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John Bryson Chane ’72MDiv
January/February 2005
by Adrian Brune

On June 12, the day after he blessed the casket of former president Ronald Reagan as it entered the National Cathedral, the Rt. Rev. John Bryson Chane, Episcopal bishop of Washington, drove to suburban Maryland to perform a same-sex “blessing ceremony” for a local priest and his partner of 12 years, using a new rite developed for the diocese. Such blessings were criticized recently by the Lambeth Commission, an international Anglican panel appointed to consider issues of homesexuality in the church. Washington’s rebel bishop spoke to us just after the commission’s report was made public in October.

Y: You’ve been called the “Bishop with the Bad Boy Streak.” What do you think of that title?

C: I look at it as the media trying to sell their magazines and their shows. But it refers to my journey to becoming a bishop, especially the bishop of Washington, which has been somewhat of a nontraditional one.

Y: How does someone go from working with Students for a Democratic Society to becoming bishop of the most political diocese in America?

C: I had left the church after high school in Winchester, Massachusetts, and I really had no intention of coming back. The only effective groups I could see addressing the social issues of the time were Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party. But a priest I knew started talking to me about the seminary and told me he thought I should go. I said, “If you’re asking me to go to seminary to be ordained, then I won’t do it. I’ll go because I have a lot of questions.”

Y: And yet you did become ordained.

C: I met Bill Coffin ['49, '56BDiv]. I was on my way to the New Haven Green, and there was a group of crazies by Battell Chapel with Molotov cocktails ready to burn the place down. Bill Coffin came over, spoke to them for 20 minutes and somehow persuaded these folks to put down their cocktails. But the most amazing thing was that he convinced the police not to arrest them. I had heard him preach before, but I had never seen him work with people like that. I thought, “This guy’s really good; he’s also got to be very prophetic and passionate about what he does.” I wanted to learn more about it.

Y: What do you think of Washington, compared to other dioceses?

C: When I first got here, I wanted to meet with Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton ['63MA, '64LLB]. She asked me about my impression of the District of Columbia. I said, “I will be truthful with you as an outsider. The District of Columbia is the last plantation in the United States.” And I meant it. She just froze. She was shocked that I said it—but she didn’t disagree. Eleanor thought some of the parishes in the poorer areas, which are largely minority, were being overlooked. And we both agreed the lack of a voting representative leaves a House panel playing at will with our governing structures. That aside, there’s no other diocese in the United States like this. For example, I received the call asking me to perform a [same-sex] blessing on my way to meeting with Condi Rice. I have a $10 million partnership with the Primate of Southern Africa to help fight AIDS. The nature of being in the middle of Washington, D.C., puts me in the middle of a lot of national and international stuff.

Y: Knowing the controversy it would cause, why did you perform the same-sex blessing? Surely you saw the irony in it the day after Reagan’s funeral.

C: I don’t really see the irony. I minister to a very diverse population, and we’re going to have opposing views from time to time. But it still remains puzzling to me that no one objects to my baptizing the children of gay parents, blessing their home, their car, and their dog, yet I cannot bless the loving relationship which makes this family’s life possible without upsetting so many of our Anglican brothers and sisters.

Because of the Lambeth Commission report—which requested that we cease the blessings—we will stop publishing rites for same-sex blessing ceremonies while the U.S. engages in dialogue with fellow Anglican communions. But I am not going to act as a policeman trying to enforce a moratorium on same-sex blessings by priests in the Washington diocese.

Y: Do you think the Lambeth Commission’s report will heal the rift in the church?

C: Lambeth has not really solved anything. It has created a framework in which people of good will can help heal our rift. I do believe it represents the great diversity in this Episcopal Church, however, and that’s our great gift. We ought to be able to have that dynamic tension, which doesn’t divide us but at least gives people options on how they can live their lives and where they stand in their relationship with Christ.

Y: Who has been your greatest influence?

C: My wife, Karen. She helped me recover from life-threatening injuries I suffered in 1995 during a major crash while I was racing modified midget sprint cars at a track near Hanover, New Hampshire. I had to learn to walk again. She was incredibly patient and gave extraordinary understanding and love.

Y: What’s something people don’t know about you?

C: My band [The Chane Gang] is coming out with an album. It’s all blues and a great album—hard-driving.

Y: That’s a shameless plug.

C: It will be even more shameless when you receive a free one in the mail.

Anne Barnard ’92
January/February 2005
by David Wolman

As a light sandstorm kicked up at Camp Fallujah, Boston Globe reporter Anne Barnard spoke via satellite phone in November about riding into the Fallujah offensive with the Army’s First Infantry Division, Friday night drag races along the Tigris River, and why being a woman can be an asset as a journalist in Iraq.

