laudable Practice

When discussing the plain character of older Anglican and Episcopal churches - such as The Middle Church , King Charles the Martyr, Shelland , and Old Wye Church, Maryland - it is not uncommon to hear this character and its lack of imagery dismissed as somehow 'unAnglican', an unfortunate expression of a thankfully long-forgotten, ill-considered theology, replaced by richer Victorian tastes, not at all averse to imagery. Plain windows, whitewashed walls, with a simple, wooden God's Board: this is deemed to be little more than prejudice at work, with the lack of imagery regarded as a denial of the sacred. This is where we turn to Jeremy Taylor. He can hardly be regarded an unimpressive divine or a purveyor of shallow theological thought. Nor, to state the very obvious, was he a 'Puritan' or, indeed, even a Reformed Conformist. Taylor's critique of Calvinist soteriology, his robust defence of episcopal order, and his commitment to the "holy Liturgy" of...

In a recent essay , Alan Ford - a leading historian of the Church of Ireland - considered the Jacobean and Caroline Irish Church in the context of what he termed "the wider perspective of Atlantic Protestantism". Alongside Ford's essay, I was also reading Plantation Churches: Places of worship in early Seventeenth-century Ulster (2025). In its concluding chapter, the book refers to The Middle Church, at the heart of Jeremy Taylor country. While built at Taylor's direction and consecrated in 1668, it is noted that a worshipper "would have seen little difference" between The Middle Church and Jacobean churches in Ireland. Around the same time, I also stumbled across online pictures of the Reformed church in Vámosatya , on the eastern edge of Hungary's Northern Great Plain. Ford's essay and the pictures of Vámosatya church provoked me to consider looking in the other direction - not across the Atlantic, but across Europe, to the continent's eastern...

The May Day holiday - a gentle but joyous celebration of Spring - is a now yearly opportunity for laudable Practice to reflect on the pleasing correspondence between Prayer Book piety and the quiet, plain, sober character of the older Anglican parish church. This year, against the backdrop of The Middle Church , in the heart of Jeremy Taylor country, I am contemplating how, from its consecration in 1668 until it was replaced by a new parish church in 1824, The Middle Church and its parishioners would have known only plain, said services, with metrical psalms being the only singing heard in the church over the century and a half during which divine service was celebrated within it. There certainly would have been no intoning of services. This came to mind when recently reading Ian Meredith's study of how the 19th century Scottish Episcopal Church lost the allegiance of migrant Irish Episcopalians in the west of Scotland. The Ritualism embraced by elements of the Scottish Episcopal...