Anglican Community Project

Theoretical words : Eric Gregory offers this wise counsel: “Words do not work the same way in normative theorizing as they do in historical inquiry. It is enough that ‘Donatist,’ ‘Pelagian,’ and “Manichean’ exist as live options in moral, political, and religious discourse – even if Augustine or later storytellers invented them in order to coordinate doctrine with their experience of God in Christian faith and practice.  These words, and the narrative scripts they signify, provide broad classifications for a range of commitments.” Historical study has an important role in helping “dislodge settled grooves of thought and make us skeptical of the stories we tell.  They can show the normative consequences of how we construct intellectual histories. They can also challenge us with an Augustine we thought we already knew by helping us understand the world behind the texts.”  But also those uses don’t rob terms like “Stoic,” “Platonic” or “Augustinian” of their conceptual usefulness, especia

The article is here . As Pope Benedict XVI has said about believing Catholics in secularized Europe: “I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.” So it must be with us crunchy cons. What else is there?

My friend Scott passed along this article to me. The conclusion of the article says: At the end of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre remarks that the world is waiting not for Godot but for a new St. Benedict. When Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger took the name Benedict upon his election to the papacy, an important motive may well have been to inspire a renewal of the civilizing work of Benedictine monasteries amidst societies in cultural decline during the anarchy of the Dark Ages of the first millennium. Perhaps a new “Benedictine moment” is already at work during our current era of cultural decline, carried out quietly and modestly by dozens of small liberal arts colleges, many of them Catholic or Protestant, by private preparatory schools and high schools, by institutes and foundations dedicated to nurturing the Western tradition, and by home-schooling parents and associations. The monks inspired by St. Benedict withdrew from a corrupt, chaotic world to do their work of restoration; the

. . .from Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, author and activist in the 'new monasticism' movement: Christian Community w/Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove from The Work Of The People on Vimeo .

Over at the Touchstone blog, Anthony Esolen writes about the history of the Church in preserving our cultural past. He writes: When I was in Sweden with my daughter this summer, we saw some churches with plaster ceilings that were entirely white.  But now and then we'd see a shadow beneath the white, and that made me wonder if there hadn't been paintings underneath, whitewashed over.  My guess was correct.  In the Enlightenment, that period of self-satisfied bigotry, the constriction of the arts, and the consigning of centuries of human learning to the flames, the smart people of the day commissioned the destruction of works of folk art that were learned, intricate, and quite beautiful.  It is hardly an isolated instance of the phenomenon of culture-destroying among deistic or antiecclesiastical elites.  Francis Bacon consigned Aristotle to irrelevance, but it is much to be doubted whether he actually read such Renaissance Thomists as Suarez and Banez, much less Thomas himsel

What should be different about community life in an Anglican parish vs. in any other strand of Christendom? Off the top of my head, it seems that our office of prayer provides the opportunity for small groups of people to pray in a church building or outside it in an equally structured manner. The lectionary means that we can theoretically be reading in harmony with large segments of the Church at the same pace and thus think about some of the same topics together. But these elements can be duplicated in Lutheran settings, Catholic settings, and a host of other traditions, so it is not uniquely Anglican. But perhaps that is a good thing. While I see a revived Anglicanism as the best hope for Protestantism in America and elsewhere, it is not the One True Church (copyright). So my attempts at thinking through an ideal Anglican community do not have to uniquely apply to Anglicanism, but should be able to be duplicated in many communions.