Dire Sunday services, shrinking congregations and financial meltdown are the realities of the contemporary Church of England. In this controversial book, Michael Hampson, who worked as a parish priest for thirteen years, examines why the Church of England is in such crisis. He describes a church irreconcilably divided between liberals and evangelicals, shackled by tradition and with little resonance for the laity of modern Britain. He locates the roots of its demise in its history, from the Reformation to the ordination of women and beyond. The internal fault lines of the Church were exposed in 2003 by the forced resignation of Jeffrey John, the first openly gay man appointed a bishop. Michael Hampson demolishes the damaging arguments against homosexual clergy and movingly describes his own journey to ordination as a gay man within a prejudiced Church. In a powerful conclusion, he argues that a radical transformation of both culture and structure is the one hope for the renewal of the Church of England. Last Rites is a fiery insider's fascinating view of a Church that has failed its clergy, its laity and the nation at large.

How did a thirteenth-century Italian friar become one of the best-loved saints in America? Around the nation today, St. Francis of Assisi is embraced as the patron saint of animals, beneficently presiding over hundreds of Blessing of the Animals services on October 4, St. Francis' Catholic feast day. Not only Catholics, however, but Protestants and other Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and nonreligious Americans commonly name him as one of their favorite spiritual figures. Drawing on a dazzling array of art, music, drama, film, hymns, and prayers, Patricia Appelbaum explains what happened to make St. Francis so familiar and meaningful to so many Americans. Appelbaum traces popular depictions and interpretations of St. Francis from the time when non-Catholic Americans ""discovered"" him in the nineteenth century to the present. From poet to activist, 1960s hippie to twenty-first-century messenger to Islam, St. Francis has been envisioned in ways that might have surprised the saint himself. Exploring how each vision of St. Francis has been shaped by its own era, Appelbaum reveals how St. Francis has played a sometimes countercultural but always aspirational role in American culture. St. Francis's American story also displays the zest with which Americans borrow, lend, and share elements of their religious lives in everyday practice.

Over the past two centuries, few Christians have been more influential than John Henry Newman. His leadership of the Oxford Movement shaped the worldwide Anglican Communion and many Roman Catholics hold him as the brains behind reforms of the Second Vatican Council. His life-story has been an inspiration for generations and many commemorated him as a saint even before he officially became the Blessed John Henry Newman in 2010. His writings on theology, philosophy, education, and history continue to be essential texts. Nonetheless, such a prominent thinker and powerful personality also had detractors. In this volume, scholars from across the disciplines of theology, philosophy, education, and history examine the different ways in which Newman has been interpreted. Some of the essays attempt to rescue Newman from his opponents then and now. Others seek to save him from his rescuers, clearing away misinterpretations so that Newman's works may be encountered afresh. The 11 essays in Receptions of Newmans show why Newman's ideas about religion were so important in the past and continue to inform the present.

This book discusses the different understandings of 'catholicity' that emerged in the interactions between the Church of England and other churches - particularly the Roman Catholic Church and later the Old Catholic Churches - from the early 1830s to the early 1880s. It presents a pre-history of ecumenism, which isolates some of the most distinctive features of the ecclesiological positions of the different churches as these developed through the turmoil of the nineteenth century. It explores the historical imagination of a range of churchmen and theologians, who sought to reconstruct their churches through an encounter with the past whose relevance for the construction of identity in the present went unquestioned. The past was no foreign country but instead provided solutions to the perceived dangers facing the church of the present. Key protagonists are John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey, the leaders of the Oxford Movement, as well as a number of other less well-known figures who made their distinctive mark on the relations between the churches. The key event in reshaping the terms of the debates between the churches was the Vatican Council of 1870, which put an end to serious dialogue for a very long period, but which opened up new avenues for the Church of England and other non-Roman European churches including the Orthodox. In the end, however, ecumenism was halted in the 1880s by an increasingly complex European situation and an energetic expansion of the British Empire, which saw the rise of Pan-Anglicanism at the expense of ecumenism.

Episcopalian identity tends to focus on history and worship, and sometimes on ethics but "cradle" and new Episcopalians plus seekers will benefit from having a brief, accessible summary of the Christian faith as seen through an Episcopalian lens. There are two underlying convictions behind the book: first, that ecumenism is at the heart of the Episcopal faith. Episcopalians are well placed to offer themselves as a place of convergence between Roman

Catholics and Protestants, and even between Roman Catholics and the Orthodox. Secondly, in the current conflicts both within the Episcopal Church and between the Episcopal Church and some of its Anglican Communion partners, there is no fundamental difference in doctrine. The book is an attempt to portray what all parties have in common.

