A Feast of Anglican Spirituality

Rating:
Summary: A Feast of Mediocrity
Review: As a lover of anthologies, and as an Anglican myself, I was excited by this publication. Stuff like this sits on my nightstand for delicious evening perusal. But this collection of poems, maxims, and the odd sermon excerpt was disappointing. It's long on Rossetti and short on meaty passages of any sort.

The book is roughly set up along the organizational lines of the Book of Common Prayer (a smallish liturgical year reading selection) and the Anglican Hymnal (The Christian Life)and their are many gems here, including a collect by Jonathan Swift that is beautiful. But my irritation rose when I found that the compiler, Robert Backhouse, had sliced the most muscular verse out of Emily Brontë's most famous poem, "No Coward Soul is Mine". You know, the verse that starts, "Vain are the thousand other creeds of men, unutterably vain..." Given that this is an Anglican anthology, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

I'd love to own an intensive Anglican reader, filled with passionate entries of the sort that make me proud to be an Anglican. Someday I may. This one, although sweet, is a bit too fluffy and twee for me.

Rating:
Summary: A Feast of Mediocrity
Review: As a lover of anthologies, and as an Anglican myself, I was excited by this publication. Stuff like this sits on my nightstand for delicious evening perusal. But this collection of poems, maxims, and the odd sermon excerpt was disappointing. It's long on Rossetti and short on meaty passages of any sort.

The book is roughly set up along the organizational lines of the Book of Common Prayer (a smallish liturgical year reading selection) and the Anglican Hymnal (The Christian Life)and their are many gems here, including a collect by Jonathan Swift that is beautiful. But my irritation rose when I found that the compiler, Robert Backhouse, had sliced the most muscular verse out of Emily Brontë's most famous poem, "No Coward Soul is Mine". You know, the verse that starts, "Vain are the thousand other creeds of men, unutterably vain..." Given that this is an Anglican anthology, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

I'd love to own an intensive Anglican reader, filled with passionate entries of the sort that make me proud to be an Anglican. Someday I may. This one, although sweet, is a bit too fluffy and twee for me.

Rating:
Summary: The table is set...
Review: As Backhouse states in his introduction, this anthology draws on a wide range of material for the subject of Anglican spirituality - essays, sermons, poems, hymn texts, articles, books; one of the echoes that resonates most strongly is the Book of Common Prayer, which is the backbone of all things Anglican, but there is a rich diversity of material here. Another interesting detail to note is the number of non-Anglicans included here, from Augustine of Hippo (from before there was an Anglican church) to John Henry Newman (who left the Anglican fold for Roman Catholicism), works are included here not because their origin is Anglican, but because they have been influential in the over Anglican ethos, the spirituality.

Some authors included here are theologians (leaving aside the idea that all Christians are theologians) - from those in the past, such as Richard Hooker, F.D. Maurice, and the like, to more modern theologians such as William Temple and John Macquarrie. Authors such as C.S. Lewis and S.T. Coleridge give a wider range, and modern 'spirituality' writers such as Evelyn Underhill help flesh out the overall sense of Anglicanism.

There are two primary, yet somewhat contradictory, ways in which texts are used here - passages that show similarities across different times, and passages that show the diversity of opinion and understanding that exists within the overall Anglican umbrella. According to William Wolf (quoted in the text, himself an author of various works on Anglicanism), the spirit of the Anglican church is biblical, liturgical and pastoral; Anglicanism is said to rest on the three-fold foundation of scripture, tradition and reason. These are embodied in the passages selected by Backhouse. Similarly, Anglicanism is incarnational and sacramental, and that is reflected in the writings here.

This is not a theology text, although there is a section on Anglican doctrine - what Anglicans believe about God, the Trinity, the Church, and so forth. Other sections of the text concentrate on issues like the Church, the liturgical seasons of the year, the Christian life, and basic pastoral issues. Quoting William Temple in his section on 'The Shaping of Anglican Identity', he includes the description of the Anglican church as having a special character (often described as the via media, the middle way) of preserving the best of catholic Christianity while remaining open to the immediacy of approach to God typified by evangelical Christians, and a freedom of intellectual inquiry. Backhouse is similarly honest in including passages that aren't lock-step supportive of things in the present regime, such as the quote from Stephen Neil, who comments that it is 'unfortunate' that the church has retained medieval ideas of property, jurisdiction and ecclesiastical administration.

This is not a systematic text, nor a comprehensive text, but Backhouse freely admits that this was not his intention. It is a sampler, a good collection of texts that show a cross-section of spiritual sensibility.