An important challenge to the churches in Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option (2017) is the call for our congregations to become “thick communities” of discipleship and prayer that can resist the corrosive acidity of liquid modernity and be instrumental in building an alternative polis to the emergent dark age of secularity. In Dreher’s vision, such…
Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary: Unveiling the Mother of the Messiah. By Brant Pitre. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018. 240 pp. $24.00 (cloth). A collage of images from pop culture made up my earliest understanding of St. Mary – pictures picked up in the childish ways we begin to learn anything. There was…
Her script was always lovely and unique, And still unique when it began to wobble, Along with spoken words. Increasing trouble With memory made her less inclined to speak. But still, she wrote her letters. Before we’d started school, she’d made us readers: Books were our favorite toys; once every week We’d take some back…
The Lost Supper: Revisiting Passover and the Origins of the Eucharist. By Matthew Colvin. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019. 188 pp. $90.00 (cloth). Debates over eucharistic theology are as predictable as they are unending. It’s not just that various dogmatic interpretations have congealed such that advancing theological reflection on the eucharist may seem futile;…
A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, “the very dead of winter.” Some of you will…
“Among the surviving wills it has been found that 45 per cent of testators in fifteenth-century Norwich made such a provision [leaving a bequest to a monastery]. In London it was 36 per cent, and in York about 33 per cent.”[1] The quotation above, when I first read it in Volume III of Kenneth-Hylson-Smith’s Christianity…
The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760‒1857. By Peter B. Nockles. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 364 pp. $55.99 (paper). In Orthodox Anglican Identity, Charles Erlandson identifies four different “spiritualities” that are commonly thought to be encompassed within “orthodox Anglicanism” as a whole: Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical, Charismatic, and Global. The Anglo-Catholic spirituality is…
I am writing as a pioneer in the emerging science of Biblical Anthropology, an empirical approach to the canonical Scriptures that avoids denominational interpretations. A Biblical Anthropologist studies the Scriptures to identify anthropologically significant data that clarifies the cultural contexts of ancient biblical populations, and especially the social structure of the biblical Hebrew. This interdisciplinary…
The question of the inerrancy of Scripture has been freshly addressed in Anglican circles lately. It is such a terribly abstract question, with far too much hanging on semantics. Let us get into the same question from a more practical angle: the battle-scarred territory of Genesis 1-11. Though I didn’t know it by this name,…
Gerald Bray’s new Anglicanism begins with a chapter spelling out succinctly the history of the Church of England, its sisters, and successors until the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The Anglicanism of the early twenty-first century, Bray notes, “is essentially a nineteenth century invention.” Before the 1840s most members of the Protestant Episcopal Church in…