The book comes in four parts:

The Faith

Sources of the Faith

The Order of the Faith

The Character of the Faith

One of the most significant works on Anglican and Women's history to be published in recent years. Includes a foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This book tells the story of how a parish women's meeting started in 1876 by a Victorian vicar's wife is now the most authentic and powerful organization of women in the new global Christianity. Its cross-disciplinary approach examines how religious faith and shifting ideologies of womanhood and motherhood in the imperial and post colonial worlds acted as a source of empowerment for conservative women in their homes, communities and churches. In contrast to much of feminist history, A History of the Mothers' Union 1876-2008: Women, Anglicanism and Globalisation shows how the beliefs of ordinary women led them to become advocates and activists long before women had the vote or could be ordained priests. Having survived an identity crisis over social and theological liberalism in the 1960s, the Mothers' Union provides a model of unity and reconciled diversity for a divided world wide church. Today it is hailed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and international development practitioners as an outstanding example of global Christian engagement with poverty and social transformation issues at the grass roots. Thematerial is arranged both thematically and chronologically. Case studies of Australia, Ghana and South Africa trace how the Mothers' Union arrived with white British women but evolved into indigenous organizations. CORDELIA MOYSE is Adjunct Professor of Church History at Lancaster Theological Seminary, Lancaster, PA, USA.

Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, was the archbishop of Canterbury who guided England through the early Reformation-and Henry VIII through the minefields of divorce. This is the first major biography of him for more than three decades, and the first for a century to exploit rich new manuscript sources in Britain and elsewhere. Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the foremost scholars of the English Reformation, traces Cranmer from his east-Midland roots through his twenty-year career as a conventionally conservative Cambridge don. He shows how Cranmer was recruited to the coterie around Henry VIII that was trying to annul the royal marriage to Catherine, and how new connections led him to embrace the evangelical faith of the European Reformation and, ultimately, to become archbishop of Canterbury. By then a major English statesman, living the life of a medieval prince-bishop, Cranmer guided the church through the king's vacillations and finalized two successive versions of the English prayer book. MacCulloch skillfully reconstructs the crises Cranmer negotiated, from his compromising association with three of Henry's divorces, the plot by religious conservatives to oust him, and his role in the attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey as queen to the vengeance of the Catholic Mary Tudor. In jail after Mary's accession, Cranmer nearly repudiated his achievements, but he found the courage to turn the day of his death into a dramatic demonstration of his Protestant faith. From this vivid account Cranmer emerges a more sharply focused figure than before, more conservative early in his career than admirers have allowed, more evangelical than Anglicanism would later find comfortable. A hesitant hero with a tangled life story, his imperishable legacy is his contribution in the prayer book to the shape and structure of English speech and through this to the molding of an international language and the theology it expressed.

The period between 1857 and 1957 saw a transformation in Anglican sexual understanding when the established church negotiated substantial new normative interpretations of marriage, sexuality, citizenship, and priesthood. Timothy Jones demonstrates how the introduction of female voices into the previously exclusively male spheres of power transformed understandings of gender. He also delineates the impact of the Anglo-Catholic revival on Anglican sexual culture, in particular, the significance of catholic sacramentality on understandings of the relationship between the sexual and the spiritual. Sexual Politics in the Church of England exposes a surprisingly dynamic and dialogical relationship between theology, feminism, and the new sexual sciences that resists the teleologies of secularisation that dominate the histories of sexuality and Christianity in Britain. The story of Anglican sexual politics told in this book firmly rebuts contemporary notions of the Church as an inevitably reactionary institution. On the contrary, it reveals the Church's historic capacity to renegotiate gender and sexual ideologies, and shows how it was often at the forefront of sexual change in British society.

Canterbury Studies in Anglicanism In the past several decades, the issues of women s ordination and of homosexuality have unleashed intense debates on the nature and mission of the Church, authority and the future of the Anglican Communion. Amid such momentous debates, theological voices of women in the Anglican Communion have not been clearly heard, until now. This book invites the reader to reconsider the theological basis of the Church and its call to mission in the 21st century, paying special attention to the colonial legacy of the Anglican Church and the shift of Christian demographics to the Global South. In addition to essays by the volume editors, this 12-essay collection includes contributions by Jane Shaw, Ellen Wondra and Beverley Haddad, among others."

