I felt sick to my stomach. It was the middle of April 2020, and we had been shut down for a few weeks. In the chaos and isolation, I foolheartedly took to read the classic novel Kristen Lavransdatter. It is a sweeping story of faith, sin, redemption, and to my utter shock, the bubonic plague….
Yesterday we noted that Bishop Ryle had listed five points on what evangelical religion is. Here is the second point he makes on that subject. ( b ) The second leading feature in Evangelical Religion is the depth and prominence it assigns to the doctrine of human sinfulness and corruption. Its theory is that in consequence of Adam’s…
He moved the candle closer to the paper Whose clouded words escaped his failing sight. Blind anger rose again. He dropped the taper, Thought flickered low, and rage put out the light. Despair stood near at hand to shake its head, And bitterness reminded him that slaves Stood as unworthy masters in the stead Of…
I travel the old ways I am the Remembrancer. The forest knows me Hostile on my way. My steps are measured Meted three by thirteen. The phantoms cry out Hunger in their grasp. Words I repeat cast Silence on the spirits. The old path is worn But seldom traveled. Tread softly this way Remove thy…
The Reformation was not the work, either of a year, or of a generation. Its foundation was laid both in the good and in the evil qualities of our nature. Love of truth, reverence for sacred things, a sense of personal responsibility, a desire for the possession of full spiritual privileges, cooperated with the pride…
Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel: Thomistic Reflections on the Problem of Evil. By John F. X. Knasas. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013. 328 pp. $69.95 (cloth), $34.95 (paper). It is not a stretch to say that the problem of evil is the single most popular argument against Christianity. Most famously…
For the next few days I am going to post some more thoughts from J.C. Ryle’s Knots Untied – these being from the very first chapter of the book, on “What Evangelical Religion is.” Bishop Ryle starts out by defining what “evangelical religion” is, what it is not, and what makes much religion not evangelical….
The question that continues to vex Anglicanism (perhaps since the time of the Reformation but even more so over the last 200 years) is whether she is “properly Catholic” or “properly Protestant”? Some will answer that she must simply be Protestant, because she is separated from Rome, and only those in union with Rome can…
Continuing further in Ryle’s Knots Untied, this is what the good Bishop had to say about the next mark of regeneration, which I am calling “watchfulness over one’s own soul”: Sixthly, John says, “He that is begotten of God keeps himself”-I John 5:18. A man born again, or regenerate, is very careful of his own…
“And the Church of England is Protestant too” – William Laud, then Bishop of St. David’s, later Archbishop of Canterbury.[1] Before the mid-19th century, to regard the Book of Common Prayer as part of an explicitly “Protestant” narrative would have been accepted as self-evident by Episcopalians and Anglicans.[2] A future Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft’s…