The relationship between church and state, indeed between religion and politics, has been one of the most significant themes in early modern English history. While scores of specialized studies have greatly advanced scholars' understanding of particular aspects of this period, there is no general overview that takes into account current scholarship. This volume discharges that task. Solt seeks to provide the main contours of church-state connections in England from 1509 to 1640 through a selective narration of events interspersed with interpretive summaries. Since World War II, social and economic explanations have dominated the interpretation of events in Tudor and early Stuart England. While these explanations continue to be influential, religious and political explanations have once again come to the fore. Drawing extensively from both primary and secondary sources, Solt provides a scholarly synthesis that combines the findings of earlier research with the more recent emphasis on the impact of religion on political events and vice versa.

This focused concentration and celebration of Anglican life could not be more timely. Debates on sexuality and gender (including women bishops), whether or not the church has a Covenant, or can be a Communion, and how it is ultimately led, are issues that have dominated the ecclesial horizon for several decades. No book on Anglicanism can ever claim to have all the answers to all the questions. However, Martyn Percy's work does offer significant new insights and illumination - highlighting just how rich and reflexive the Anglican tradition can be in living and proclaiming the gospel of Christ. These essays provide some sharply-focused snapshots of contemporary Anglicanism, and cover many of the crucial issues affecting Anglicans today, such as the nature of mission and ministry, theological training and formation, and ecclesial identity and leadership. Church culture is often prey to contemporary fads and fashion. Percy's work calls Anglicanism to deeper discipleship; to attend to its roots, identity and shape; and to inhabit the world with a faith rooted in commitment, confidence and Christ.

Top voices highlight important changes in the role of bishop. Compelling essays, written by bishops, other clergy, and academics from across the Episcopal Church, reflect the breadth of thinking on the history, current state, and future of the role of leadership within the denomination and the wider Anglican Communion. Topics include the transformation of the role over the last fifty years, a review of historic documents on the episcopacy, issues of race and gender, and the definition of ministry and leadership. This volume will be of interest to leaders across denominations as well as scholars.

A leading expert shares important benchmarks for leading liturgy. Grounded in Christian liturgical theology and how ritual forms the people who practice it, this book offers the principles at work in good liturgical practice, guidance for making liturgical choices, and best practices in leading and presiding over liturgical worship. Topics include curating liturgy and leading with excellence, principles for liturgical planning and presiding, and best practices for the Eucharist and Baptism. The author draws on his wide-ranging work in ritual theory to provide a practical guide that clergy and lay leaders in the Episcopal Church will find to be an essential resource. Those in other denominations will also find this book to be a useful reference in standard setting.

At an international level, Anglicanism has almost no mandating or juridical power. Stresses and threats of division over issues such as human sexuality have resulted in moves to enhance the Communion's central structures and instruments. However, it is becoming clear that there is little likelihood of substantial change in this direction succeeding, at least in the medium term. The challenge for Anglicanism is to make a 'polity of persuasion' work more effectively. This volume seeks to identify some trends and shifts of emphasis in Anglican ecclesiology to serve that end. Jeffrey W. Driver argues that there is more at stake in such an exercise than Anglican unity. In an ever-shrinking, pluralist, and conflicted world, where oneness is often forced by dominance, the people of God are called to model something different. The injunction of Jesus, 'it is not so among you', challenged his followers to use power and live in community in a way that contrasted with what occurred 'among the Gentiles' (Mark 10:41-45). This is why the sometimes tedious debates about authority and structure in the Anglican Communion could actually matter - because they might have something to say about being human in community, about sharing power and coexisting, about living interdependently on a tiny and increasingly stressed planet. The Anglican experiment in dispersed authority, for all its grief, could be a powerful gift.

The first two archbishops of Canterbury after the Norman Conquest, Lanfranc and Anselm, were towering figures in the medieval church and the sixth archbishop, the martyred Thomas Becket, is perhaps the most famous figure ever to hold the office. In between these giants of the ecclesiastical world came three less noteworthy men: Ralph d'Escures, William of Corbeil, and Theobald of Bec. Jean Truax's volume in the Ashgate Archbishops of Canterbury Series uniquely examines the pontificates of these three minor archbishops. Presenting their biographies, careers, thought and works as a unified period, Truax highlights crucial developments in the English church during the period of the pontificates of these three archbishops, from the death of Anselm to Becket. The resurgent power of the papacy, a changed relationship between church and state and the expansion of archiepiscopal scope and power ensured that in 1162 Becket faced a very different world from the one that Anselm had left in 1109. Selected correspondence, newly translated chronicle accounts and the text and a discussion of the Canterbury forgeries complete the volume.

