Cosmo Gordon Lang (1864–1945), was an Anglican prelate who served as
Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury. As Archbishop of
Canterbury during the abdication crisis of 1936 he took a strong moral
stance, and comments he made in a subsequent broadcast were widely
condemned as uncharitable towards the departed king. In his early
ministry Lang served in slum parishes in Leeds and Portsmouth before
his appointment in 1901 as suffragan Bishop of Stepney in London. In
1908 Lang was nominated Archbishop of York, despite his relatively
junior status as a suffragan rather than a diocesan bishop. He entered
the House of Lords as a Lord Spiritual and caused consternation in
traditionalist circles by speaking and voting against the Lords'
proposal to reject David Lloyd George's 1909 "People's Budget". This
apparent radicalism was not, however, maintained in later years. At the
start of World War I, Lang was heavily criticised for a speech in which
he spoke sympathetically of the Kaiser. After the war he supported
controversial proposals for the revision of the Book of Common Prayer,
but after acceding to Canterbury he took no practical steps to resolve
this issue. As Archbishop of Canterbury he presided over the 1930
Lambeth Conference, which gave limited church approval to the use of
contraception. After denouncing the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in
1935 and strongly condemning European antisemitism, Lang later
supported the appeasement policies of the British government.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmo_Gordon_Lang>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1270:
An agreement between Charles I of Naples, King of Sicily, and Muhammad
I al-Mustansir, ruler of the Hafsid dynasty in Ifriqiya, ended the
Eighth Crusade and opened up free trade between the Christians and
Tunis.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Crusade>
1863:
Seventeen-year old Danish Prince Vilhelm arrived in Athens to become
George I , King of Greece.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_I_of_Greece>
1960:
Surgeon and scientist Michael Woodruff performed the first successful
kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal
Infirmary.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Woodruff>
1961:
The Soviet hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba was detonated over Novaya Zemlya
Island in the Arctic Sea as a test. With a yield of around 50 megatons,
it was the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated to date.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba>
1991:
The Madrid Conference, an early attempt by the international community
to start a peace process through negotiations involving Israel and the
Arab countries, convened in Madrid, Spain.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid_Conference_of_1991>
1995:
In a referendum, the province of Quebec voted by a very narrow margin
of 50.58 percent in favour of remaining a part of Canada.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_independence_referendum%2C_1995>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
morbid (adj):
1. (originally) Of, or relating to disease.
2. Unhealthy or unwholesome, especially psychologically.
3. Suggesting
the horror of death; macabre or ghoulish.
4. Grisly or gruesome
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/morbid>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
Date not the life which thou hast run by the mean of reckoning of the
hours and days, which though hast breathed: a life spent worthily
should be measured by a nobler line, — by deeds, not years...
--Richard Brinsley Sheridan
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Brinsley_Sheridan>