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Richard Holloway dissects the nature of evil

The controversial former bishop discusses his latest book, Between the Monster and the Saint.

It is pure coincidence, but there is something apt in the fact that Richard Holloway has arranged to meet on the day before the beginning of the Lambeth Conference, writes Adrian Turpin.

The newspapers are full of headlines predicting ructions to come, mostly along the lines of “Archbishop Williams needs miracle to hold church together”. Gene Robinson, the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire and bête noire of the evangelicals, is haunting London’s television and radio studios like Banquo’s ghost. It is not just a depressing spectacle but also a depressingly familiar one, and few know it like Holloway.

It was in 1998, as Bishop of Edinburgh, that he went to his last Lambeth Conference. After a poisonously acrimonious debate about homosexuals in the church, he got up the next morning, packed his car and began the long journey back to Scotland. This incident may not have been the sole trigger that saw Holloway exit the church, but it was certainly a notable staging post. By the following year — still a bishop — he had published probably his best-known book, Godless Morality.

“It upset a lot of people,” he says, neither proudly nor regretfully, sitting in the drawing room of his house in Merchiston.

Full story at the Sunday Times.