Quotes and Excerpts
- The Revd William Alexander Ayton, Vicar of Chacombe, in Oxfordshire, was one such case. A Freemason of extraordinarily deep occult learning, he maintained a clandestine alchemical lab in his rectory basement, and declared that he had made the Elixir of Life […]
- The Revd A. H. Baverstock, twice Master of the Society of the Holy Cross (SSC) in the 1920s, was a member [of the Golden Dawn], as was the Very Revd Frank Selwyn Bennett, the Dean of Chester Cathedral, a formative influence on the culture of Anglican cathedrals in the 20th century.
- The Revd Francis Heazell, secretary of the Church of England’s committee on ecumenical relations with the Eastern Orthodox from 1917 to 1929, was a Ruling Chief of the Order’s London Temple. His duties would have included teaching the Order’s hermetic doctrines to new initiates. […]
- So were some of his brothers at Mirfield. In fact, Rees, and a fellow monk of Mirfield, Fr Charles Fitzgerald CR, helped to found a Golden Dawn temple in New Zealand while on mission there in the 1910s. The chapter that they started eventually came to include several Anglican bishops from that country. […]
- Was Jesus the focus of our attention?
- Was the Bible taught well?
- Was hope offered to hurting people?
- Did anyone come to faith in Christ?
- Did church members love, serve and encourage each other?
- Were guests made to feel welcome?
- Is there more excitement about the future than longing for the past?
- Were any broken relationships healed?
- Are people more prepared to live for Jesus after having been here?
- Do people want to come back?
The ordination of women has halted Anglican-Roman Catholic negotiations, for now; but if Anglo-Catholics have a place in GAFCON, they could bring Grafton’s dream of reunion with the Old Catholics and Orthodox closer to fruition. GAFCON has essentially exorcised latitudinarians from the Anglican picture, leaving them to fade away in their Canterbury ghetto. It is undoubtedly an evangelical-dominated movement. Nonetheless, that leaves a significant Anglo-Catholic minority, particularly in the U.S. and Africa. That minority could be all that is needed to graft the majority of Anglicans firmly onto the apostolic vine. The Union of Scranton founded by the Polish Old Catholic hierarchy that Grafton once courted is already moving toward reunion with some Anglo-Catholic jurisdictions, and the Anglican Church of North America, which split off from the U.S. Episcopal Church in 2009 to join GAFCON, could become a bridge between the Old Catholic movement and the worldwide Anglican majority. This could help GAFCON to decide whether it is just evangelical, or both evangelical and Catholic. If it opts for the latter course, then Grafton’s thesis may not yet be a dead letter.
Source: Anglicans and the Reunion of Christendom | Thomas Plant | First Things
Excellent thoughts, although I believe that the PNCC halted discussion with ACNA because of its unresolved policy on gender & holy orders.
let us remember that we are fighting for God’s Truth: truth revealed in Holy Scripture; truth more fully shown to us in modern discovery; and for the liberty of the sons of God; liberty ecclesiastical, political, intellectual. The Anglican Communion, and the Anglo-Catholic Movement which is its spearhead, its only consistent manifestation, are the only hope for the re-union of Christendom and the reconciliation of the modern world to Christianity. Roman propaganda, both inside and outside the Church, is an effort to pervert and ultimately to destroy that movement. I have avoided making accusations, but I cannot but warn you, that there are very sinister elements in what we are fighting against. If there is a “Protestant underworld,” as we are sometimes told, there is also an Anglo-Catholic underworld, and a very queer region it is. The use that is being made of the confessional and of the retreat movement in certain quarters, may lead to very disastrous results; and some of our smaller religious communities need watching carefully.
Source: English Catholicism, by CB Moss
Dr Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942, successfully cursed a hotel when a friend complained that it ruined the view at his lake house. The hotel burned down — twice. Thoroughly pleased with his success, the Archbishop went on to curse other minor items, such as ugly windows, when asked by his friends and fellow clergy. Anecdotes such as these might suggest that, if Anglicans were dabbling in the occult, it was all nothing more than the idiosyncrasies of strong personalities.
