For centuries Lent has been a time when Christians stop and take stock of their lives. It is a time for revisiting the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. It is a time of focusing on our sinfulness and the need to repent, as well as a season in which we focus on putting aside our luxuries and making sure that others have what they need. All of these themes, and more, are explored in this collection of Anglican readings that begin with Ash Wednesday and end on the Saturday of Easter Week.

These readings are arranged in a regular sequence through each week of Lent. Sunday readings focus on God s love, Mondays on the need for discipline, Tuesdays on fasting, Wednesdays on prayer, Thursdays on sin, Fridays on the cross, and Saturdays on baptism.

A Time to Turn draws on the best sermons, books, poems, and hymns of Anglican writers throughout the centuries, with a reading for each day, followed by the brief suggestion for focusing the reader's meditations. Writers include Christina Rossetti, John Donne, Philips Brooks, John Keble, Thomas Traherne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others. Brief biographies are included, along with a bibliography for those who would like to read more from a given writer. "

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.

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

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."

Down through the centuries, people of faith have known that prayer has many languages, and not all of them have words. Here in Prayer of the HeART, readers will learn to use art as a way to open up a deep conversation with God. This book is not about "art" in the sense of making pretty pictures, or even about expressing an experience of God. Rather it opens readers to new possibilities. The art they create here is the visual result of an experience with God through visual imaging. Those who use this technique invite God to be the director, writer, and artist of their hearts as they are introduced to the concept of "heart spirituality." Prayer of the HeART is a wonderful exploration- for both the experienced artist and the novice- of the role of creativity in the life of prayer. Readers will find a variety of drawing techniques and media, and ways of dialoguing with the images they create. Each chapter, developed around a theme, features a visual exercise and a way to journey deeper into the heart of God.

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.

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.

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.

Rowan Williams has served as Archbishop of Canterbury through one of the most turbulent periods in the history of global Anglicanism. He has also faced numerous challenges within the Church of England. How has he coped with the huge issues of a divided church and a rapidly changing world? What has he done as archbishop when parts of the church are campaigning for an 'inclusive church' with gay-partnered clergy and women bishops, while others are determined to resist these developments? How has he related to other Christian traditions and those of other faiths? What has he said about the Iraq war, the financial crash, Sharia Law? In this fascinating assessment, Andrew Goddard surveys Archbishop Rowan's time in office. Goddard draws on Williams- speeches and writings, as well as interviews and comments from those who have worked with him. This book shows the pressures faced by an academic scholar who only took on this demanding role because he believed it to be God's call. What sort of leader has he been, and what sort of legacy does he leave for his successor, Justin Welby?

In the year 1581, after four days of debating six leading Anglican divines at the Tower of London, Jesuit Edmund Campion (1540-1581) was put to death because he would not deny his faith. In 1970, the martyred Campion was canonized a saint. A Jesuit Challenge is a book-length edition of previously unpublished Catholic manuscript accounts of those debates.. "As corrective historical documents, these Catholic manuscripts reveal a quite different picture of Campion and his opponents from that represented in the government's published version, and thus offer us a fuller and more balanced understanding of what actually took place. In addition to their historical value, the Catholic manuscripts also include lively exchanges between Campion and his opponents, and provide humanizing details about them. As personalized documents they capture the dramatic flavor of a series of spirited debates dealing with the major theological issues separating Protestant England from Catholic Rome in Elizabeth's reign.. "Together with a transcription of the Catholic manuscript accounts, Holleran supplies a general historical introduction to the debates, a detailed description of the manuscripts, brief supplementary commentaries about the debates, and a full set of explanatory notes.

