[No Anglican Covenant Coalition] The Revd Dr Lesley Crawley, Moderator of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition, and Dr Lionel Deimel, the Coalition’s Episcopal Church Convenor, have announced the appointment of Professor Marilyn McCord Adams as a Patron of the Coalition. Professor McCord Adams joins Bishops John Saxbee and Peter Selby, and Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch whose appointments were announced previously.

“Professor McCord Adams’s experience in both the Episcopal Church and the Church of England gives her a much broader understanding of the workings of the Anglican Communion,” said Deimel. “Coming on the heels of the decisive synod votes in Derby and Gloucester, it is an exciting time for the No Anglican Covenant Coalition.”

“The proposed Anglican Covenant was conceived in moral indignation and pursued with disciplinary intent,” according to Professor McCord Adams. “Its global gate-keeping mechanisms would put a damper on the gospel agenda, which conscientious Anglicans should find intolerable. The Covenant is based on an alien ecclesiology, which thoughtful Anglicans have every reason to reject.”

McCord Adams is Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. From 2004 to 2009, she was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University and Residentiary Canon at Christ Church, Oxford. She also served as a member of the Church of England General Synod at the time when the Anglican Covenant was being developed. She has written two books on the religious understanding of evil, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, and Christ and Horrors: the Coherence of Christology. Her most recent book, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.