are christened Jayden. Anyway, that’s not the point. Torz, who is 26 and lives in London, decided that she

CofE takes aim at payday lenders. But what about the banks?

Does Christmas have to start with a payday loan? No, according to the Church of England. The Church has unveiled its annual advertising campaign this morning, posing this very question to the residents of Manchester. As usual, the CofE is worried Britons are becoming ignorant about the origins of Christmas. As one of the adverts (pictured above) from Christmas starts with Christ shows, the aim is to remind Britain of the religious nature of the festive season as well as urging people not to go into debt to finance Christmas. But are the payday loan companies the only companies the Church should be worried about? In a recent Barometer column,

Justin Welby and the Downing Street grid

One man who isn’t on message at the start of the government’s economy week is Justin Welby, who has been warning against excessive jubilation at the end of this week when the next tranche of GDP figures are released. He told the Telegraph: ‘A flourishing economy is necessary but not sufficient. A healthy society flourishes and distributes economic resources effectively, but also has a deep spiritual base which gives it its virtue.’ This sounds a little bit like pre-2010 David Cameron, but it doesn’t quite chime with the political offensive that the Tories want to go on this week, accusing Labour of making consistently bad predictions about the economy. The

Archbishop Welby poaches the Queen’s spinner

As Mr Steerpike reported last week, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been seeking an apostle to spread the good news to the media. Today it has been announced that Alisa Anderson, the Queen’s press secretary, will join the staff at Lambeth Palace. As Royal watchers will know, Anderson was last seen pinning the announcement of the birth of Prince George of Cambridge to the golden easel outside Buckingham Palace. There’ll be no such glamour at Lambeth.

Blessed are the spin doctors | 13 September 2013

After spilling the communion wine down his cassock in an attempt to wade into the ongoing Wonga-row, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been rather quiet of late. Justin Welby faced acute embarrassment when he tried to throw the pay-day loan lenders out of the temple, only for it to be revealed that the Church of England’s investment portfolio include a significant stakes in such grubby money-lenders. Lambeth Palace have clearly learnt their lesson and are now seeking a ‘high profile and influential’ professional, with the ‘skills of a proven and visionary leader’ to help spin for God: ‘As a member of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s senior team, the Director of

The Guardian’s latest crush: Justin Welby

The Church of England has had some surprisingly good press recently. Who knows how these things happen, but the media seems to have decided to stop attacking its homophobia, and to start praising its social vision. The change at Lambeth Palace seems to have prompted this shift, which is a bit ironic, as Justin Welby is far more involved in the sexually illiberal side of Anglicanism than Rowan Williams was, but never mind. It has also been prompted by persistently hard economic times: the Church’s involvement in deprived communities gradually wins it more attention. Maybe it has insights that normal political bodies lack. Would you believe it? Some of the

Dear Justin Welby – here’s how you can really take on Wonga

I’ve been in the pulpit again, this time to salute the centenary of the death of Charles Norris Gray, a formidable Victorian vicar of my Yorkshire town of Helmsley. Gray was a social activist with strong opinions on everything from sanitation to election candidates, and he did a great deal of good for his parish — so I’m not averse to the idea of churchmen intervening in worldly affairs, and I think Archbishop Justin Welby was right to highlight the parasitical nature of ‘payday lenders’ such as Wonga, even if he was subsequently embarrassed to discover that the Church of England was an indirect investor in it. But by his

Justin Welby pleases both left and right with clever Wonga comments

Justin Welby is a clever man. His comments about payday loan companies in Total Politics have managed to please both the left and right, which is no mean feat on such a controversial issue. How has he managed to do it? Well, the Archbishop has identified a social problem, of people accessing high-cost credit that they can’t always afford to repay, and offered an intelligent solution, rather than that offered by politicians suffering from dosomethingitis, which is normally to ban stuff they don’t like. Welby clearly doesn’t like payday loan companies. They do charge high rates of APR, but only on short-term loans, which makes Wonga’s 5,853 per cent APR

Charles Moore’s notes: While Justin Welby was finding God, I was eating baked beans

Attending the funeral of Margaret Thatcher in April, the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was much impressed by the bit in the sermon by the Bishop of London about how Mrs Thatcher had replied personally to so many letters. He went back to his department, and asked it to give him each day one letter from a member of the public which recounted particularly shocking problems in the Health Service. He now uses these letters to dive into the problems that patients experience. It is a good idea, but how alarming that it is a novel one. The Department of Health receives more letters than any other part of government except

Justin Welby, a very political Archbishop

In this increasingly secular age, you would expect the Archbishop of Canterbury to be a figure of diminishing importance. But Justin Welby is fast becoming the most politically influential Archbishop since the war. Part of Welby’s influence stems from the fact that both the Conservatives and Labour think that he is, secretly, one of them. I remember within days of his appointment being approacedh by a Tory minister and then by one of those closest to Ed Miliband. They both wanted to explain how Welby was going to help move public debate in their direction. One never had this kind of conversation about Rowan Williams whose views were thought not

The new God squad: what Archbishop Welby and Pope Francis have in common

It’s a few weeks after the election of Pope Francis, and a notoriously leaky church source is talking about the revolution to come. The new leader of the faithful is a sharp operator who finds himself surrounded by ‘a medieval court system of hopeless characters, each jealously guarding their own silos of activity. There’s lots of crap people in key positions.’ Meanwhile, away from the court, bureaucrats churn out windy memos. They may not know it yet, but the process of ‘clearing out the weeds’ will start soon — possibly as early as this August. That might seem over-ambitious, but we’re not talking about the sleepy Vatican. The source is

