Taylor Marshall’s work is highlighted here in my latest article for Aleteia. My friend and fellow former Anglican priest is doing fantastic work for the church Ten years ago Taylor Marshall resigned from his ministry as an Episcopalian priest. He was a young married man with no idea what God wanted him to do next, except that his reading and prayer had brought him to the point where he knew he was being called to come into full communion with... Read more
Over at The Suburban Hermit is a post on the vow of obedience. In the present world the suggestion of obedience is met with incomprehension. That one should submit one’s entire will to another individual is not only a social error, but an anti-social horror. Obedience is a blasphemy in a world of individual freedom, and yet all the wise ones tell us it is only through obedience that innocence is recovered and retained. Obedience can only be rediscovered through... Read more
My latest blog post for National Catholic Register wonders if there is a connection between architecture, prayer and priests. I know a young priest who was brought up as a Baptist. He went into a beautiful old Catholic Church during the liturgy. This was a classic neo-Gothic church with stained glass windows and a beautiful liturgy. He fell to his knees and said that he knew then and there that he not only needed to be a Catholic, but that... Read more
One of the things that maddens and amuses me about Protestants is something called “primitivism”. I’ve written about it here. “Primitivism” is the ambition to return the church to the simplest form as it was in the “early church”. The little fundamentalist church in which I grew up worked on this assumption. They were going back to basics and getting rid of all those “man made traditions”. They were cutting out the denominations and prayers read out of books and... Read more
Have you checked out my new blog yet? I’ve taken the opportunity to create a blog free from ads and flashing lights and the distractions of Patheos. It focusses on monastic spirituality, book reviews, prayer, work and reading. Today at Suburban Hermit is the biography of St Benedict from my book St Benedict and St Therese-The Little Rule and the Little Way. There is a great picture of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, England with the Shakespeare sonnet that refers to “bare... Read more
I was watching the service of Evensong from Westminster Abbey the other night that took place during Benedict XVI’s visit to England. It was all very splendid and you could tell Benedict was impressed with the Anglican music and ceremonial. His speech emphasized, however, the Catholic roots of both Westminster Abbey and England itself. In an excellent article, Joseph Pearce traces those roots here through the literary heritage of England. It is often forgotten that the Catholic presence in England... Read more
Damian Thompson aka “the blood crazed ferret” launches a scathing attack on Pope Francis here at the UK’s Spectator. After the latest disastrous interview with ninety one Italian journalist Antonio Scalfari, Thompson argues that the Pope is unpredictable, out of his depth and a dangerous loose cannon. Last Sunday, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica carried an article by Eugenio Scalfari, one of the country’s most celebrated journalists, in which he claimed that Pope Francis had just told him that ‘at the end of... Read more
Do you remember that creepy movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Some kind of alien bug invades earth and takes over people’s bodies replacing them with soul-less replicas. The horrible thing about the film is that the aliens are not huge hybrid insectoid lobster monsters, but just as ordinary as the guy and girl next door. This image came to me when contemplating the kind of heretics we experience in the church today. I recently finished Dr Marcellino D’Ambrosio’s When the Church... Read more
I hate to be a party pooper, but it seems that we are further apart than ever before on some very key issues. Read more
For some time now I have been feeling the need to have another outlet for more personal stuff. So today I launch my new blog: The Suburban Hermit. This blog will be notes on reading, prayer and work. As a Benedictine oblate I try to follow the threefold vows of obedience, stability and conversion of life within the structure of reading, work and prayer. This blog will continue with comment and critique of news, current events, church news etc. More personal... Read more
Fr. Dwight Longenecker
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