In truth, Anglo-Catholic involvement in the occult is much broader and deeper than most would suspect. Take, for instance, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, established in 1887. Devoted to the Western esoteric tradition, and practising various forms of initiatory ritual magic, the Golden Dawn recruited heavily from the clergy. Some of these men were, indeed, simple eccentrics.
Although the Golden Dawn and its daughter organisations had a notable contingent of clergy and Anglican laity, the Order was necessarily restrictive. It remained, primarily, a phenomenon of a very select elite. Theosophy, by contrast, was more widely diffused within the Church of England. At the turn of the 20th century, there was a popular interest in “mysticism” which took various forms. […] ANGLICAN clergy were not immune to this wider cultural force. Sermons on Theosophical topics could be heard in some early Edwardian parishes. Many Anglo-Catholics of the era were able to blend beliefs in the astral body, reincarnation, and root races with Catholic doctrines and ritual practices. But the Anglican liaison with Theosophy was not to last. At the 1920 Lambeth Conference, Theosophy was formally condemned, alongside Spiritualism and Christian Science. Some Theosophical Anglicans, such as J. I. Wedgwood and C. W. Leadbeater, eventually decided to leave the Church of England and start their own Theosophical churches as episcopi vagantes.
All around us is the image of the skull. We are in a living memento mori. Everything and everywhere ceaselessly depicts for us in word and image the demise we find ourselves inhabiting. We do not look upon the skull from without: we observe it as we dwell from within.
Yet composting habituates in a person an unanxious embrace of death. The real end of one thing can usher in the real beginning of another. God, just as much now as He did on Pentecost, has provided for us all that is necessary for life and godliness in this and every age. We have what is dead and what is dying, and He has sent to us His Spirit which gives us air and heat and moisture. It is only left to us to prayerfully and care-fully place it all together and pay attention.
We Christians are, God as our helper, both the gardeners of Western civilization, cultivating its rise and enjoying its fruits and now amassing its remains in the compost pile, and its heap-dwelling microorganisms, responsible for discerning the bits and pieces that are worth decomposing into the precious stores of nutrients and energy that will become the fertile soil of a future crop and its harvest.
When the culture becomes the memento mori, we become the shepherds of decay.
Source: Shepherds of Decay by OblateNate
one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. However, having been ‘reinforced’ in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission – killing SAMs – and then attacked the operator in the simulation. Said Hamilton: “We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realising that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”
He went on: “We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”
Source: Highlights from the RAeS Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities Summit
there were two distinct flavors of Christianity, both of which I tried to avoid. One was the fusty old Church of England variety. You would see this if you had to go to a wedding or a funeral, or when a vicar was invited to give a sermon at school. The vicar would be a slightly Victorian figure, an older man almost dainty in his manners, trying his best to speak in a dying tongue to a generation of kids more interested in their ZX Spectrums. The Victorian vicar would hand out morality lessons from a man who had lived two thousand years ago and whose core imagery might as well have been from Mars: wine presses, fishing boats, vineyards, masters and servants, virgins. The basic pitch seemed best summed up by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I’d rather have been reading than listening to a vicar: “One man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.”
The second flavor was the trendy vicar. Unlike his predecessor, the trendy vicar was plugged into the spirit of the age. He knew that instead of bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist, we were watching The Young Ones and playing Manic Miner, and he was on our side. The trendy vicar had a clipped beard and wore jeans and sang folk songs about how Jesus was our friend, and gave awkward, vernacular sermons in which biblical stories were interspersed with references to EastEnders or Dallas or Michael Jackson songs. Despite his good intentions, the trendy vicar was much worse than the stuffy vicar. At least the Victorian sermons were in some way otherworldly, as religion should be. If it was pop culture we wanted, and we did, we were better off sticking with the real thing, which was to say the thing without any Jesus in it.
So, I had no reason to take any notice of religion in general or Christianity in particular.
Source: Cross and machine — pk
Source: 10 Questions More Important Than “What Was Your Sunday Attendance?” by Karl Vaters
Satan’s hobby is religion. That’s because his real job is far darker. As a priest, you cannot have reading religious books as your pastime, because that is part of your job. You will need moments of escape from stress of parish life and religion, which is what a hobby provides.
