laudable Practice

The loss of religion makes real loss difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it with Disneyfying ornaments ... - Sir Roger Scruton, ' The Work of Mourning '. If there is one word that cannot be reconciled with the Prayer Book's The Burial of the Dead , it is 'kitsch'.  There is no room for kitsch in a Prayer Book funeral.  The seriousness of death and the reality of resurrection are sharply set before us: sentimentality, which attempts to obscure the first and ignore the second, is banished.  In the very midst of death, The Burial of the Dead proclaims a robustly Christocentric vision.  Here "Disneyfying ornaments" have no place for they are exposed as trite and insubstantial. Here hope is firmly rooted in the truth and substance of Christ. O merciful God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life; in whom whosoever believeth shall live, though he die; and whosoever liveth, and believeth in...

In truth, I don’t much care for memorial services. The purpose of them is to speak well of the dead; literally, to eulogise. Such events work well for the powerful, the famous and the righteous. “A man of rare ability and distinction, rightly honoured and celebrated, he ever directed our attention away from himself,” said the Dean of Westminster of Prince Phillip. Memorial services don’t require much religion either, which is part of their popularity in a secular age. They are sandwiches of hymns and readings and speeches — and songs can be easily substituted for hymns, poems for Bible passages. So said Giles Fraser in a recent Unherd column.  I happen to profoundly disagree.  It is noticeable that while Cranmer's Burial Office - quite rightly - has a robust focus on grace in Christ and the hope of the resurrection through Christ, Anglican funeral sermons quickly recognised the need to pay tribute to the deceased.  Consider, for example, Jeremy Taylor's sermon at the fun...

It was typical Twitter Milbank : provocative, breezy, and not overly concerned with detail.  The idea that Prince Philip was resurrecting the old debates of the 1928 Book (more of which below) is, to say the least, fanciful.  As George Weigel once stated in First Things , "Elizabeth II is said to be 'low Church' in her Anglican sensibility": in other words, Prayer Book Mattins and decent Laudian ceremonial.  All the evidence would suggest that Prince Philip shared the Supreme Governor's preferences.   1662 What particularly stands out, however, is Milbank's implication that 1662 should be dismissed as somehow inferior - what he terms in a subsequent tweet "old time religion" - contrasted with the "ecumenically Catholic" 1928 revision .  To term this a 'high church' stance is absurd.  The High Church tradition from the 17th into the 19th century delighted in the Book of Common Prayer as an ecumenically Catholic liturgy precisely beca...