laudable Practice

As Bishop Budde reached the conclusion of her sermon at the Inauguration service of prayer in the National Cathedral she said: Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy. The unborn children of our land should have their dignity recognised as those created in the image of God. Our God teaches us that we are to cherish life in the womb, for we were all once carried in our mothers' wombs. The unborn child should find welcome and compassion. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen. Of course, this was not what Bishop Budde said in her sermon. If she had said this, the adulation heaped upon her by progressives - religious...

... ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?  Matthew 16:3 For the most part, the Church of England has reacted to the election of Donald Trump and the UK’s vote to leave the EU (the “Trump-Brexit phenomenon”) by jumping on to the middle-class Establishment bandwagon of outrage and horror. As if set to auto-pilot, the C of E has joined in with those who are decrying the collapse of the liberal consensus and bemoaning a new mood of division in our public life. Bishop Philip North, writing in the Church Times , 1st December 2016 It has, rather predictably, happened again. Anglicans on this side of the Atlantic have interpreted Trump's presidential election victory in apocalyptic terms: the wailing and gnashing of teeth by Anglican clergy on social media has been loud. We might not have been surprised if some had asked for the post-election counselling offered to Guardian staff . This post is not primarily addressed to US readers. Between the...

I am a friend of The Episcopal Church. Admittedly, I am a rather odd friend. I much prefer the title PECUSA (retained, we should remember, in the opening line of TEC's Constitution ). When someone mentions TEC my thoughts can drift to William White and John Henry Hobart; to Anglican order taking root in the early decades of the Great Republic; to the significant Episcopalian civic and cultural presence enduring into the second half of the 20th century. More immediately, I think with gratitude of those Episcopal congregations in which I have worshipped, in Cape Cod, in Maine, in New York City, in Washington DC. And I think also of those Episcopalians with whom I have become acquainted online, some of whom share my Old High predilections for Sunday Morning Prayer, the surplice, and churches like Old Trinity, Dorchester , Maryland. When TEC is mentioned, what I do not think about are Bishops Pike or Spong. As you might expect, I am definitively with Rowan Williams on this: say the C...

Each Thanksgiving for some years past, laudable Practice has given thanks for aspects of the life and witness of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. This year, my attention turns to Old Narragansett Church in Rhode Island , regarded as the oldest Anglican and Episcopalian church building in New England. Built in 1707 in the style of a New England meeting house, Old Narragansett Church combines two expressions of modesty: New England charm and Prayer Book piety.  A sermon preached by a former rector of the successor church at the two hundredth anniversary of the erection of the Old Church quite beautifully evokes both these aspects of the building: For ten scores of years has it braved the storms, which have beaten upon it from the Atlantic, and stood as a landmark in southern Rhode Island. In all New England, there remains no other church structure of our Faith, so ancient. Well worthy of our honour and affection is the sturdy old edifice, with which are involve...

Early in Advent, laudable Practice suggested that the experience of Advent in the Northlands - these Islands in December, sharing something of the Winter darkness of Scandinavia - hinted at the Laudian vision of ' the Union of the Churches of the Northern Kingdoms ' and of contemporary Anglican-Lutheran communion.  When I shared a link to the post on Twitter, a priest in The Episcopal Church commented that it "reflects much of the practice here in the northland of Minnesota, and the convergence of the Scandinavian and German heritage, Lutheranism, and their influence on our Anglican worship".  He pointed to an Advent Sunday experience: Attended an Advent procession last Sunday in an Episcopal Church, where in the growing darkness the candlelit choir sang from the Anglican, and German, and Scandinavian heritage. Very fitting for Minnesota. — Dave Langille (@cdnusboy) December 4, 2022 There is something of an echo here of Anglican-Lutheran relationships in North Amer...

In theological college in the late 1990s, you could have divided the student body into three groupings: those of us who looked to Rowan Williams, those who looked to John Stott, and those (a minority) who looked to Bishop John Shelby Spong. For those of who did not look to Spong, his writings and pronouncements exercised a not insignificant influence, for we often defined ourselves against his views. His recent death, therefore, brought to my mind the debates of theological college in those years, the times since then when I have invoked his name to represent a stream of theology with which I deeply disagree, and the passage of the years. The thoughts below are not intended in any way to represent a meaningful assessment of the works and thought of Bishop Spong.  They are, rather, a means of assisting me to organise my thoughts on how a Bishop and theologian with whom I profoundly disagreed, particularly on Creedal matters, helped to shape my thinking. And, now in my early 50s, the...

Over the years, laudable Practice has regularly critiqued many aspects of late 20th and early 21st century liturgical revision.  Frequently, the Church of Ireland's Book of Common Prayer 2004 and The Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer 1979 have been the targets of such criticism. This post seeks to provide some balance to those criticisms.  As previously stated, counter-revolution is not conservative , and that includes liturgical counter-revolution .  1979 and 2004 are now settled parts of the Episcopal/Anglican experience in the United States and Ireland: a counter-revolutionary rejection of 1979 and 2004 would not be authentically conservative or traditional.   What is more, in the same way that my personal experience of officiating and participating according to 2004 has shaped my critiques of it, so too that experience has also provided a basis for valuing aspects of 2004.  Likewise, those times when I have worshipped in TEC have been accordin...

It is very rare indeed to find a secular newspaper carrying discussion of the epiclesis.  It was, however, a feature of recent coverage of the covenant between the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama and the Cathedral Church of the Advent.  One report quoted the former dean explaining his decision to leave TEC for ACNA: Pearson’s views on liturgy rankled the diocesan headquarters. He was particular about the prayers said during communion, such as an epiclesis, a prayer calling on the Holy Spirit to consecrate the bread and wine used in the Eucharist. "Most of the Anglican Communion does not have this thing called an epiclesis," Pearson said. "... So, we were simply conforming to a tradition that the majority of the Anglican Communion observes." Another report referred back to a 2016 article by the former dean in The Living Church : In our context, we have elected to use the eucharistic prayer from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which has no epiclesis. As a congregation t...

You might have guessed, I’m more of a Pelagian than an Augustinian. It is not a line I would want to hear in any Anglican - indeed, any Christian - sermon.  It was, however, said in a recent sermon in Washington National Cathedral.  So what did the self-confessed Pelagian in the pulpit preach?   For John, human love is always derivative of the source, God’s love. And my friends, this is exactly why I struggle with the doctrine of original sin. If the divine image of God and God’s love is coded into our factory settings, why then should we, in our purest essence as newborns, why would we be stained with sin in all its wretchedness? How can an innocent child be birthed from sin, when the Bible tells us that we are birthed from love? I love this story, that the Celtic Theologian John Philip Newell tells of the fourth century Celtic monk Pelagius, who was convinced that when we hold a child immediately after its birth, when we feel the softness and smell the sweetness o...