In this second book by Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori, she explores issues and challenges of deep concern to the Episcopal Church, the wider Body of Christ, and the world at large. Arranged thematically, her essays reflect on the travel, issues, people, and passions that have driven the first three years of her primacy. She places particular emphasis on the Millennium Development Goals, plus the turmoil within the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church in the United States.

For John Newton, one of Christendom's greatest hymn writers and writer of "Amazing Grace," God's matchless grace was intensely personal. Saved from a life of slave trading, John Newton was fully aware of the "depths from which he was pulled."

In this autobiography, revised and updated for today's readers by Dennis Hillman, Newton relates the events that led him from unimaginable sin and spiritual bondage to a life of ministry and renewal--transformed by God's amazing and inexhaustible grace.

Discover the timeless story of John Newton's conversion and the true meaning of the familiar words, "Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see."

On the 40th anniversary of the irregular ordination of the group of women who became known as the "Philadelphia Eleven," Darlene O Dell introduces us to the women involved, the paths that brought them together on that that momentous day - and what has changed (or not changed) in the life of the church over the intervening years. This is the first book to document the story in first-person interviews. It includes a Foreword by Carter Heyward. "

The New Church's Teaching series has been one of the most recognizable and useful sets of books in The Episcopal Church. With the launch of the Church's Teachings for a Changing World series, visionary Episcopal thinkers and leaders have teamed up to write a new set of books, grounded and thoughtful enough for seminarians and leaders, concise and accessible enough for newcomers, with a host of discussion resources that help readers to dig deep. Michael Curry leads off this volume with a clarion call for Episcopalians to join the Jesus Movement. A team of the church's brightest stars follow up with reflections on the practice of ministry in light of the movement: Nora Gallagher on encountering the "other," Rob Wright on adaptive leadership, Broderick Greer on reconciliation, Anthony Guillen on new ministries, Megan Castellan on evangelism, and Kellan Day on ministry with young people. Michael Curry closes with a word on making the world whole. Christians have been following Jesus together for some 2000 years - these leaders help to illuminate how we follow him in our time.

Ian Ker presents a major collection of Newman's writings, celebrating his full achievements as both a universally significant religious thinker, and a major Victorian writer. An unsystematic thinker, Newman's ideas are scattered throughout his works - most of which were 'occasional' in their origin. This anthology provides a rich and varied sampling from his voluminous works, drawing our attention to some of the very finest passages in Newman's writings whether selected from his well-known publications or from occasional texts that are difficult to find in print. The selection is divided into five sections, which focus on his life as an educator, a philosopher, a preacher, a theologian, and a writer.

One of the most significant works on Anglican and Women's history to be published in recent years. Includes a foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This book tells the story of how a parish women's meeting started in 1876 by a Victorian vicar's wife is now the most authentic and powerful organization of women in the new global Christianity. Its cross-disciplinary approach examines how religious faith and shifting ideologies of womanhood and motherhood in the imperial and post colonial worlds acted as a source of empowerment for conservative women in their homes, communities and churches. In contrast to much of feminist history, A History of the Mothers' Union 1876-2008: Women, Anglicanism and Globalisation shows how the beliefs of ordinary women led them to become advocates and activists long before women had the vote or could be ordained priests. Having survived an identity crisis over social and theological liberalism in the 1960s, the Mothers' Union provides a model of unity and reconciled diversity for a divided world wide church. Today it is hailed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and international development practitioners as an outstanding example of global Christian engagement with poverty and social transformation issues at the grass roots. The material is arranged both thematically and chronologically. Case studies of Australia, Ghana and South Africa trace how the Mothers' Union arrived with white British women but evolved into indigenous organizations. CORDELIA MOYSE is Adjunct Professor of Church History at Lancaster Theological Seminary, Lancaster, PA, USA.

Although the sacramental Rite of Reconciliation is included in many Anglican prayer books, nothing has been written expressly Anglicans since the 1980s that focuses on the pastoral skills required for this ministry. This book combines and passes on the teaching, coaching, skill development, and accumulated pastoral wisdom that has not been widely accessible or well integrated into clergy training. Realistic transcripts and "verbatims" of sample confessions and counseling sessions involving a wide range of people makes this a unique ministry resource for most seminaries and theological colleges, plus clergy in general-including Lutheran pastors who use the rite of "Individual Confession and Absolution" in the Lutheran Book of Worship."

