James Clark is the author of The Witness of Beauty and Other Essays, and the Book Review Editor at The North American Anglican. His writing has appeared in Cranmer Theological Journal, Journal of Classical Theology, and American Reformer, as well as other publications.
Browne identifies the practice of communing using only the bread and withholding the wine from the laity as another outgrowth of Roman Catholic eucharistic doctrine: “The doctrine of transubstantiation naturally led to the belief that, inasmuch as the elements were wholly changed into the substance of Christ, therefore whole Christ, Body and Blood, was contained…
The Great Return: Why Only a Restoration of Christianity Can Save Western Civilisation. By Jamie Franklin. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2025. 272 pp. $24.99 (hardcover). Settled beliefs are, by their nature, difficult to disrupt. Indeed, a dramatic occurrence of some kind is often a necessary impetus for people to re-evaluate their deepest assumptions. For many,…
Part 2 of 2 Rather than give an exhaustive account of lying, it will suffice for present purposes to arrive at a basic understanding of what a lie really is. In the process it will become apparent that while all lies are deceptions, not all deceptions are lies. Once the true definition of a lie…
Part 1 of 2 Not long ago, Ben Crenshaw—Contributing Editor at American Reformer—suggested in an article that deception is sometimes commendable. The claim was incidental to the larger point of the article in question, but Carl Trueman—Professor of Biblical & Religious Studies at Grove City College—took issue with it in an article of his own….
Little space is typically devoted to expositing Article XXIX because, as Browne and many other commentators have noted, “if the last Article be true, this most probably follows on it.” If “by faith we are enabled to receive Him,” then “the wicked,” who are “void of a lively faith,” will of course be unable to…
At the Cross: Reflections on the Stations of the Cross. By Justin D. Clemente. Anglican Compass, 2024. xxiii + 148 pp. $14.95 (paper). A number of Lenten practices and observances—e.g., prayer, almsgiving, and fasting—are longstanding elements of the Christian tradition, yet may be unfamiliar for those who are newcomers to the Anglican way. One such…
Much like baptism, the Eucharist is too capacious to address comprehensively in a commentary. For this reason, Browne says that a “brief view” of the subject “is all that is here possible.” In discussing how Browne delimits the Church of England’s doctrine as it pertains to this Article, it should first be noted that the…
If “the new birth of the Spirit is closely coupled with new birth by water,” as Browne argues, then a question that follows is how this new birth of the Spirit is applied to infants. The difficulty, as it is often presented, is that whereas “in the case of adults, faith and repentance are necessary…
American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order. By Jerome E. Copulsky. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024. 384 pp. $40 (hardcover). “The concept of heresy,” Jerome Copulsky observes, “is…relational—it is a term deployed by a group to mark out its boundaries, define its foes, and police deviance within its ranks” (3). That is to…
A Companion to the Book of Common Prayer. By Gerald Bray. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2023. 522 pp. $117 (hardcover), $46.88 (paper). Prayer Book commentaries—close studies of the Book of Common Prayer that analyze it with regard to its language, liturgy, theology, history, etc.—were once fairly common as a genre.[1] Nowadays such works are…