laudable Practice

'Everybody agrees that is the worst in Christendom.' This was the somewhat startling judgment of Mary II, when considering the decayed state of the Church of Ireland shortly after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. These are the words with which Patrick Little (editor) opens the volume of essays that is The Church of Ireland Under the Stuarts (2025). The essays, covering a wide range of subjects - from the role Trinity College Dublin to cathedral music, from the devotional life of the episcopalian second Earl of Cork during the Interregnum to the role of the bishops in the Irish House of Lords - might be considered as something of a revisionist response to the words of Queen Mary. The Church of Ireland which emerges from these essays has greater spiritual, intellectual, and cultural vibrancy than recognised in Old Hat accounts and enduring populist mythology. The intellectual and cultural vibrancy owed much to Trinity College Dublin, driving the "distinctiveness" of th...

When we consider the characteristics of Old High piety (sober, rational but not rationalistic, modest, reserved), its consistent critique of Enthusiasm, and its suspicion of excessive asceticism, the monastic spirituality of the Christian East may not, to say the least, be the first tradition we think in terms of identifying similarities. However, reading Rowan Williams' recent little book on this spirituality - Passions of the Soul - has led me to wonder about such similarities. Consider, for example, Williams' account of how the early Eastern monastic classics responded to the reality of temptation in the Christian life: In the long run, the pattern of integrated, restored human life that we're called to and drawn to in the labour of prayer and service and love is in all sorts of ways - quite appropriately - a prosaic matter, a matter of doing the next thing (p.16). This would function very well as an Old High description of what the Christian life is like: not a matter ...

As the year draws to a close, I am looking back on the best books I read in 2022, including a 'book of the year' recommendation. In  Transubstantiation: Theology, History, and Christian Unity (2019), Brett Salkeld offers an interpretation of Aquinas' articulation of transubstantiation which offers important points of contact with the Reformed tradition. Particularly striking, however, was its positioning of Aquinas as considerably closer to Calvin - and, indeed, Zwingli - than Luther, who was much more a 'late medieval'. There is a superb chapter on Calvin and his "remarkable agreement" with Thomas "on signs and signified in the Eucharist". Similarly, on the relationship between the Ascension and the Eucharistic presence, "Calvin (and Zwingli too!) follows Aquinas rather precisely": How ironic, then, Calvin's reputation as a Zwinglian is based largely on his theology of signs and his affirmation of the ascension, two points on whic...

Having recently purchased Hampton's Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England (2021), I thought it might be useful to repost my 2018 review of Anti-Arminians . --- The renaissance in the historical appreciation of 18th century Anglicanism - condemned by Newman in 1841 as the "miserable century" - began with J.C.D. Clark's  English Society 1688-1832 .  With a few exceptions (particularly E.R. Norman's 1976  Church and Society in England 1770-1970 ), historians of Left and Right, and latter day Puritans and Tractarians, agreed with Newman in presenting a moribund national Church during the 'long' 18th century (i.e. 1660-1832).  Clark radically challenged this, with his picture of an intellectually vibrant, robustly orthodox, socially and culturally significant Anglicanism. From this has flowed a number of ground-breaking works, demonstrating that Clark's interpretation - with its focus on political th...

These great and merciful benefits of God (if they be well considered) do neither minister unto us occasion to be idle, and to live without doing any good works, neither yet stirs us up by any means to do evil things: but contrariwise, if we be not desperate persons, and our hearts harder then stones, they move us to render our selves unto God wholly with all our will, hearts, might, and power, to serve him in all good deeds, obeying his commandments during our lives, to seek in all things his glory and honour - from The Homily of Justification . If one aspect of  The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition , edited by Samuel L. Bray and Drew N. Keane, captures the character of the project, it is the inclusion of The Homily on Justification in the Appendices.  Now, this is not to make a conventional, straightforward point about Cranmer, the Prayer Book and the Reformation's  sola fide .  Rather, I am suggesting a slightly different emphasis.  ...