The Anglican Communion doesn’t need a Covenant because Anglicanism is a covenant. It is a way of Provinces listening, living distinctively apart from each other whilst remaining part of one another. That is a way of doing difference differently from the ways in which groups and individuals usually do difference. It is predicated on grace and goodwill.
What is the opposite of a guilty pleasure? I feel as though I should admire the Advent Conspiracy, but I don’t. If you haven’t heard of the Advent Conspiracy, it is an extremely well-intentioned, not to mention Net savvy attempt to get Christians to: worship fully, give more, spend less and love all. Seems as though it should be right up a lefty Christian’s alley, no?
The term “charitable giving” is something of a misnomer in America, because it includes every dollar donated to every nonprofit institution. I don’t think it really counts as charity to give to institutions — whether your own church or a foundation enriching your child’s secular private school — that provide services to you in return for the “gift.”
Scott and I work at the same places. We live in the same house and wear (sad to say) many of the same clothes. Lots of things have happened around us since 2003 but a remarkable number have stayed the same. Except boys: they grew an alarming number of inches and shoe sizes and turned from funny, smart, adorable little boys into funnier, smarter, handsome young men.
Advent, despite all earnestness, is a time of refuge because it has received a message. Oh, if people know nothing about the message and the promises anymore, if they only experience the four walls and the prison windows of their gray days, and no longer perceive the quiet footsteps of the announcing angels,
Turner’s writing was characterized by personal modesty, steady focus, and an amazingly approachable prose style marked by clarity and anchoring his subjects in their broader place in English or European history. All this was laced with a riotous sense of humor, sometimes in one-line comments, sometimes in passing on a howler quote from the good and the great that had come his way.
When we watch, we’re watching for signs. Signs are things we watch for because they are the leading edge of a larger reality we await. We may await recovery, rescue, or reconciliation. We may await fulfillment, recognition, or love. We long for so many things. We need signs that they are on the way, or even already present.
St. Paul kept holding up a vision of a new interconnected humanity. “Bear one another’s burdens,” he said. “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” . . . No one understood this better than C.S. Lewis’s novelist friend Charles Williams, who believed that we humans are meant to be what he called “godbearers” to each other, channels of God’s love. And he said that the deepest truth of our lives is what he called the “co-inherence,” that our lives are immersed in God. There’s no separating out God in us and us in God and you and me in each other.
In a climate of intimidation and fear, he dares to confess out loud the name of Aslan the lion, the true King and the Son of the Emperor beyond the sea. The magical world of Narnia has come under the spell of the white witch, who styles herself its queen and keeps it in bondage, so that it is always winter but never Christmas.
The duty of prayer is so great and necessary a part of religion, that every degree of assistance toward the discharge of it will be always acceptable to pious minds. The inward and spiritual performance of this worship is taught us in many excellent discourses; but a regular scheme of prayer, as a Christian exercise, or a piece of holy skill, has been much neglected.