Articles by The Rev. Dr. Eric M. Parker

The Rev. Dr. Eric M. Parker

Fr. Eric is the Rector of St. Paul's Anglican Church in Lexington, VA. A native of southern Mississippi, he holds an M.A. in Theology from Reformed Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Religion from McGill University. He has co-authored a book on Nicholas of Cusa and authored various academic and online articles. He is married to Aubrey and they have three lovely children.


1

A Return to Civilization at St. Dunstan’s Academy

It was just after Ascension Day that we packed up our family and drove over the Blue Ridge Mountains, eastward into the setting sun. Our destination was nowhere, not yet a place, but some land somewhere past the Wintergreen Resort in Nelson County, Virginia. There are few places in America like Appalachia. It is the…

2

A Short Homily for Christmas Day by Mark Frank (1613–1664)

A lesser known Caroline Divine is Mark Frank (1613–1664), once Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and later Archdeacon of St. Alban’s. His sermons on the liturgical year were published in two volumes within the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology and were recently transcribed online by Marianne Dorman. Frank’s homilies are filled with imaginative prose and inspiring…

Re-Visioning Lancelot Andrewes: A New Course at the Davenant Institute

Published in partnership with The Davenant Institute. My first encounter with Lancelot Andrewes was by accident. I admit (somewhat reluctantly) that I was actually on the trail of a Puritan and instead I happened upon the “stella praedicantium” (the star of preachers), as a contemporary once called him. It was in the lady chapel of…

2

How the Reformation Preserved the Sacramental Worldview

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…

5

Calvinism and Eucharistic Sacrifice

Anyone who reads the early church fathers (Irenaeus, Tertullian, etc.), knows that they used the language of ‘sacrifice’ to describe the Eucharist. The Protestant Reformers also read the fathers, and read them more thoroughly than most of us today. As recent scholarship in Post-Reformation Reformed theology has shown, for all the confessional agreement among the…

2

Evensong at Home

They say the family that prays together stays together. Of course, it’s not the words spoken in prayer that keeps a family together, but the heart of devotion to Christ and to one another that fuels the prayer. C. S. Lewis argues that prayer without words can actually be more beneficial than spoken prayer, but…

2

The Home Altar

A home altar is an Ebenezer, a stone of remembrance. It is a semi-public display of one’s priorities in life. You may hide it away in a back room, following the advice of Jesus to go into your closet to pray, but it is a shared space, available for your whole family and for guests…

(c) 2024 North American Anglican

×