“Why is the Church silencing victims?”, Unherd, July 11, 2023:

“My small children, being Hebrew speakers, call me abba. Originally Aramaic, the language of the Lord’s Prayer — “Our Father, which art in heaven” — abba is softer, more intimate than the English “father”. Perhaps slightly closer to “daddy”, though less nursery, less sentimental. To call God “abba” is to speak of God as a loving presence, not an austere despot.

So into that one word a whole pile of very deep stuff collapses — our relationship to the ultimate nature of things, our relationship to religion, our relationship with our own fathers. You don’t have to be Freud to find it unsurprising that Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, touched a highly sensitive nerve when he worried out loud that there might be a problem with “Our father”.

Many commentators inwardly groaned, spotting another depressing bout of Church of England wokery. And yes, the Archbishop did inevitably rehearse the idea that God is the apex predator of the patriarchy. But actually, what he said was worse than that. Much worse…..”

Read the full article at Unherd.com