It's not the worst column I've ever read, I guess: that honor goes to the late William Buckley, whose columns I have rarely ever bothered to read -- but now and then, I'd convince myself that it would be good to try to see the world from the other side, so to speak, so I'd wade through some of the claptrap the rightwing wrote. Once, having grit my teeth and sat me down for this healthy mind-broadening yoga, I opened the paper and started to wade through a Buckley bit. I got to the end, couldn't believe how dreadful it was, and read it through twice more just to be fair. I was left with a definite impression that Buckley had dashed the column off after a sleepless night in which heavy drinking alternated with barfing over the rail of his yacht. The sentences paraded pompously across the page; paragraph followed paragraph; but there was no craft in it; there was not even any idea in it. No sentence followed any other logically. I should want to say that I still have no idea what all that was about, but I actually had then and still have a very clean and clear and crisp image in my mind of Buckley, all ego and four sheets to the wind, clutching his booze fiercely while barfing over the rail into the cold salt water and slurily muttering, "Fuck them! I'll just write a bunch of gibberish, and if they are idiotic enough to ask for any explanation, I'll raise my eyebrows and look down my nose at them and silently curl my lip, to convey the idea they're just too stupid to understand what I've so brilliantly written." Sitting there, paper in hand, I could feel the rocking of the yacht and hear the poor man's hiccups and smell his boozy vomit. I doubt if I ever glanced at anything Buckley wrote after that. It was just really bad work. It was really really bad work

This, of course, is not nearly so bad, not by a long shot, since this, at least, is about something, though I think it is about something one of my friends used to call the "whatness of nothing" -- one of those imponderable metaphysical dilemmas that is far too vague to grab hold of and bite into. We used to discuss such things at length, lying in grass beside our bikes in the lazy summer twilight: I know everything should exist but of course there are also things that don't exist and they not only exist, because as things they are part of everything and everything exists, and yet they don't exist because, as we know, they don't -- you know what I mean: things like square circles, or the knife I have that's missing its blade and whose handle I later lost ... And then one forgotten day never marked on any calendar, we ceased discussing this suchness of nothing, without fireworks or any other celebration, as if we had clairvoyantly agreed it offered a sparse reward for all the labor input, though perhaps the true reason remains undeciphered since, in any case, we never noticed then that the conversation had changed, but only noticed much later, when we suddenly saw ourselves there in the past, viewed from a physically impossible vantage point that could never have been a view actually seen with our own eyes, as if watching a colorful group of Tyrolean peasants on the ground while passing in a blimp above but being unable to grab the camera in time to snap their picture

There was a time when I had not realized that columnists sometimes troll their readers, in order to produce a satisfyingly outraged letter in response. Here I had hoped when I first saw the headline that maybe the poor headline editor was having "one of those days," though it seems more likely now that the editor has condensed the column accurately and admirably, perhaps even actually adding a bit real meat to it. Brevity is indeed, as the proverb goes, the soul of wit, and I think I shall have a great deal more to say about that, at least as far as time permits, but allow me at least to applaud the editor's brevity, though I should also be amiss if I failed to complement the author who, despite having nothing to say today, nevertheless manages to say it in detail: 

What (I think) she is saying is that women are asking for more leadership roles within religious organizations. Because some of these organizations do not want to grant them more authority, women are leaving those religious organizations.

Thus, religion has a problem with women and that is causing women to leave, which creates another problem with women.

But I'm not sure.

I knee-jerked an angry LTTE. A few days later the columnist called me. He was in a great mood. He said he'd suspected nobody ever thought two seconds about anything he wrote, and he'd decided to write some really empty claptrap to see if anybody responded. He was glad I wrote the LTTE

I thought about him when I saw this piece

very respected.

In light of that, it's even more curious that this is so badly written.

it was lost on some others.

If you're told you're one of 10 different religious writers being asked the same question, with, presumably the same number of words to aim for, you might well think 'I've got to avoid the obvious points, or it'll just sound like everyone else', and you end up trying too hard to be different - which might look like trolling.

Having said that, I'm surprised that an English professor of religion called the General Synod vote "a leadership unwilling to accept female authority". The Synod has 3 parts, and the houses of the bishops and the clergy both voted by the necessary 2/3rds majority to have women bishops. It was the laity who failed to support it (it has to pass all 3 houses). It's a bit of a stretch to call the House of Laity the C of E 'leadership'.

Still, what can you expect from something commissioned by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation? The man can screw anything up.

I haven't read the other ones, but perhaps that would be enlightening.

Tony Blair Faith Foundation

http://www.tonyblairfaithfoundationus.org

The specific situation in the Church of England is that the vote in the synod to allow women bishops was narrowly defeated, not by the vote of the clergy, but by the vote of the lay representatives, so this article is wrong on it's face. This writer blames the clergy. There is an entrenched group of conservatives in this church that is much larger and more influential than in the Episcopal Church, which is the American counterpart. The Episcopal Church is headed by a Presiding Bishop, Katherine Jefferts-Schiori, so it is quite different here.

This is one of the vaguest critiques that I have read in awhile.