Fr. Alexander Wilgus is the Rector at Redemption Anglican Church in Frisco, TX. He is creator of the Word & Table podcast and Director of Saint Paul’s House of Formation online catechesis program. Fr. Wilgus is married to Lauren and father to four children: Owen, Bryan, Abraham, and Mae.
I read Mere Orthodoxy’s “The Case for Baptist Anglicans” with great interest as an Anglican pastor in North Texas where the Baptist faith is the dominant religion. Accompanying Christians who have been catechized as Baptist is a core part of the job which I consider a privilege, having grown up Southern Baptist myself. The ecumenical…
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld “There have been bad Popes before.” I have frequently heard this from Catholics in the Francis era. Once haunting the moral witness of the Church, John XII’s murders and mistresses and the Borgia and Medici mafiosos that ruled the Roman roost during…
Every time an Anglican converts to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, from lowly American deacons to English bishops, a story is told by way of explanation: Anglicanism, once a proud bastion of purely Protestant doctrines and practices, was hijacked by sacerdotal pretenders beginning in the Oxford Movement, and now, downstream from sham midcentury liturgical reforms, Anglicans have…
Last spring, as lockdown orders went out to American cities and states, many prominent Christian voices equated masking, social distancing, and staying home with the command to love neighbor, and the refusal to do so as tantamount to indifference to the lives of others. As the pandemic has rolled on, other church leaders have decried…
It seems plain that the Roman and Orthodox traditions have been more right than wrong about Mary. As a purely historical and scriptural matter, the perpetual virginity seems a fact so plain–even to the great Bible-men Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli–that it is astounding to me that the idea got lost along the way in American…
Reading the thoughts of many of the highest profile Christian writers and leaders, we are led to believe that God must have very little to do with great and calamitous events like the COVID-19 pandemic. N.T. Wright’s encouragement to lament instead of advance to explain might have come as welcome pastoral advice if it was…
Flesh he tookInterceding he blestDying he brokeRising he gaveThe manna that savesThe draught of his bloodThat ran over the woodWhich he bore to the pyreWhere he passed through the fireAnd Eve’s tempter was crushedThe death of her deathRaised up for all lifeThat her sons may be savedBy the flesh Mary boreFor the good of the…
The debate touched off by Emily Mcgowin’s article on Women’s Orders in Anglican Pastor has opened onto the vast territory of the theology of gender. That is, of course, an important controversy to have out (though perhaps not on comment boards), but in the midst of the ruckus, I think that it is worth returning…
Hannah King’s call to “make a start” for unity with the Episcopal Church of the United States invites a fresh response–and not the sort that rehashes the well known divisions between progressive and orthodox Anglicans. But as another young priest in the ACNA (and another Texan as it happens), I write out of concern for…
No Christian communion asks itself what it is more than my own Anglican one. Protestant or Catholic? Traditional or Evangelical? Calvinist or Zwinglian? The question of Anglican identity is too often treated as a matter of theology or liturgics. Overeager liturgists (of both the Anglo-Catholic or High Reformed varieties) accumulate lists of Anglican ritual “distinctives,”…
