Drew Nathaniel Keane is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University and a PhD candidate in the School of English at the University of St. Andrews, writing a thesis (tentatively) titled The Use of the Prayer Book: The Book of Common Prayer (1549-1604) as Technical Writing for an Oral-Aural Culture. With Samuel L. Bray, he edited the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition (IVP Academic, March 2021). From 2012 to 2018 he served on the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music. More of his work is available at drewkeane.com.
It will soon be the anniversary of the consecration of the first American bishop, 14 November, which prompts reflection on the effects of that momentous occasion. Samuel Seabury of Connecticut received episcopal orders from three Scottish bishops — Primus Robert Kilgour, Arthur Petrie, and John Skinner — on 14 November 1784, the Twenty-Second Sunday after…
This is the second half of an essay by Drew Keane discussing the meaning of the word “Evangelical.” You can find part 1 here. Are you an evangelical? Posed with this question, some Anglicans will reply with a smile, “yes, of course!” while other Anglicans will frown “certainly not! Some Anglicans see it as a…
What is an “evangelical”? In the preface to Christian Faith: Dogmatics in Outline (2016) B. A. Gerrish explored the question as an exercise in self-identification: “[O]thers, whether approving or scornfully, have called me a “liberal,” whereas I have always considered myself an “evangelical” in the old, Reformation sense: one who holds that “the real treasure…
Recently my friend John Wallace, an avid church-crawler, posted on Facebook a photograph he had taken of the old commandment boards from the original building (built 1752-3) of Trinity-on-the-Green, New Haven, CT. The commandment or decalogue boards originally hung behind the Communion table. Though not very familiar to most Anglicans today, they were a staple…
On Beeson Divinity School’s Anglican podcast, Gerald McDermott recently interviewed Ben Jefferies, Secretary of the ACNA liturgical committee. McDermott and Jefferies discuss the ACNA’s 2019 Prayer Book. Jefferies’s characterization of the new book leaves me bewildered. A centerpiece of the discussion is the normativity of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Jefferies calls it the…
Where is the center of gravity in Cranmer’s Order for the Lord’s Supper (of 1552, Cranmer’s final version of the Communion liturgy) and to what extent does the 1928 American Prayer Book affect or move this center? Before beginning, let me clarify my approach. The following observations represent the thinking of someone steeped in the…
