Stephen Bates

The Literary Review awards highlight the steamiest and most excruciating writing of the year.

The eyes of the Anglican world, Christianity’s third-largest denomination, were last week focused on an agreeable Victorian Italianate mansion in Northern Ireland. Anglicanism’s biggest cheeses — 35 of its 38 primate archbishops and presiding bishops — were sequestered inside, supposedly praying about the church’s future. This urgent desire for a united Anglicanism is a recent development.