This book is a study of the Anglican Church in the Jacobean period, a time of central importance in English religious and political history. By looking at official words instead of official deeds, the author challenges the recent revisionist position, made by both Anglican apologists and historians, that the reign of James I was an era of religious consensus and political moderation. Analyzing sermons preached and then ordered into print by the king, the book demonstrates that the Jacobean claim to "moderation" and the pursuit of a so-called "via media" were rhetorical strategies aimed at isolating Elizabethan-style Calvinist reformers and alienating their supporters.
Utilizing sources drawn from history, literature, and religion, this interdisciplinary work combines rhetorical and historical analysis in discussing the major religious and political issues of the period: the union with Scotland, the Gunpowder Plot, the Oath of Allegiance controversy, and the forceful elaboration of anti-Puritanism and ceremonialism in the Church of England. Throughout, the author presents evidence for her claim that the discourse of government is the substance of government.

Between 1700 and 1850 the Church of England was the among the most powerful and influential religious, social, and political forces in Britain. This was also a momentous time for the British Empire, during which it developed and then lost the North American colonies, extended into India, and settled the colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Public understanding of this expanding empire was influentially created and promulgated by the Church of England as a consequence of its missionary engagement with these colonies, and its role in providing churches for British settlers. Rowan Strong examines how that Anglican Christian understanding of the British Empire shaped the identities both of the people living in British colonies in North America, Bengal, Australia, and New Zealand during this period - including colonists, indigenous peoples, and Negro slaves - and of the English in Britain.

First full-length study of the life and career of John Henry Williams, one of the most fascinating figures of the eighteenth-century church. John Henry Williams was the vicar of Wellesbourne in south Warwickshire from 1778 until his death some fifty years later. A dedicated pastor, displaying an `enlightened and liberal' outlook, his career illuminates the Church of England's condition in the period, and also a clergyman's place in local society. However, he was not merely a country parson. A `political clergyman', Williams engaged fervently in both provincial and national political debate, denouncing the war with revolutionary France between 1793 and 1802, and published a series of forceful sermons condemning the struggle on Christian principles. To opponents, he appeared insidious and blinkered, but to admirers he was 'a sound divine, and not a less sound politician'. This book, the first to examine Williams' career in full, is a detailed, vivid, and sometimes moving, study of a man who occupies an honorable and significant position in the Church of England's history and in the history of British peace campaigning. Dr COLIN HAYDON teaches in the Department of History at the University of Winchester.

This book looks at how that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church, coped with mass migration from Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The book details the great array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the Church with the men and money that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and a common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding 'British world'. It also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. One of the book's key aims is to show how the colonial Church should be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The colonial Church was an institution that played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and State. -- .

This volume brings together a diverse group of Reformation scholars to examine the life, work, and enduring significance of John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury from 1560 to 1571. A theologian and scholar who worked with early reformers in England such as Peter Martyr Vermigli, Martin Bucer, and Thomas Cranmer, Jewel had a long-lasting influence over religious culture and identity. The essays included in this book shed light on often-neglected aspects of Jewel's work, as well as his standing in Elizabethan culture not only as a priest but as a leader whose work as a polemicist and apologist played an important role in establishing the authority and legitimacy of the Elizabethan Church of England. The contributors also place Jewel in the wider context of gender studies, material culture, and social history. With its inclusion of a short biography of Jewel's early life and a complete list of his works published between 1560 and 1640, Defending the Faith is a fresh and robust look at an important Reformation figure who was recognized as a champion of the English Church, both by his enemies and by his fellow reformers. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Andrew Atherstone, Ian Atherton, Paul Dominiak, Alice Ferron, Paul A. Hartog, Torrance Kirby, W. Bradford Littlejohn, Aislinn Muller, Joshua Rodda, and Lucy Wooding.

Compiled originally as a supplement to the Church Hymnary Third Edition, this work caters for a variety of tastes and styles. Alongside favourite classic hymns and modern choruses, it contains African spirituals and Taize and Iona chants.

Attitudes towards divorce have changed considerably over the past two centuries. As society has moved away from a Biblical definition of marriage as an indissoluble union, to that of an individual and personal relationship, secular laws have evolved as well. Using unpublished sources and previously inaccessible private collections, Holmes explores the significant role the Church of England has played in these changes, as well as the impact this has had on ecclesiastical policies. This timely study will be relevant to ongoing debates about the meaning and nature of marriage, including the theological doctrines and ecclesiastical policies underlying current debates on same-sex marriage.

