laudable Practice

The Sign of the Cross is the most universally "Catholic coded" thing in the world. The comment appeared on X in the midst of a debate on Christmas Day about the ecclesiastical identity of the McCallister family in 'Home Alone'. (Yes, you read that correctly.) This particular comment was regarding Kevin crossing himself while saying Grace before a meal. This matter, of course, is not entirely straightforward. Kevin, as some contributors pointed out, crosses himself in the Orthodox fashion. A previous comment achieved 'community note' status when, after describing Kevin walking into a church on Christmas Eve as "one of my earliest encounters with Catholicism in film", it was pointed out that the church in question was actually Episcopalian - albeit with some clearly Roman Catholic statues added. To return to Kevin crossing himself, various contributors to the debate also pointed out that many Lutherans and Anglicans/Episcopalians also made the sign of ...

Many thanks to The Anglican Way for publishing my essay ' George Herbert, Anglican Modesty, and the Season of Lent '. Below, an excerpt in which I offer something of a defence of the oft-misunderstood and misused words of Fisher: "We have no doctrine of our own. We only possess the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church enshrined in the Catholic Creeds, and these creeds we hold without addition or diminution". I understand Fisher's words as a "sober minimalism" regarding any distinctive Anglican claims, defining the church by a reliance upon the Christological centre, on  solus Christus : In ‘Love (III)’, as [Rowan] Williams states, "the point is that acceptance of the divine love simply requires the abandonment of all effort at assessing my own worth, negatively or positively". It is the action of the Triune God in Christ that is the Church's foundation, centre, and life: an over-active, loud, argumentative, zealous proclamation of some...

Ahead of the feast of Saint Patrick on Sunday, words from a series of 1852 sermons by Christopher Wordsworth (then Archdeacon of Westminster, later Bishop of Lincoln, firmly in the Old High tradition) on The Church of Ireland, Her History and Claims . Wordsworth rejoices in Saint Patrick as exemplifying that which the Old High tradition vigorously defended and affirmed: the apostolic faith of Scripture, the Christocentric catholic creeds, national episcopal churches, historic threefold order. In the classic Old High term used by Wordsworth at the conclusion of the sermon, this was the 'evangelical truth and apostolic order' of the Reformed Catholic episcopal churches of these Islands. May Wordsworth's words, therefore, aid us in celebrating Saint Patrick in true Old High fashion, rejoicing in "the common ground of St. Patrick's Gospel, St. Patrick's Creed, and St. Patrick's Church". His mission in Ireland seems to have begun about A.D. 440, and there h...

Anglicans - despite the best efforts of Gregory Dix - regularly celebrate the legacy of Cranmer the liturgist. Cranmer the liturgist continues to shape how we as Anglicans pray, and not just at Choral Evensong.  Many contemporary Anglican eucharistic rites continue to employ prayers from Cranmer.  To take an example from the Church of Ireland's BCP 2004, its Order 2 Holy Communion includes the Collect for Purity, an absolution drawn from Cranmer, the Prayer of Humble Access, an invitation to receive based on Cranmer's words of Administration from 1552, and a blessing which is again from Cranmer.   It is not, however, only Cranmer the liturgist who influenced and (in many ways) continues to influence Anglicanism.  Classical Anglicanism was profoundly shaped by Cranmer the theologian .  Much as this might offend or, indeed, horrify some contemporary Anglicans, it is the case that Cranmer's theological views continue to determine significant aspects of the An...

I have not turned my back on those who remain in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. This is the claim of Michael Nazir-Ali in the final paragraph of his recent First Things article, 'From Anglican to Catholic'. Rejecting the Book of Common Prayer and the Articles of Religion; seeking ordination afresh despite having been ordained deacon, priest, and bishop in the Anglican Communion; embracing a whole raft of doctrines explicitly rejected by Hooker, Andrewes, Laud, Taylor, Keble, and Pusey - quite how this is described as not turning his back on those who remain Anglicans is, to say the least, distinctly odd.  Put more bluntly, it is nonsense. Rather more revealing is an earlier statement in the article: I had often boasted that Anglicanism, although reformed, had by divine providence retained both the sacred deposit of faith and the sacred ministry. 'Although reformed'? Perhaps nothing so quite indicates the extent to which Nazir-Ali has rejected classic...

