laudable Practice

This is not a post concerning Traditionis custodes .   That is a matter for Roman Catholic friends to discuss and debate.  When reading some contributions to this debate, however, I was struck by the following statement from an insightful article in the Church Life Journal : Many traditionalist Catholics see this liturgical bomb exploding with some very dangerous theological and ecclesio-political shrapnel. Normally North American or European, they see the curtailing or elimination of the pre-conciliar liturgy as a threat to carefully curated socio-cultural traditionalist havens (parishes, schools, social networks, online communities), where the putative rot of “modernity” or “the culture” and the errors or even heresies rampant in the post-conciliar Catholic Church can be held at bay, ideally to be eventually reversed. Whether or not this accurately describes Roman Catholic communities using the 1962 Missal is for others to determine.  It does, however, rightly ide...

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...