The Archbishop of Canterbury has appointed the Revd Jonathan Gough as his Officer for Ecumenism in succession to the Revd Canon Dr Richard Marsh. Jonathan Gough is currently Senior Chaplain at the Army Foundation College in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Following his ordination in 1985, he served four years as a curate in North Devon and in Gloucester. Since 1989 he has held a series of appointments within the Royal Army Chaplains department.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has appointed the Revd William Adam as his Assistant Officer for the Anglican Communion and Ecumenism. Will Adam is currently Team Vicar in Witney in the Oxford diocese following his curacy spent at Beaconsfield, and since 1998 has been one of the Oxford Diocese’s Ecumenical Officers.

One of the subtleties of Shakespeare’s As You Like It is the existence of layers of sexual ambiguity implied in its original performance: a boy-actor played the part of a young woman disguised as a young man who at one point is pretending to be a girl. I was put in mind of these layers of meaning when I read The Eucharist: sacrament of unity (ESU), the Church of England’s highly courteous and careful response to the British and Irish bishops’ 1998 teaching document on eucharistic doctrine and sharing entitled One Bread One Body (OBOB). There is of course one vitally important difference: whereas the play’s layers form the stages in a dialectic, i.e. an interactive process, of ambiguity, the theological document offers a dialectic of clarification, which provides a model of what is involved in ecumenical reception.