{"id":7747,"date":"2004-03-10T22:54:48","date_gmt":"2004-03-10T22:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/williams_and_pullman.html"},"modified":"2004-03-10T22:54:48","modified_gmt":"2004-03-10T22:54:48","slug":"williams_and_pullman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/williams_and_pullman.html","title":{"rendered":"Williams and Pullman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rowan Williams commends the works of Philip Pullman<\/a><\/p>\n

The Archbishop of Canterbury has commended the novels of Philip Pullman to a gathering invited to Downing Street by the Prime Minister. Dr Rowan Williams reportedly said that, while it would not be right for atheism to be incorporated into religious education, as a pro-Labour think tank advocates, Pullman’s His Dark Materials ought to be taught. The Pullman trilogy has recently achieved new popularity on stage, but it has also offended Christians by its caricature of the Church.<\/p>\n

The Archbishop says that “teaching about religion [should] include teaching about its critics”. This is in the best Anglican tradition of toleration. Yet Pullman’s quarrel is less with the Church of England than with the authority, celibacy and rituals of Catholicism. For Catholic readers, Pullman seems motivated as much by old-style No Popery as by the atheism he professes. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, this is not the half of it. The article (which is an opinion piece) is not supportive of Williams’ suggestion, but nonetheless doesn’t quite get the point of Pullman. He’s absolutely, totally anti-theistic. God – old, whithered, useless, and an obstacle to real human joy and freedom, dies in the third volume of the trilogy, and good riddance, too.<\/p>\n

So it goes a bit deeper than anti-Popery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rowan Williams commends the works of Philip Pullman The Archbishop of Canterbury has commended the novels of Philip Pullman to a gathering invited to Downing Street by the Prime Minister. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}