Book Reviews
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)…
The 1537 Matthew Bible: More Anglican than Not
When the sixteenth century dawned in England, there were laws prohibiting the translation of the Bible into English. It was illegal to even own or to read English Scriptures.((In 1401, under King Henry IV, parliament passed a statute called De haeretico comburendo, or On the burning of heretics, targeting Wycliffe’s followers, the Lollards. Then in 1408…
The Via Media in Action
The Word of God and the Words of Man: Books II and III of Hooker’s Laws: a Modernization. By Richard Hooker. Edited/translated by Bradford Littlejohn, Brian Marr, Bradley Belschner, and Sean Duncan. Moscow, ID: The Davenant Institute, 2018. 142pp. $11.95 (paper). Due to the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in 2017, I have heard…