Do not think that every waking moment will be devoted to perfect prayer, because it will not. We all need to pray and study, but we also need to relax at times.
Parenting is important, but that is also not a hobby. It is important to spend time with the family, but you will also need another way to blow off steam without falling into immorality, the temptation to which will be your constant companion if you become a priest.
There are lots of hobbies out there. Just walk through an art supply shop or the tool isle of the hardware store. You may try three or four before you find the right one, so just keep trying.
If you are going to identify with your parishioners, then you will need to experience their world. Take off the cassock and make friends with non-Orthodox. It is good to be around people who will not judge you the way your parishioners will.
A priest who cannot serve in a parish is like a hammer without a handle. And, if he has no need for you, don’t expect his attention or any favors. He has a lot of other priests who are serving faithfully and are more deserving of his energy. Source: Read This Before You Think About Seminary…
Thornton summarizing Jeremy Taylor’s Eucharistic ascetic – a basic approach to the Eucharist that we all ought to make accessible for newcomers from other Christian traditions
Source: Fr Mark Perkins
On Thursday Apr. 27, Twitter user Ashley Gjøvik tweeted(opens in a new tab) about Bluesky’s disconcertingly broad terms of service(opens in a new tab). She tweeted several screenshots of the terns, including a snippet that reads “If you post any content to the Bluesky Web Services, you hereby grant Bluesky and its licensees a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive right and license to use, reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, modify, sublicense, and distribute the content, on or in connection with the Bluesky Web Services.” In plain English that means: we own everything you post. Source: Want to try Bluesky? Look carefully at the terms of service. | Mashable
In that reluctance to come to grips with “Classical Anglicanism” (despite protestations to the contrary), the ACNA project remains strongly entangled with the theological, historical, liturgical, and institutional perspectives that so disastrously reshaped the Episcopal Church in the USA and the Anglican Church in Canada in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Source: A Curate’s Egg - The ACNA Prayer Book of 2019 - The Anglican Way
the modern English liturgy is clueless about the wedding ring: ‘I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage.’ Whether at a coronation or a wedding, if you have to say that something is a symbol and a sign, it is not a very good symbol and it fails to signify. ‘With this ring I thee wed,’ says nothing about a symbol but actually symbolizes. ‘This is a symbol’ merely asserts something that is not in fact the case. Source: The Coronation of King Charles III – Anglican Catholic Liturgy and Theology
The main thing Tim wanted to say was always about someone other than him: his mind seemed never to be on himself but rather on his friends, on those he pastored and mentored, and above all on the God who is known to us in Jesus Christ. The criticism he received — almost all of it irrational and misinformed — slightly bemused him but otherwise left him unaffected; he had more important things to think about than his own reputation.
In one of his last books he wrote of
Christianity’s unsurpassed offers — a meaning that suffering cannot remove, a satisfaction not based on circumstances, a freedom that does not hurt but rather enhances love, an identity that does not crush you or exclude others, a moral compass that does not turn you into an oppressor, and a hope that can face anything, even death.
This depicts Jesus Christ ascending into Heaven. Mary and the Apostles stand around the rock atop Mount Olivet and watch. I framed the scene in a twelve-pointed star surrounded by plant and animal ornament. Above I wrote the words Ascendit Deus in a Lombardic script; below I drew a miniature of the prophet Elijah taken to Heaven in a fiery chariot.
Source: ASCENSION of JESUS CHRIST ~ DRAWING by DANIEL MITSUI
First and foremost, stick to the basics. Teach and preach the Bible. Disciple and evangelize. Make sure children and young people are taught and fed. Work for strong families. Gather at the Lord’s table, weekly. Learn the Psalms. Pray, pray, pray.
Second, did I mention Psalm-singing? If you want a congregation that hungers and thirsts for justice, a congregation that weeps with those who weep, and congregation prepared for discomfort, sing the Psalms, even or especially the hard ones. If they have the Psalm in their mouths, they’ll develop a taste for God’s justice, and they’ll become inoculated to various off-brand forms of pseudo-justice.