The Pope, Welby, and the new evangelical swagger

There’s excitement in Christian circles today about the first meeting of Pope Francis and Archbishop Welby. The two men have important things in common. Both reached their positions of power from unusual backgrounds: Welby from the evangelical HTB movement; Francis from the Society of Jesus. Both have spent quite a lot of time attacking unregulated financial capitalism. Both shun traditional pomp. They both speak to a charismatic Christianity, modern and global, which stresses social justice and proselytisation above theological rigour and tradition. They are also Christians with whom secular liberals can do business. But will having such apparently compatible leaders make any meaningful difference to Catholic-Anglican relations? The Catholic blogger William

Bishop of London Richard Chartres on bankers, Occupy and Justin Welby

You may have gathered from last week’s column that I’ve been cruising the Med in search of fresh subject matter. It’s the sort of cruise that includes a programme of lectures, and the star turn on that front has been the Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, enjoying a change of pulpit after his much-praised sermon at Lady Thatcher’s funeral. I had been struck by a passage in that address about the ‘prior dispositions’ required for a healthy market economy: ‘the habits of truth-telling, mutual -sympathy and the capacity to co-operate’. So as we steamed across the Ionian Sea I sent a note to the bishop’s cabin asking whether he’d

Why Greece isn’t recovering: the view from a cruise ship

This column comes to you from the cruise ship Minerva in the Greek port of Piraeus. Why I’m aboard is a story for another day — and let me admit up front that, as financial-crisis reportage goes, observations provoked by a Homeric vista of islands and cocktails on the poop deck are unlikely to match Newsnight’s Paul Mason choking through tear gas outside a burning Athens bank. But still there are parables to be trawled from the placid Aegean waters. As the anti-austerity bandwagon gathers momentum, the Greeks seem to be in deep denial about the other element of the recovery equation. Even if you sincerely believe that fiscal pain

The Church of England needs a compromise on gay marriage. Here it is

It is a wearyingly obvious observation, but the Church of England remains crippled by the gay crisis. It is locked in disastrous self-opposition, alienated from its largely liberal nature. Maybe the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has a secret plan that will break the deadlock: there is no sign of it yet. The advent of gay marriage has made the situation look even more hopeless. It entrenches the church in its official conservatism, and it further radicalises the liberals. A few weeks ago the church issued a report clarifying its opposition to gay marriage, in which it ruled out the blessing of gay partnerships. This was not a hopeful

Live from Golgotha

A rather charming and typically self-deprecating Easter sermon from Archbishop Justin at Canterbury Cathedral; I’m beginning to like him. His subject was the inevitability of disillusion with things like governments and councils and ‘regulatory bodies’ and indeed Archbishops of Canterbury who are all bound, in the end, to be fucking useless (although this was not how he put it). I was seated in one of the pleb pews and rather hoped he might have taken a leaf out of that Argentine left-footer’s book and wandered over and washed my feet. They’ve become unaccountably scaly of late and for some reason now resemble the claws of a Galapagos tortoise; a bit

The spy who went into the fold?

What are the Times trying to say about noted Spectator fan and new Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby? They have delved into his past. It turns out to have been rather eventful; but they’ve left unexplained the connections between the many interesting dots in Welby’s life. The Thunderer exposé reveals that Welby and his wife ‘volunteered as a young couple to brave the secret police of communist Europe by smuggling Bibles’, adding, intriguingly: ‘The newlyweds were provided with a camper van by the Dutch-based East European Bible Mission for their trips to Czechoslovakia and Romania. Secret compartments and a false floor hid the biblical contraband. The Welbys were taught to

Church of England 2.0

Welcome Rt Rev Justin Welby, who became the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury this morning at St Pauls. The Church of England’s first tweeting ABC has been a bit quiet online of late, but that hasn’t stopped us nosy parkers getting a glimpse into life behind the scenes of this most holy transition. If Welby’s twenty-something daughter Katherine is anything to go by the flaws in process have not gone unnoticed: ‘Off to St Paul’s today for the confirmation of election. Anywhere else in the world an ‘election’ that had only 1 candidate it was illegal to vote against would be called corruption.’ Well quite, but it’s not all self-flagellation. While

Justin Welby to face MPs and peers on women bishops row

Justin Welby is certainly a bold chap: I understand the man set to take over from Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury is due to meet MPs and peers on Thursday to discuss their concerns about women bishops. I’ve picked up a flyer for the morning meeting in the House of Lords, where the current Bishop of Durham will ‘discuss concerns of members regarding Women Bishops’. Chairing the meeting will be Sir Tony Baldry MP and the Bishop of Leicester, Tim Stevens, who is also the Convenor of the Bishops in the House of Lords. It’s likely to be an extremely well-attended meeting, especially given some politicians have been pushing

Justin Welby’s social conscience

One of the things we know about the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is that he doesn’t like bankers. Another is that he has given a good deal of thought to the question of social sin – a trickier concept than personal, individual failings. A third is that he has been profoundly influenced by the social teaching of a nineteenth century pope, Leo XIII, as expressed in his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum. It’s available online, just twenty pages long. That encyclical is a curious document to read now: some of it feels anachronistic (if you like women bishops, you’re going to hate the bit about fathers as the natural