Provides for a selection of texts, together with scholarly introductions, from one of the world's great private libraries, covering a period from Elizabeth I to the Church's involvement in homosexual law reform. This volume of the Church of England Record Society, published in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the foundation of Lambeth Palace Library, is a tribute to the value of one of the world's great private libraries to the scholarly community and its importance for the history of the Church of England in particular. Thirteen historians, who have made considerable use of the Library in their research, have selected texts which together offer an illustration of the remarkable resources preserved by the Library for the period from the Reformation to the late twentieth century. A number of the contributions draw on the papers of the archbishops of Canterbury and bishops of London,which are among the most frequently used collections. Others come from the main manuscript sequence, including both materials originally deposited by Archbishop Sancroft and a manuscript published with the help of the Friends of Lambeth Palace Library in 2007. Another makes use of the riches to the papers of the Lambeth Conferences. Each text is accompanied by a substantial introduction, discussing its context and significance, and a full scholarly apparatus. The themes covered in the volume range from the famous dispute between Archbishop Grindal and Queen Elizabeth I, through the administration of the Church by Archbishop Laud and Archbishop Davidson's visit to the Western Frontduring World War I, to involvement of the Church in homosexual law reform.

The religious leader John Henry Newman (1801-1890) started his long career as a devout Protestant; he later became the head of a new movement of Catholic ideas within the Church of England, and finally joined the Catholic Church. He began a new epoch in the study of religious faith. In this classic short study, reissued with a new preface to celebrate Newman's beatification, Owen Chadwick examines the many aspects of Newman's thought and writings, especially his views about faith, knowledge, and education.

A House of Meanings, now available in Spanish. Author Juan Oliver presents liturgical theology in accessible language, free of technical jargon. The book is designed for individual reading and structured to be a resource for a series of parish workshops, especially during the Easter season. Chapters conclude with a discussion guide intended to assist parishioners in developing their own sense of the value of worship and its relationship to our daily lives. Unique and refreshing, La Liturgia/A House of Meanings will be useful not only to congregations but to seminarians and anyone planning or evaluating worship.

John Henry Newman (180190) was brought up in the Church of England in the Evangelical tradition. An Oxford graduate and Fellow of Oriel College, he was appointed Vicar of St Mary's Oxford in 1828; from 1839 onwards, he began to have doubts about the claims of the Anglican Church for Catholicity and in 1845 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He was made a Cardinal in 1879. His influence on both the restoration of Roman Catholicism in England and the advance of Catholic ideas in the Church of England was profound.
Volume XXXII contains a further 513 letters which have surfaced since the publication of the preceding volumes, spanning the years 1830 until virtually the eve of Newman's death on August 11, 1890. There are, for example, thirty-four letters to Thomas Arnold, Jr., following his conversion to Roman Catholicism on January 18, 1856, in Van Diemen's Land and his subsequent return to England with his wife and family; seven letters to Charles Marriott and seven letters from him dealing mainly with the sale of the Littlemore property following Newman's secession to Rome on October 9, 1845; and eighteen letters to various members of the Mozley family, including two letters to Jemima in the wake of the Achilli trial in 1853.
Other recipients include the Duke of Norfolk and his family; Charles Wellington Furse, Principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon, near Oxford, and future Archdeacon of Westminster; and Miss Maria Trench, who was preparing some of Keble's papers and reviews for publication. There are also two letters to Pope Leo XIII petitioning him for the canonization of John Fisher, Thomas More, and the English Martyrs.

Letters written by a clergyman during the late seventeenth century illuminate the religious turmoil of the period. This book provides an edition of the letters of George Davenport, an Anglican clergyman in the north of England whose adult career covered the period of the Interregnum and the Restoration. Many of the letters are to his former Cambridge tutor, William Sancroft, beginning from 1651 after Sancroft had been expelled from Cambridge, and continuing after the Restoration when Davenport replaced Sancroft as chaplain to John Cosin, bishop of Durham, later becoming Rector of Houghton-le Spring, Durham. They were written to keep Sancroft supplied with information about Durham, where he was a prebendary with license to be non-resident, needing to collect revenues from his living and then torebuild his prebendal house. The earlier letters reveal something about the life of an illegally (since episcopally) ordained young Anglican who, unlike many, did not go into exile but stayed largely in London supported by friends. Davenport eventually became a most conscientious resident parish priest and the letters throw considerable light on the Restoration settlement in the Durham diocese, from the `beautifying' of Houghton church to the catechisingof the people and the collection of tithes from a sometimes tardy flock. Davenport also helped Cosin to Catalogue his famous library and himself gave many manuscripts to it, of which a list is included here as an appendix. The letters are presented here with full introduction and elucidatory notes.