The first two archbishops of Canterbury after the Norman Conquest, Lanfranc and Anselm, were towering figures in the medieval church and the sixth archbishop, the martyred Thomas Becket, is perhaps the most famous figure ever to hold the office. In between these giants of the ecclesiastical world came three less noteworthy men: Ralph d'Escures, William of Corbeil, and Theobald of Bec. Jean Truax's volume in the Ashgate Archbishops of Canterbury Series uniquely examines the pontificates of these three minor archbishops. Presenting their biographies, careers, thought and works as a unified period, Truax highlights crucial developments in the English church during the period of the pontificates of these three archbishops, from the death of Anselm to Becket. The resurgent power of the papacy, a changed relationship between church and state and the expansion of archiepiscopal scope and power ensured that in 1162 Becket faced a very different world from the one that Anselm had left in 1109. Selected correspondence, newly translated chronicle accounts and the text and a discussion of the Canterbury forgeries complete the volume.

The book explores the twenty-first novel from the perspective that it is more concerned with theological debate than we might like to think. It reads five twentieth-century writers who have written the equivalent of sermons, from the perspective of a man who was denied access to the Anglican clergy because of his homosexuality, and finds a parallel tradition of exasperation at the church's obduracy against homosexuals and determination that the church must recognize its homosexual ministers.

A study of the impact of urbanisation on organised religion in Croydon in the Victorian and Edwardian era. Drawing upon detailed local sources, Dr Morris's study of the town and suburbs of Croydon concentrates on the impact of urbanisation upon the development of Victorian and Edwardian organised religion. The book addresses in particular the origins and form of what has been described as the decline of organised religion in England, pinpointing the difficulties inherent in previous attempts to account for this phenomenon. In his search for an explanation, Dr Morris argues that it is appropriate to study the local tensions and conflicts which engrossed the attention of the churches in this period, the religious beliefs and activities of the middle classes who composed the broad mass ofchurch membership, and the activities and divisions of the urban elites who were most influential in the churches' management. Finally he examines the role of reformed local government in redefining the sphere within which churchaction was deemed to be effective.

There has never been a display like it. This is the catalogue to an ambitious exhibition at the Goldsmiths' Hall, London, which will comprise 250 gold and silver objects and sets of objects spanning the history of the Church from the earliest possible times to the present day. A foreword by the Rt Revd Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and twelve essays by distinguished authorities will illustrate aspects of evolving liturgy and Church history such as the medieval Mass, Church patronage in the Middle Ages, and the English Reformation. Historical themes from post-Reformation centuries will include Catholic recusancy, the 17th- and 18th-century altar service and the medieval revivals that mirrored the Victorian Tractarian movement. Important commissions from the 1980s and 1990s for Lichfield Cathedral and York Minster will also be discussed. Essays will be accompanied by new photography of key objects, many of them the'secret' treasure of individual parish churches. The guiding principle of the exhibition is that all loans be in the possession of the Church or other religious foundations. Objects have been selected from cathedrals, Oxford colleges and'royal peculiars' such as St George's Chapel at Windsor. The majority are from parish churches great and small up and down the country.

Sydney Anglicans, always ultra-conservative in terms of liturgy, theology and personal morality, have increasingly modelled themselves on sixteenth century English Puritanism. Over the past few decades, they have added radical congregationalism to the mix. They have altered church services, challenged church order, and relentlessly opposed all attempts to ordain women as priests, let alone bishops. Muriel Porter unpacks how Australia's largest and, until recently, richest diocese developed its ideological fervour, and explores the impact it is having both in Australia and the Anglican Communion.

Sydney Anglicans, always ultra-conservative in terms of liturgy, theology and personal morality, have increasingly modelled themselves on sixteenth century English Puritanism. Over the past few decades, they have added radical congregationalism to the mix. They have altered church services, challenged church order, and relentlessly opposed all attempts to ordain women as priests, let alone bishops. Muriel Porter unpacks how Australia's largest and, until recently, richest diocese developed its ideological fervour, and explores the impact it is having both in Australia and the Anglican Communion.

This book seeks to bring coherence to two of the most studied periods in British history, Caroline non-conformity (pre-1640) and the British revolution (post-1642). It does so by focusing on the pivotal years of 1638-44 where debates around non-conformity within the Church of England morphed into a revolution between Parliament and its king. Parliament, saddled with the responsibility of re-defining England's church, called its Westminster assembly of divines to debate and define the content and boundaries of that new church. Typically this period has been studied as either an ecclesiastical power struggle between Presbyterians and independents, or as the harbinger of modern religious toleration. This book challenges those assumptions and provides an entirely new framework for understanding one of the most important moments in British history. -- .

