The advent of the ACNA 2019 Book of Common Prayer raises an important question: what authority does it have in comparison with the other historic Books of Common Prayer? After all, the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer varies from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer not merely in liturgical form but also in doctrine…
You followed to a stone, And there the trail was lost. (Yvor Winters) With morning prayer fulfilled, I kneel beneath A dampened oak to brush away a wreath Of moss from lichened stone. Two names appear: Deceased from Mother’s side. Nervous, I peer Beyond the lilting rows of buckled tombs Toward the seminary’s waking rooms…
Anyone who reads the early church fathers (Irenaeus, Tertullian, etc.), knows that they used the language of ‘sacrifice’ to describe the Eucharist. The Protestant Reformers also read the fathers, and read them more thoroughly than most of us today. As recent scholarship in Post-Reformation Reformed theology has shown, for all the confessional agreement among the…
priest, poet Younger than I by nearly forty years, He stands for examination, then kneels, The bishop laying hands upon the head Of one who prays for strength to rise again, Holding on tight to a Bible, the gift A bishop gives to all whom God has called To preach the Word and offer bread…
I began my sacramental education in a rural Baptist church. There, every service ended with an altar call. Music plays as the pastor waits expectantly to receive anyone who is ready to make a decision to follow Christ. The decision, once made, indicates salvation. The rite is so important, that no Baptist pastor would dare…
God has been good to Holy Cross Anglican Church, the parish I serve in the Milwaukee area. We routinely have visitors who are looking and seeking a deeper walk with Jesus. We’ve even had a whole family who converted to the faith. Holy Cross used to be St. Edmund’s Episcopal and left the Episcopal Diocese…
In the latest Miserable Offenders Episode, yours truly mentioned the need for Anglicans to be disciplined by the prayer book and to take up the rule of life it requires. Also, I mentioned in a past post on Through A Mirror Darkly how the 2019 ACNA BCP does not require fasting or abstinence but merely…
In childhood’s realm, I found a prize in earth: It was a tiny king and tiny queen Arranged upon a palanquin of gold, My memory insists they’re beautiful, The metal robes, enameled faces, crowns As sparkling-bright as cleft and burnished gems. The soil had changed the iris of an eye, And so the king had…
after Jack Gilbert’s ‘The Abnormal is Not Courage’ The Stylites stood on poles for thirty, forty yearsFlagellati scourging themselves with ropes. Bloody and merciless.A magnitude of heroism, of self-denial that allows me no peace.This poem would lessen their feats. QuestionThe piety. Say it’s not beatitude, not at it’s best.They were impossible, and too strife-driven. Too unique.“Whose…
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,…