Book Reviews
On the Day of Your First Communion: Book Review
One of the great flaws in the 20th century Church, especially in its Mainline and American expressions, was a lack of catechesis, particularly with children. The result has been a lack of retention accompanied by a rise in nominalism. This summer, I had the privilege of reviewing Sarah Howell’s children’s book On the Day You…
E.L. Mascall’s Christ, the Christian, and the Church Book Review
Christ, the Christian, and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation and Its Consequences. By E. L. Mascall. Pp. xvii + 257. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2017. ISBN 978 1 68307 019 1. Paper $24.95. Introduction The reprinting of Eric Lionel Mascall’s brilliant synthesis is a welcome gift to Anglicans and broader Christian theology today….
George Wheler’s ‘Protestant Monastery’ and Olde England
I want to bring a text to our readers’ attention that will undoubtedly seem obscure, especially to those not already familiar with the sort of domestic piety, usually done in accordance with The Book of Common Prayer, that is found among the great (and even lesser so) English houses of the seventeenth century and onward….
Hymnal Review: The Book of Common Praise (2017)
The ACNA has no province-wide plan for creating a new hymnal. This is unfortunate, but it makes sense – different congregations have their favorite hymnals (often the 1940 or the 1982), and the growing preference for contemporary praise music is not especially conducive to printing standard book considering the majority of it is released as…
The Old Religion
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,”…
On the Day You Were Baptized: Book Review
It is more than fair to say that Christian catechesis in America has been largely ineffective for at least two generations. This is particularly true for sacramental traditions, many experiencing large rates of attrition to Evangelical traditions or no faith altogether. Thanks to the influx of work about intentional Christian living in a post-Christian world,…
We Give Our Thanks Unto Thee: Essays in Memory of Fr. Alexander Schmemann Book Review
As an undergraduate student exploring Anglicanism and the catholic faith, I first came across the work of Eastern Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann while working on a paper for a class on Acts. My paper attempted to trace catholic Christian liturgies as natural evolutions from their Jewish predecessors in light of the coming of the Messiah….
A Review of God of All Comfort: A Trinitarian Response to the Horrors of This World
“the reality of grace is vastly richer and far more powerful than the force of those flames. It is so strong that even when our capacity to narrate the good-news story of grace is destroyed (as it often is in situations of violence), the reality to which it witnesses, the unending love of God, remains…
A Liturgical Bait-and-Switch?
I have long considered myself something of a liturgy nerd. I remember as a young child comparing various sections of the Episcopal 1979 Prayer Book and wondering why we always prayed the Nicene Creed on Sunday and never the Apostles’ Creed. When I was returning to the Anglican tradition as an adult, a significant part…
Dueling Pauls?
One of the tendencies in any theological tradition is to develop a canon in canonem (“canon within a canon”). The Anabaptists have the Sermon on the Mount, or so they claim. The Reformed supposedly have Romans. Catholics will always (falsely) accuse Protestants of reading Paul at the expense of James and Protestants will always (falsely)…