The Relevance of Religious History for Today
The imminent birth of an heir—Prince William and Duchess Kate’s baby due within a few weeks—recalls the potential of royals to (re) set expectations about birth. When anesthesia was pioneered in the nineteenth century, its appeal in obstetrics was obvious. Chloroform, applied to a cloth and held over the nose and mouth of the laboring [Read More...]
This year more than most, March 21 is a date of multiple significance in the Church of England. You might justly ask whether the English church still matters much on the world stage, but the wider Anglican Communion assuredly does: by the middle of this century, there could well be 150 million Anglicans worldwide. Historically, [Read More...]
Attending a church service can be a sobering experience, and not necessarily for anything said or sung. It’s shocking to read the birth and death dates of the various composers of the words and music of the hymns used by my own Episcopal church. We realize with horror just how short the lifespan was in [Read More...]
I am a member of the Episcopal Church, USA (hereafter TEC). I am increasingly worried that in a few years, I might be THE member of the Episcopal Church, USA, the last of my kind. As Rod Dreher, Ross Douthat and others have pointed out, the church has just issued a summary of its attendance [Read More...]
I just got hold of Eamon Duffy’s latest book Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (Just published in Britain, and due out in the US in August). Duffy is a wonderful historian whose 1992 book The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 was a staggering evocation of [Read More...]
Recently I read G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare (1908), a roller-coaster of a novel, full of surprises and thought-provoking theological reflections. (It is also, happily, one of the public domain titles available for free on Kindle.) I don’t want to summarize the book because The Man Who Was Thursday is best read the way I did — [Read More...]
I am normally reluctant to link to articles that need a subscription, but I’ll make an exception here. The current Weekly Standard has a lengthy piece by Armin Rosen titled “Birth of a Nation: With American Evangelicals on the Ground in South Sudan.” By way of background, Sudan was for many years divided between its [Read More...]
This Sunday was the final meeting of Falls Church (Va.) Anglican at its historic location near Washington, D.C. The parish dates from 1732, the church’s brick sanctuary from 1767. George Washington and George Mason were among the church’s early vestrymen. Falls Church’s removal from the property resulted from the latest in a series of nationwide [Read More...]
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