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.

Richard Trahair shares an insider's experience of the wide-ranging 'goings on' in a large Church of England diocese in the south of England from the 1980s. As estate manager - Diocesan Property Secretary - for more than thirty years, he reflects on the astonishing range of characters he worked alongside, and the diverse buildings and land for which he was responsible. Richard delves into the nature of a parsonage house, its parish loyalties, and the keen controversy over selling the grand old houses and replacing them with smaller ones so that the impoverished clergy and their families can at least keep warm. Both people and places were a heady mix of the delightful, the worthy, the curious and the downright eccentric. With encounters recounted that range from wacky and hilarious, to thought-provoking and historical, catch a glimpse into the life of a twenty-nine-year-old surveyor in a diocesan office dominated by retired military gentlemen, rattling around in a huge 15th century former city workhouse, as he grows into his role.

This unique new book records and celebrates the extraordinary wisdom and genius of Frederick William Dwelly, the first Dean of Liverpool. His creativity in the use of poetry, of music, of the commissioning of art, and in the use of the Great Space of Liverpool Cathedral set him apart from his peers and won huge admiration from all quarters. Above all, his liturgy was always centred around the value of the human being and he fostered worship that was dignified, imaginative and relevant for the thousands of people who attended services. Peter Kennerley's lively account of the work of a true master of liturgy is set in the context of the story of the cathedral itself, to create this highly readable, beautifully illustrated and fascinating volume.

An accessible Q&A introduction to the Episcopal Church Use with new members, as a confirmation resource, and in youth and adult study groups Written by two established and well-recognized figures in the Episcopal Church Everybody enjoys a simple Q&A: it provides a quick, easy, and non-threatening way to learn perfect for today s busy lifestyle. Yet, with Episcopal Questions, Episcopal Answers, we re also dealing with some of the most central and compelling elements of the faith. Sample questions of the new work include: What do Episcopalians believe about the Bible? Why do Episcopalians practice infant baptism? Why does God permit evil and suffering? What are the sacraments of the Episcopal Church? Is it acceptable for a Bishop to question the Virgin Birth? Why is the Prayer Book so important to Episcopalians? What is the relationship between the Prayer Book and the Bible? What is the Anglican Communion? How did the Episcopal Church come to be? How are decisions made in the Episcopal Church? "

Most Christians think they know what makes people tick. But do they? If the truth be told, this is often more anecdotal than factual. Are the unchurched hostile, ill-informed or simply disengaged? Is it God, Christianity, Christians or the church that puts people off? Is it people's own lives, their beliefs, attitudes and habits that prevent them from exploring Christianity? 'The Responsive Church' aims to find out the answers to these questions and more. Drawing upon research from London Institute of Contemporary Christianity, author Nick Spencer explores the landscape of twenty-first-century religions and spiritual beliefs. His findings are fascinating. But it doesn't end there. While listening closely and critically to what people are saying, Graham Tomlin listens to what God is saying throughout the Bible: Scripture is after all the touchstone by which we need to measure all things, the light in which we need to walk. Sometimes listening to critics of the church helps us to see things we have never noticed before. And if the voices from outside tell us where we are, we can expect Scripture to point us to where we need to go from here. 'Our hope is that this exercise will enable Christians to become more attuned, both to the God who still speaks to his church and to those people whom he loves but who do not yet find church attractive, credible or satisfying, ' write the authors. 'Perhaps by listening to both, it can help bring the two together.'

This essential handbook for the preparation of worship presents the authorised Bible readings (references only) for the liturgical year beginning Advent Sunday 2022. It includes: - a full calendar of the Christian year; - a simple code indicating whether celebrations are mandatory or optional; - complete lectionary references to the Principal, Second and Third services for Sundays, Principal Feasts and Holy Days; - lectionary references for Morning and Evening Prayer; - the Additional Weekday Lectionary; - general readings for saints days and special occasions; - a guide to the liturgical colours of the day. A must-have reference guide for every vestry and parish office. This is the standard pocket-book size edition.