Catholic Christians believe that the church is the visible presence of the mystical body of Christ on earth. The church mediates between God and his creatures because in our current condition we are not able to endure the presence of God himself unmediated. Scripture tells us that on two very important occasions – in the…
Beside the saintly woman of Norwich, an anchorite without pretense, a prophet of startling revelations, my Wife of Bath and Madame Eglantine, my courteous knight and squire do pale. Confessor to many, her wisdom shared beside the river through embroidered scrim— I wonder: what if I met her before my tales were spawned, my pen…
While reading Samuel Bray’s recent assessment of 20th century Prayerbook revision I was reminded of a poem by Tony Hoagland [they]…casually dropped his name the way pygmies with their little poison spears strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant. “O Elephant,” they say, “you are not so big and brave today!” It’s a bad…
Perhaps the strangest element of the strange story of the ornaments rubric is that the interpretation of this ambiguous rubric continues to excite such fierce debate among Anglicans today. The reason for this is that since the 1850s this rubric has become a frequent site for battles over Anglican identity.[1] So much ink (literal and…
While still a student, wandering abroad But lodged in Dublin for the summer, I Would pass, each day, through King Street with a sigh Dismissing all I couldn’t afford as fraud, And turn, at the butt-end of Grafton Street To join the host of tourists on their way Beneath the Fusilier’s arch,…
The women’s gifts to Him would not last long: Just as His corpse itself must soon decay, Embalming myrrh’s soft sweetness drifts away. A tomb that’s carved in stone’s forever strong, But nothing can sweet aloes’ life prolong. What Joseph gave would stand beyond today: This granite burial site was sure to stay– Regardless of…
One could say that the argument over the Via Media is its own via media, cutting through two camps in the Anglican Communion. Although there have been various ways of interpreting the term, more recently its interpretation has divided two groups of Anglicans—those who insist on the Reformed character of Anglicanism and those who see…
he following was originally written for a course entitled “Prayer and Sanctity” as part of my M. Div. work at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. We were asked to examine the life and writings of a saint in our tradition and to consider the following: “ the official life (vita, synaxarion); legendary material; liturgical hymnography;…
She was my strangest friend. She saw the dead on the day they died. They stopped by her house on the way to the Jordan. Sometimes she saw a globe of light emerge from her body—bright like a miniature globe lightning. God talked to her, joshing in a voice like her own. I always wondered…
In a recent Mere Orthodoxy piece titled “Why Is Anglicanism a Gateway to Catholicism?”, M.H. Turner raises some important questions about why Anglicans swim the Tiber. For my part, I found Turner’s proposed answers wanting. Paul Owen responded with a solid historical defense of Anglo-Catholicism, but he left Turner’s questions about the motive of modern…
