In early America, flush with the chaos and wonder of the Great Awakenings, there was a creeping hope (as absurd as it is retrospectively) in the Episcopal church. Bishops and laity embraced this Evangelical tide in its best forms. Its hierarchy, historical rootedness, formal liturgy, and irenic Reformed disposition made the Episcopal church appear as…
“Fools rush in where angels dare to tread.” – Alexander Pope, An Essay in Criticism Entering into the virtual (and, I hope, “real life”) debate over whether Anglicanism is Catholic or Protestant seems a little like an illustration of Pope’s epigram. But since I’ve already manifested the foolishness (or is it audacity?) to attempt a…
O how sweetly the voices resound there when all the Holy Ones sing the praises of God saying: sanctus Thus we also praise the Lord on earth whom the holy angels praise in the highest saying: sanctus You alone make clean from unclean cleanse us, as long as we are in the world because you…
The pernicious doctrine opposed by Article XVI—that deadly sins committed after baptism cannot be forgiven—is rarely encountered in our dissolute age. If anything, we are more likely to fall into the opposite error of diminishing the seriousness of sin and the damage it inflicts. Yet tender consciences, suffocating beneath the burden of grievous sins, are…
The Anglican Office Book, 2nd Edition. Edited by Charles Lance Davis. Lake Almanor, CA: Whithorn Press, 2023. 2,247 pp. $125 (leatherette). The first edition of The Anglican Office Book was published in 2021, with the purpose of presenting “the entire Divine Office, through the prism of the classical Prayer Book tradition, in a format designed…
If you begin a lullaby, You’ll know what words, what tune. The harder question, though, is why, Which—like a red balloon Floating along, as evening comes, On soft, pale purple air, Just out of reach of laws and sums, Unanswered—hovers there. The red balloon floats there alone, Dark seeping in from shade. No wonder we’re…
