Anglican Community Project

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 le...

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.

Richard Fletcher [ The Barbarian Conversion ] notes that ancient Christendom was not monolithic: In terms of custom and practice there were many churches in sixth- and seventh-century Europe, not One Church. Christendom was many-mansioned. Fletcher talks about the motif of exile in the monastic expansion. Christians, following the writing of Augustine, saw themselves as exiles and pilgrims and then the monastics took this exile literally. They often left their homeland and people to found monastic missions amongst others. Fletcher says: Pilgrimage, in the sense of ascetic renunciation of homeland and kinsfolk, is of special importance in our understanding of the phenomenon of conversion in the early Middle Ages. Pilgrimage merged insensibly into mission. The monasteries that were founded by the exiled holy men had something of the character of mission stations. It was not that they were established primarily among pagans; indeed, they could not have been, dependent as they were on we...

One of the puzzling facets of the Christian life as I live it and see it lived is the lack of joy that we have. It seems to me that many Americans are living lives of quiet desperation, under layers of regret, hopelessness, frustration and outright depression. This applies to the unsaved as well as the saved, but in our case it is puzzling because of what Jesus has told us. Jesus said, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” I imagine that the joy of Jesus is of such an infinite magnitude that it would be wonderful to experience. Furthermore, God sternly rebuked Israel for not serving him with joy. He said, “Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, because of the abundance of all things, therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and lacking everything.” That seems to summarize our American condition succinctly - an abu...