God’s hov’ring Breath above the deepDrew from the new-created crustThe brush, the fruit which men would reap,And heads of wheat whose upward thrustsSprout grain for baking into loaves. Then like a mighty, rushing gustThe Spirit filled Christ’s Brother-BandWhose language left the men of dustTo marvel as God’s second HandStretched o’er the field that Peter sowed,…
Today, after taking an excursus into the ideals of Anglican parochial and higher education, I want to return in the months ahead to laying out a comprehensive vision of Anglican spirituality. In Tract 4, I defined and discussed Christian spirituality in general, and now I want to extend that definition in a more specifically Anglican…
The Anglican Church in North America has always embraced planting missions across the continent. Archbishop Robert Duncan began his tenure pressing the Anglican 1000 initiative, with the goal of planting 1,000 parishes within ten years. Archbishop Foley Beach took up the mantle with his Always Forward initiative and now Presiding Bishop Ray Sutton (Reformed Episcopal…
I am not a poet. As most of my peers in undergrad— in possession of richer emotional timbres or more complex childhoods— filed into the creative track of my Christian alma mater’s English major, I plodded along in the ‘literature’ or critical track. I dutifully read old poetry. The Anglican tradition in poetry was a…
This piece is co-published with the Davenant Institute. You can also see it on their blog, here. In a response to my recent essay “The Shape Fallacy: Reconsidering the Book of Common Prayer as Text,” the Rev. Ben Jefferies offers hearty disagreement and eloquent rejoinder. These are always welcome. Jefferies calls my essay “an all-out assault…
The study of the senses and the English Reformation is one of the most creative historiographical interjections on the Reformation in England in recent years. Matthew Milner’s work is the first substantive treatment of the senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste) in the English Reformation, which is surprising, as the historiography of the senses…
Sanguine clot on an altar of white,singular or sparse clustered, drippedas from a painter’s brush, smudgedblood print against a vernal shroud, tripartite leafed, yellow exclamations hold its center.Wakerobin, birth-ease, red eye amidstthe common trillium, by what mythis your incongruity clarified or entered but by a woman conjured to a fleeing doe,a hunter’s arrow in her…
While Watts and Wesley got an earlier start, the Church of England didn’t really begin its widespread use of hymnals until the mid-19th century. In part it was due to doctrinal reasons, in part due to cost, and partly because there weren’t any good Anglican hymnals. One of the earliest examples of the latter was…
The Third Part of the Homily Against images and the Worshipping of Them Containing the confutation of the principal arguments which are used to be made for the maintenance of images: which part may serve to instruct the curates themselves, or good men of understanding Now ye have heard how plainly, how vehemently, and that…
The Ornaments Rubric has been the subject of much discussion in Anglican circles, and with good reason. T. W. Perry has written that the Christian Church in all its historical liturgies has “practically enunciated a law—that Divine Service is to be accompanied with external accessories.” “The Rule given by the Church of England in applying…