Y: What’s it like where you are today?

B: It’s like a crisp, beautiful fall New England day, with the occasional sound of outgoing Howitzer rounds.

Y: How did you come to be in Iraq? Did you draw the shortest straw?

B: Like a lot of other metro reporters, I wanted to do overseas reporting. I’d done it before in Russia. After 9/11, I immediately told the foreign editor that I’d be willing to go pretty much anywhere. First I went to Pakistan to cover the Afghanistan war. Then I covered the war with Iraq, which mostly entailed going to not-very-informative press briefings at U.S. Central Command in Qatar. Once Baghdad was taken, my editor said, “Why don’t you go there?” When I got there in April 2003, I fell in love—both with the story and with a fellow Globe reporter, Thanassis Cambanis, who was also there. We both continued to cover Iraq on and off. When the paper created a full-time position in Iraq, we proposed doing it together as a two-person bureau.

Y: Where do you live?

B: The Hamra Hotel, in what used to be a pretty nice area of Baghdad—Jadriya.

Y: If the U.S. military is as controlling of information as we’re sometimes led to believe, how do you conduct reporting, and where do you go to get information?

B: They’re really not controlling the flow of information. The higher-ups don’t control what I see, what troops say to me, or what I write. We spend the majority of time going out into the street to talk to people and politicians, going to the scenes of bombings, getting reactions. The only filter between us and the Iraqi people is the security threat to us in doing independent reporting—kidnappings, death threats to translators. But it’s the U.S. military that’s more in a bubble than we are. I live in what they call the Red Zone—which is anything outside the Green Zone.

Y: You were embedded with the First Infantry Division during the battle of Fallujah. Was it frightening?

B: It’s probably the single most frightening thing I’ve done in Iraq. In April 2003 I was in a hospital and a gunman in the street was firing wildly and no one knew where to go for safety. That was a heart-pounding moment. But as for risk and sustained danger, Fallujah was the most frightening. Prior to that, I had gone on patrols and raids, but never something like this.

Y: Are there seatbelts in the back of the Bradley Armored Vehicles?

B: No, no seatbelts. There are two benches and you sit sideways. There are also little straps to hold onto, like on the subway. And it’s totally dark at night. In a sense you feel very safe because it’s armored, unlike in a Humvee. But then again it’s a more tempting target for an armor-piercing RPG. It also leads the way into the battle. You feel strangely passive sitting there, without any control, in the back of this lumbering vehicle. When we stopped, I would dismount with the five infantry troops as they secured a building and we'd all go inside.

Y: Do you worry that the task of keeping you safe hampers their efforts?

B: At first the idea of embedding in a combat situation freaked me out. I thought: “I’m not really supposed to be there, it’s not their job to protect me, and I don’t want to be associated with them while they’re attacking.” But my attitude has evolved over time. During the first invasion of Fallujah I was with a battalion that was doing raids and patrols. I felt I was doing something constructive just by witnessing. I would say that in general, rank-and-file troops want the story to be told, warts and all. This time in Fallujah, when we went into one tough, industrial part of the city where they knew things would be very hot, the sergeant told me to stay in the Bradley for the first dismount, so he could gauge how secure it was. Well, the sergeant was shot when they went in there, though luckily it was just a flesh wound. I was grateful to him for his judgment.

Y: Is being a woman a major obstacle to getting your job done?

B: It’s not that much of an obstacle. In a lot of ways it helps. The biggest obstacle is safety and security where foreigners are conspicuous. Women are less so. I’ve gone on trips down to Najaf wearing an abaya, which is the cape that Shiite women wear. When you’re pretending to be dozing in the back seat of a car, no one will think twice to look at you. And it’s the same in Baghdad. If I wear a Sunni head scarf, I won’t stand out.

Y: Is there anything you’ve experienced in Iraq that all of us over here, no matter how much media we consume, could never fully understand?

B: The low-level constant stress of random violence. People think of Jerusalem as scary to live in, but the rate of bombings and killings is far higher here. And there are so many surreal things, like living isolated in a hotel, then going out to speak with Iraqis who have no electricity, then going into the Green Zone, passing through five layers of security into a place where being an American is a plus, and then going back outside, where you want to hide the fact that you’re an American and slip away in an unmarked car.

Y: You wrote a piece about drag racing in Baghdad. What’s that all about?

B: Every Friday, all the young, cool guys in Baghdad bring their cars to this sort of park that was once an exclusive area, and they race them around a track along the [Tigris] river. The day I went they weren’t racing, but they were doing all these donuts and other stunts. Some of the cars are pathetically broken down, but people seem to cheer more for them, like they’re underdogs. There are some nice sports cars, too.  

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