The role of bishops in the process of Reformation in the 16th century, studied from their surviving writings and contemporary discussion. The English bishops played a crucial role in the process of Reformation in the sixteenth century, from the first arrival of continental Reformed thought to the virtual extinction of the office in 1559. This work has at its core the bishops' own understanding of the episcopate, drawn from their surviving writings and other contemporary discussions; such a study is key to understanding what became of the English Church of the middle ages and what it was to become under Elizabeth. Carleton examines the interplay between bishop and king, the episcopate in the context of other orders, and the social context of the office; he studies episcopal activity in key areas such as preaching, ordaining, and opposing heresy; and he notes the influence of the models which the bishops themselves set up as ideals, most notably Christ himself as the ideal bishop. The backgrounds of the bishops are set out in the appendix.

In this book a veteran country parson emerges from obscurity to focus upon the root causes and a possible long term solution of the most intractable problem facing today's Christianity, and especially his own Anglican Communion - its crippling and deep-seated disunity in the face of relentless secularist attack. John Fitch's "eirenicon," defined as "a proposal tending to make peace," while explicitly disclaiming the slick or superficial, offers a distinctive long-term approach to this issue with a touch of originality. His intriguing diagram on the front cover hints at the line taken - a no-holds-barred analysis of the uniquely Anglican concept of "churchmanship." The book, though deadly serious, is by no means devoid of humour; at the very least it deserves a patient reading from all who share the author's concerns. Born in June 1922, John Fitch read History and Theology at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. After preparing for ordination at Wells Theological College in Somerset, he served for forty years in various Suffolk parishes, retiring in 1987. He was appointed an Honorary Canon of St Edmundsbury in 1975 and was a co-founder of the Suffolk Historic Churches Trust. Now living in Essex, he has one son, two daughters, and seven grandchildren. His previous areas of publication have been antiquarian and genealogical.

Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of Jesus for the Non-Religious, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Sins of Scripture, and many other books, is known for his controversial ideas and fighting for minority rights. In Eternal Life: A New Vision, a remarkable spiritual journey about his lifelong struggle with the questions of God and death, he reveals how he came to a new conviction about eternal life. God, says spong, is ultimately one, and each of us is part of that oneness. We do not live on after death as children who have been rewarded with heaven or punished with hell but as part of the life and being of God, sharing in God's eternity, which is beyond the barriers of time and space. spong argues that the discovery of the eternal can be found within each of us if we go deeply into ourselves, transcend our limits and become fully human. By seeking God within, by living each day to its fullest, we will come to understand how we live eternally.

Always compelling and controversial, Spong, the leading Christian liberal and pioneer for human rights, wrestles with the question that all of us will ultimately face. In his final book, Spong takes us beyond religion and even beyond Christianity until he arrives at the affirmation that the fully realized human life empties into and participates in the eternity of God. The pathway into God turns out to be both a pathway into ourselves and a doorway into eternal life. To Job's question "If a man (or a woman) dies, will he (or she) live again?" he gives his answer as a ringing yes

A straightforward, easy-to-understand introduction to the Episcopal Church. What are we as Episcopalians? This concise booklet explores five main areas of Episcopal life: identity, authority, spirituality, temperament, and polity. A great introduction to the Episcopal way of thinking in readable prose for any newcomer or seeker in the Episcopal Church who may wonder what makes Episcopalians different than Roman Catholics or other protestants.

This book considers the work of Charles Taylor from a theological perspective, specifically relating to the topic of ecclesiology. It argues that Taylor and related thinkers such as John Milbank and Rowan Williams point towards an "Aesthetic Ecclesiology," an ecclesiology that values highly and utilizes the aesthetic in its self-understanding and practice. Jamie Franklin argues that Taylor's work provides an account of the breakdown in Modernity of the conceptual relationship of the immanent and the transcendent, and that the work of John Milbank and radical orthodoxy give a complementary account of the secular from a more metaphysical angle. Franklin also incorporates the work of Rowan Williams, which provides us a way of thinking about the Church that is rooted in a material and historical legacy. The central argument is that the reconnection of the transcendent and the immanent coheres with an understanding of the Church that incorporates the material reality of the sacraments, the importance of artistic beauty and craftsmanship, and the Church's status as historical, global, and eschatological. Secondly, the aesthetic provides the Church with a powerful apologetic: beauty cannot be reduced to the presuppositions of secular materialism, and so must be accounted for by recourse to transcendent categories.