Three classically Anglican reasons to rejoice on the commemoration of Saint Hilary of Poitiers. 1. In the midst of January, with the Sundays after the Epiphany sustaining the Church's joy in Our Lord Jesus Christ, "who in substance of our mortal flesh manifested forth his glory: That he might bring all men out of darkness into his own marvellous light" (Epiphany preface, Prayer Book as Proposed in 1928), commemorating Saint Hilary of Poitiers is a means of renewing our vision of the grace and truth of the Incarnation. In his discussion of the union of divine and human natures in the Incarnate Word, Richard Hooker turns to Saint Hilary's De Trinitate :   "He which in himself was appointed", saith Hilary, "a Mediator to save his Church, and for performance of that mystery of mediation between God and man, is become God and man, doth now being but one consist of both those natures united, neither hath he through the union of both incurred the damage or los...

"Morning and Evening Prayer from the Anglican prayer book tradition." That is how the Ordinariate's new Divine Worship: Daily Office is being advertised.  And, indeed, there is some merit in this, as Oikodomeo has said in an excellent review: DWDO is an ecumenical gift and compliment to the Anglican Communion. The Prayer Book Office has been the principle means of grace for Anglican Christians since the break with Rome. That Rome now not only acknowledges this but encourages this prayer is a celebration of the Anglican gift to the church catholic. Anglicanism is a means to holiness, a gift of grace.  What does give me pause, however, is related to Oikodomeo's entirely correct observation that Mattins and Evensong were "the principle means of grace for Anglican Christians" over centuries.  Part of the reason for this was the fact that these offices included Confession and Absolution.  To put in more explicit terms, the grace of Absolution was experienced i...

In another example of what Kenneth Kirk identified as the "ideal of combining the principle of authority with that of freedom", expounded by "a little group of Anglican divines of the seventeenth century - Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, Sanderson, Hall, and their fellows", we might point to Taylor's understanding (in Part III of his sermon 'The Return of Prayers') of how the clergy are "appointed for the salvation of mankind" (the Ordering of Priests ).   First, what Kirk termed "the principle of authority", evident in Taylor's 'high' account of the ministerial office: though it were therefore very well that things were thus with all men, yet God, who takes care of us all, makes provision for us in special manner; and the whole order of the clergy are appointed by God to pray for others, to be ministers of Christ's priesthood, to be followers of His advocation, to stand between God and the people, and to present to God all t...

Rowan Williams: And coming back to that theologian we both rather treasure, John Calvin, I think people who looked hard at what he says about the image and what he says about the love that’s required of us, I think there’s a lot there, isn’t there, in Calvin, about just that. It’s not all about depravity. It’s not all about the obliteration of the image. Depravity is in a sense much more to do with the fact that if this is what we really are, if this is how God is and we are, what a loss there is in our lostness, because there is such joy on the other side of it. Marilynne Robinson: Yes. And he has also this Renaissance assumption of human magnificence. RW: Yes. MR: I mean, look how spectacular we are, you know, solving these problems in our sleep and all the rest. And then he says, basically, this is dust and ashes compared to what we would be. So it’s an a fortiori comparison, catapulting the human image beyond human experience. Which I think is very beautiful.  This exchange be...

A few years ago the Reformed thinker Jake Meador wrote an article entitled ' The Invisible Anglicanism of CS Lewis '. The invisibility of Lewis' Anglicanism was, Meador said, to "miss the most basic fact of all about Lewis the Christian".  We might, of course, expect evangelicals and those Roman Catholics who Meador terms "Chesterton’s warrior children" to minimise and overlook the Anglicanism of Lewis.  Stranger, however, is that Anglicans should do so.  It is difficult not to think that a degree of embarrassment and awkwardness surrounds that fact that Lewis was a popular Christian writer.  This itself betraying a woeful ignorance of Anglicanism's past in which popular writings - such as as The Whole Duty of Man , the most popular religious work in 18th century England - shaped popular religiosity.   Lewis also, however, positioned himself against the theological project which came to define the post-1945 Church of England establishment, challengi...