laudable Practice

Over the Christmas season, I was interested in references, on The Lutheran Neoplatonist , the substack of a priest in the Church of Norway, to seasonal Norwegian customs. The first was in a homily for what the Book of Common Prayer terms The Sunday after Christmas Day, or what contemporary Anglican liturgies tend to describe as The First Sunday of Christmas. The Lutheran Neoplatonist , however, pointed to the Norwegian term : what we call “Romjulssøndag” ... in the Church of Norway. Romjul (lit. “space Christmas”) refers to the days of Christmas between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.  Something of this is probably reflected in the experience of many Anglican churches in these Islands and North America on The Sunday after Christmas Day. A smaller congregation after the large congregations for carol services and Christmas Day; perhaps simple congregational carols and less choral music; and the main liturgy of the day rather more modest than Midnight Mass. We might, then, regard Th...

Today's post is part of an occasional series on paintings which capture experiences of magisterial Protestantism. The picture found at the head of this blog, William Teulon Blandford Fletcher's 'Sacrament Sunday', c.1897, is a particular example of this. I have previously posted on ' Preaching to the Congregation ' by German artist Jacobs Alberts, c.1910. This post reflects on two paintings from the 1860s by Norwegian artist Adolph Tidemand (b. 1814, d. 1876). Both depict the administration of Holy Communion to the dying, according to the rites of  Den norske kirke , the Church of Norway. They provide us with significant insights into magisterial Protestant piety. This is particularly evident in an important detail in the paintings. In both cases - and this, I think, must surely be Tidemand's informed intention - they portray the chalice being administered to the dying. This expresses the importance to the magisterial Protestant traditions of communion in bo...

As Christmas approaches, it is usual to find some online Anglican voices protesting at the use of 'Midnight Mass' to describe the First Eucharist of Christmas.  Usually these are robustly Protestant voices, angered by the use of a term which - it is contended - was entirely rejected at the Reformation.  At other times - perhaps rather more surprisingly - it can be a minority of Anglo-catholics, criticising its use in Anglican parishes which do not otherwise describe the Eucharist as 'Mass'.  Let us begin with those Protestant voices.  That 'Mass' ceased to be used in the Church of England as a title for the Eucharist in 1552 is a fact. There was good reason for this in light of the significant differences between the Prayer Book Eucharist and the Tridentine Mass: communion in both kinds, denial of of the eucharistic sacrifice as a propitiatory sacrifice, use of the vernacular, rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation for more deeply Augustinian accounts o...

The following Sunday, July 14th, Mr. Keble preached the Assize Sermon in the University Pulpit. It was published under the title of "National Apostasy." I have ever considered and kept the day, as the start of the religious movement of 1833 - John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua . In his defence of counterfactuals ('what if' scenarios of history), historian Niall Ferguson states "what actually happened was often not the outcome which the majority of informed contemporaries saw as the most likely: the counterfactual scenario was in that sense more 'real' to decision-makers at the critical moment". As such, careful and cautious exploration of counterfactuals can be justified, for they are "the many unrealised, but plausible, alternatives". On the morning of 14th July 1833, it would have been very surprising indeed if anyone in the Church of England could have predicted the significance later attributed to the Assize Sermon preached by t...