This morning she woke at 4:00 a.m. with an image in her mind; she had been dreaming of walking up the aisle of Christ Church toward the white Gothic altar. As she had done many times before, she was bearing something tall and weighty. In dream, it was not the processional cross but a lovely…
‘Sober delight and rational exaltation’[1] ❧ Easter Day, 1800 “In that vast and noble building no more than six persons were found at the table of the Lord.”[2] Thus did the then Bishop of London lament how Easter Day 1800 passed in St Paul’s Cathedral, London. This one statistic became the defining and oft repeated…
The Argument It’s difficult to be an Anglican today. Visit a church with “Anglican” on the door and the chances that you will hear the words of Thomas Cranmer are pretty low. The odds of encountering liturgical dance, praise and worship, t-shirted pastors perched atop stools, priestesses, chasubles, moral therapeutic deism, progressive therapeutic theism, conservative…
Time’s arrow from the past is launched With a force no bodkin may resist,And we have found eternal youthElusive too, the alchemiesAnd fountains long discredited. Yet immortality we have devisedTo preserve an endless, shining summer—To preserve them all, intact and whole,Not memories, but lived as new. Martin Crowe has died today, In middle-age—the cancer stoleWhat hair…
“It is our responsibility to teach God’s truths to our children. They are full members of the church too.” This excerpt from the letter to the reader of The Nicene Creed: Illustrated and Instructed for Kids captures what is so important about books like this. Rev. Joey Fitzgerald has three children of his own and…
Catholic Christians believe that the church is the visible presence of the mystical body of Christ on earth. The church mediates between God and his creatures because in our current condition we are not able to endure the presence of God himself unmediated. Scripture tells us that on two very important occasions – in the…
Beside the saintly woman of Norwich, an anchorite without pretense, a prophet of startling revelations, my Wife of Bath and Madame Eglantine, my courteous knight and squire do pale. Confessor to many, her wisdom shared beside the river through embroidered scrim— I wonder: what if I met her before my tales were spawned, my pen…
While reading Samuel Bray’s recent assessment of 20th century Prayerbook revision I was reminded of a poem by Tony Hoagland [they]…casually dropped his name the way pygmies with their little poison spears strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant. “O Elephant,” they say, “you are not so big and brave today!” It’s a bad…
Perhaps the strangest element of the strange story of the ornaments rubric is that the interpretation of this ambiguous rubric continues to excite such fierce debate among Anglicans today. The reason for this is that since the 1850s this rubric has become a frequent site for battles over Anglican identity.[1] So much ink (literal and…
While still a student, wandering abroad But lodged in Dublin for the summer, I Would pass, each day, through King Street with a sigh Dismissing all I couldn’t afford as fraud, And turn, at the butt-end of Grafton Street To join the host of tourists on their way Beneath the Fusilier’s arch,…