Third, call the pastor at the church down the road. Call the pastor at the next church down the road. Start a pastors' prayer group in your city, town, or village. If you’re a white pastor, call the pastor of a black church; if you’re black, call the pastor of a white church. If you’re a Catholic priest, pursue a friendship with a Pentecostal; if you’re a Presbyterian, search out the Orthodox priests in town. Contact the pastor of an immigrant congregation. Organize a day of prayer, led by the pastors of your community. Pray, pray, pray together.
[…]
two virtues are crucial. One is hope. Teach your people that, no matter what comes, the Lord is in it. No matter what happens, the Lord is opening new avenues of service, witness, and worship. The Lord dismantles and He rebuilds. It’s hard to live through demolition, but it’s also a chance to lay the foundations for rebuilding.The other is courage. Panic is everywhere, greatly amplified by social media feeds. Christians need to follow Jesus, the fearless One whose favorite exhortation to timid disciples was, Fear not. Source: To Pastors – Theopolis Institute
St. Brendan was an Irish monk of the fifth and sixth centuries who made extensive sea journeys to spread the Gospel to the islands around Ireland and to found monasteries. His most famous adventures are recounted in the Voyage of St. Brendan. According to the Voyage, St. Brendan and his monks celebrated Mass on several occasions on an island that was really the back of the largest fish in the ocean, which is named Iasconius.
the borders are in the style of 6-9th century Northumbro-Irish art, with its distinctive ornamental knotwork, lacertine animals and geometric patterns.
There is a reason why the Orthodox do not approve of war but simply look at it as something that may be a lesser evil than the alternative of not fighting a war. It is because there is that in us that shouts, “Thou shalt not kill.” There is that in us that says that we were created to have communion one with another and all of us with God. As permitted as some killings may be, there is that in us which shouts that this is not right, that this was never meant to be. Source: Unexpected scene in a manga light novel | OrthoCuban
The incensation of the Altar (including the Cross) and Oblation. Source: Latin Mass Society Australia
Where identity was once a result of multiple aspects of life, for some in Silicon Valley, identity, meaning, and even purpose are all being found in one central place, work. But what happens when work replaces religion?
Source: Via Media: What Happens When Work Becomes Religion w/Carolyn Chen on Apple Podcasts
We support “right to repair” legislation for consumer products and capital equipment. We believe more ownership means more economic freedom in the truest sense. If you can’t fix it without being bound to the manufacturer’s terms, you don’t really own it.Source: Twitter
A Sunday service is held at a church in Nagero. Source: ‘Am I going to get out of here alive?’ In one of Africa’s most dangerous corners, a fight to the death for the elephants - Los Angeles Times
“Three Streams” is a phrase that has come to the fore in the last 10 years or so, especially amongst Anglicans in the ACNA and in continuing Anglican churches. The phrase is meant to suggest (a) that there are three historic “streams” within historic Christianity — the Catholic, the Evangelical, and the Charismatic — and (b) that Anglicanism embodies these in a distinct way that can serve the renewal of the Church.
Prof. Gillis Harp has suggested that the notion may have its origins in Lesslie Newbigin’s The Household of God (1953) or possibly an article by Richard Lovelace in Charisma magazine in 1984. Regardless, it was brought to prominence by the late Wheaton College professor Robert Webber in his wide corpus on “Ancient-Future” worship, sometimes called the Convergence Movement. In an article for ACNA’s newsletter Apostle, Trinity School for Ministry’s professor emeritus, the Rev’d Dr Les Farfield writes:
The genius of Anglicanism is that for five hundred years it has held in creative tension three different strands of Biblical Christianity. Those three streams are the Protestant, the Pentecostal/Holiness and the AngloCatholic [sic] movements.
I must say I find this a problematic argument from a historical perspective: How many Anglicans before the twentieth-century charismatic movement would have found recognizable the claim that the “Pentecostal/Holiness” stream is an integral part of Anglicanism?
Source: Three streams (but not the ones you’re thinking of) – Covenant