for Edgar Bowers, i.m. The clouds this night collapse with violence Into themselves, the frothing Gulf their score, Then rise to forge a new design, each tense With struggle to hold form, impermanence Their constant state. Below, the fitful shore Endeavors to maintain a faithful line, Establishing frail boundaries once more, Demanding less than what…
Introduction As Anglican churches across the country have scrambled to adapt to mandates from civil and ecclesial authorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of tenets of Eucharistic theology have been asserted and circulated across the province that have been received without sufficient theological analysis. In a time of crisis, quick decisions are…
The first eternity is things, the second our imagining, the third my soul, flying out to her, donning the purple robe she sewed, Wisconsin winter, thirty years ago. Purple, the color of a king. I wear that robe New Orleans June. Of the wounds, this is just one. I asked our priest to bring her…
Debating Perseverance: The Augustinian Heritage in Post-Reformation England. By Jay T. Collier. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 240 pp. $105 (cloth). According to Jay T. Collier, there are two competing ways of understanding the Church of England’s identity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Some scholars—such as…
Just as I saunter down the front porch stair Into the brilliant light of Sunday morning, My collar pressed, pants creased, and without care, As if the world shrugged off all signs of mourning, I catch sight of the dive bar on Teele Square. And there, left blinking, helpless, lost in light, …
Able Muse Press, 126 pages, $19.95 “You try/ to sort through images cluttering your mind’s dark attic,” says the opening poem, “Change Ringing”, of Sally Thomas’s debut collection Motherland, as if to announce the book’s humble preoccupations—a mere rummage round in the poet’s private memory. But that picture quickly complicates as she works out what…
THE PROBLEM Most Anglicans I know have enough respect for the Scriptures and their traditional interpretation that when confronted with a bald Universalism — such as that presented last year by David Bentley Hart’s latest book — they have enough sense to reject it. But Universalism is a Hydra with many heads. To my great…
It’s lamentable that in our day philosophy has become, like the study of Religion, “a game that scholars play,” as one academic put it. For the Reformed orthodox of the 16th-17th centuries, however, like the Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, philosophy is the “love of wisdom.” This means it’s a way of life, as Pierre…
That was a way of putting it —T.S. Eliot, East Coker Conditional, at best. In other words. Needless to say. When all is said and done. Thinking things through. Seeing them. So to speak. A word to the wise. Better left unsaid. What isn’t golden: falling into place. The word made flesh, or was the…
I’m taking a short break from my series of Tracts on Anglican spirituality because God has put on my heart to lay out a vision for Anglican education. In Tract V, I will try to persuade you of the necessity of the parochial school, and in Tract VI, I’ll preach the need for a distinctively…