John Henry Newman is often described as 'the Father of the Second Vatican Council'. He anticipated most of the Council's major documents, as well as being an inspiration to the theologians who were behind them. His writings offer an illuminating commentary both on the teachings of the Council and the way these have been implemented and interpreted in the post-conciliar period. This book is the first sustained attempt to consider what Newman's reaction to Vatican II would have been. As a theologian who on his own admission fought throughout his life against theological liberalism, yet who pioneered many of the themes of the Council in his own day, Newman is best described as a conservative radical who cannot be classed simply as either a conservative or liberal Catholic. At the time of the First Vatican Council, Newman adumbrated in his private letters a mini-theology of Councils, which casts much light on Vatican II and its aftermath. The leading Newman scholar, Ian Ker, argues that Newman would have greatly welcomed the reforms of the Council, but would have seen them in the light of his theory of doctrinal development, insisting that they must certainly be understood as changes but changes in continuity rather than discontinuity with the Church's tradition and past teachings. He would therefore have endorsed the so-called 'hermeneutic of reform in continuity' in regard to Vatican II, a hermeneutic first formulated by Pope Benedict XVI and subsequently confirmed by his successor, Pope Francis, and rejected both 'progressive' and ultra-conservative interpretations of the Council as a revolutionary event. Newman believed that what Councils fail to speak of is of great importance, and so a final chapter considers the kind of evangelization-a topic notably absent from the documents of Vatican II-Newman thought appropriate in the face of secularization.

A full scholarly edition of Dowsing's record of his and his deputies' activities in Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, 1643-4. During the Civil War, in late 1643 and 1644, the Suffolk puritan William Dowsing visited some hundred parish churches in Cambridgeshire, and about a hundred and fifty in Suffolk, smashing stained glass and other 'superstitious' imagery, ripping up monumental brass inscriptions, destroying altar rails and steps, and pulling down crucifixes and crosses. He dealt equally vigorously with the chapels of the Cambridge colleges, still fresh from their Laudian re-ordering. This modern edition of Dowsing's journal brings together, with commentary, the Cambridgeshire and Suffolk sections of his record of what he destroyed, never previously published together. Dowsing and his character and beliefs are set in context, with coverage of Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm; the work of Dowsing and his deputies in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk; Dowsing and Cambridge University, and the arguments at PembrokeCollege; evidence of destruction in the other counties of the Eastern Association; the text and history of the journal. Contributors: JOHN BLATCHLY, TREVOR COOPER, JOHN MORRILL, S. SADLER, ROBERT WALKER.

The convocation records of the Churches of England and Ireland are the principal source of our information about the administration of those churches from middle ages until modern times. They contain the minutes of clergy synods, the legislation passed by them, tax assessments imposed by the king on the clergy, and accounts of the great debates about religious reformation; they also include records of heresy trials in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many of them connected with the spread of Lollardy. However, they have never before been edited or published in full, and their publication as a complete set of documents provides a valuable resource for scholarship.This volume contains the evidence for the northern convocation during the years of the reformation and its aftermath, when the church in the north was significantly disrupted and reorganized. There is a full account of the northerners' reaction to Henry VIII's religious policies, and a summary analysis of the little-known York Provinciale, or collection of northern canons, generally attributed to Cardinal Wolsey.

Complete in two volumes, the records of the Manx convocation cover the period from the 13th century to the present day. Largely unpublished hitherto, the materials contained in The Records of Convocation have been drawn from a variety of sources. They make available, for the first time, the fullest possible account of the convocations which stood at the very heart of the nation's life throughout most of the medieval and early modern period. The Records of Convocation contain the minutes of clergy synods, the legislation passed by them tax assessments imposed by the king onthe clergy, and accounts of the great debates about religious reformation and reform. The two volumes of records of the Manx convocation cover the period from 1229 to the present day, but they are of particular interest forthe eighteenth century, where they provide a remarkably full and detailed account of a vigorous period of ecclesiastical reform.