The changing relationship between the church and its supporters is key to understanding changing religious and social attitudes in Victorian Britain. Using the records of the Anglican Church's home-missionary organizations, Flew charts the decline in Christian philanthropy and its connection to the growing secularization of society.

While this one-volume guide is especially useful for Christian educators, showing them how to teach week by week according to the ethos and tradition of the Episcopal Church, it also provides a valuable and useful reference tool for all church leaders and members in connecting Christian faith to daily life.

This new guide to Christian education and formation is based on the Book of Common Prayer, the cornerstone of Anglican liturgy and theology. Keyed to the Revised Common Lectionary, all activities and lessons are structured on the seasons and lessons for Years A, B, and C. The guide stresses the major themes of baptismal theology and shows how teachers, parents, and children can live the liturgical cycle in Christian formation ministries at church and at home.

At once a travel guide and a vision for the future, this series is good news for the Episcopal Church at a time of fast and furious demographic and social change. It analyzes the present plight of the church and sketches a positive way forward, sprouting from the seeds of change those transformative practices already at work renewing the church. What church models can help point us toward transformation? What are the essential tools? What will give us strength, direction, and purpose to the journey?

Each volume of the series will: Explain why a changed vision is essential Give robust theological and biblical foundations Offer a guide to best practices and positive trends in churches large and small Describe the necessary tools for change Imagine how transformation will look

For most Episcopalians, stewardship is synonymous with pledge drives, budgets, and capital campaigns, but the Bible is clear that God wants more than our tithes and offerings. Looking to its scriptural roots in 1 Chronicles, Luke-Acts, and the letters of Paul, as well as St. Francis third way, Robertson offers a vision of holistic stewardship for the whole church, holistic because it can t be separated from evangelism, outreach, scripture study, and ministry to the newcomer. It does not involve strong-arm tactics, only a willingness to risk changing existing structures and ideas in order to enrich the faith community and strengthen connections to the neighboring world.

"Transforming Stewardship" delivers both good and bad news about Episcopalians and stewardship. "Robertson" provides essential models and spiritual practices in order to transform the church s outmoded attitudes toward stewardship and wealth into a broader context of faith."

In the section entitled "Concerning the Service of the Church," the Book of Common Prayer identifies the normative services of the Episcopal Church: The Holy Eucharist, the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord's Day and other major Feasts, and Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, as set forth in this book, are the regular services appointed for public worship in the Church. (BCP, 13) Eucharistic propers (collects, Scripture readings, and proper prefaces) are provided in the Book of Common Prayer for the days when the Eucharist is the principal service. As celebration of the Eucharist has become more frequent, many congregations and other communities of faith now celebrate weekday Eucharists on days for which the Prayer Book does not assign propers. To facilitate the use of these authorized options, this resource contains weekday propers for the seasons of the Church Year (the temporal cycle), the Common of Saints (the sanctoral cycle), and Various Occasions from the Prayer Book and from resources authorized since the adoption of the Prayer Book. The propers in this resource are grouped into three sections by type for the temporal cycle, the sanctoral cycle, and various occasions.

Introduces and explains church music and congregational singing for beginners. Music is an essential element in Anglican worship; in fact, The Hymnal 1982 is used in virtually every Episcopal service of worship that involves singing. While most parishioners participate in music making at some level (such as singing hymns or common responses), fewer people might understand the specific genres that comprise the music of an Episcopal worship service or the liturgical meaning behind each selection. This book provides a more in-depth understanding of this rich and complex tradition, discussing the history and evolution of music within the Episcopal Church, including its Anglican roots. This book is designed to help clarify-and simplify-the importance of hymn singing and service music in Episcopal worship, as well as explain the history, structure, and content of The Hymnal 1982.making at some level (such as singing hymns or common responses), fewer people might understand the specific genres that comprise the music of an Episcopal worship service or the liturgical meaning behind each selection. This book provides a more in-depth understanding of this rich and complex tradition, discussing the history and evolution of music within the Episcopal Church, including its Anglican roots.

This guide for clergy, parish musicians, lay readers, and congregational representatives covers all the stages of organizing worship services for the entire year. Using The Book of Common Prayer and Hymnal 1982 as primary resources, it explores the rich variety of options both time-honored traditions and accepted innovations.

Times and seasons covered in depth include Advent, the Twelve Days of Christmas, Lent and Holy Week, Easter and the Great Fifty Days, and the Sundays after Epiphany and Pentecost. Planning the Church Year explains the preparations that make for meaningful holy days and special occasions, such as Lesser Feasts, Thanksgiving Day, Vigils, Michaelmas, All Saints Day, the bishop s visitation, the Patronal and Dedication Festivals. "