Anyone up for a chat thread?

[RileyG]

No. I asked the church when they last got the stats from the radio station and their eyes glazed over. I have found most churches don't actually want to know how many people use the legacy media resources because it's usually not a good number. They prefer to go on like it's still 1975 and there aren't dozens of alternatives to their low production value shows.

This particular church has been on the air continuously since 1962. The show is paid for by an endowment from a long dead member. The station is not very powerful. The signal fades out after about 30-35 miles. However, there are 50-60 thousand people in the listening area.

That's actually very interesting.

God bless

 

[The Liturgist]

I am continually distressed by the persecuton of Anglicans in Pakistan, and continue to pray for them, but I have had what you may or may not find to be an interesting idea:

Despite Arrion Press in San Francisco producing a beautiful Prospectus, the 1979 BCP, while like all other Episcopalian BCP editions was released into the Public Domain, never had a Standard Edition, so the last Standard Edition remains the legendary DB Updike setting of the 1928 BCP, which could be the most beautiful liturgical book ever printed (the fifty vellum copies issued to each diocese and a small number of subscribers of the 1928 BCP and the art nouveau vellum design of the 1892 BCP, financed by JP Morgan, are literally priceless, while the elegant regular version of 1892 and 1928 (in the case of the 1928 Standard Edition, the same design was used for both the Vellum version and the regular version), is extremely valuable, and a facsimile print done in the 1950s is also exceedingly valuable.

My thought is a subscription for a finely printed copy of the 1979 BCP and/or perhaps the 1979 and 1928 editions primarily to raise funds for relief for persecuted Anglicans in the Church of Pakistan, which would also celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1979 edition and the 100th anniversary of the 1928 edition, and the 135th anniversary of the 1892 edition. Adding the 1928 edition to the volume would not make it excessively large sjince these are folio-sized books and would have the added benefit of attracting prospective subscriptions from Continuing Anglican churches which often have a good relationship with the Episcopal Church, for example, in Las Vegas, and in Detroit St. John’s Episcopal Church uses the 1928 BCP (I was shocked to discover it was not Continuing Anglican; I thought it was a member of the ACC, which uses a flag similar to the Episcopal Church Flag).

I had in mind asking Arrion Press if they could still do a run based on the 1979 Prospectus, but then I had the idea of putting the 1928 text in the same volume, and also pursuing a cheaper vendor, since the main goal would of course be to raise funds to help the Church of Pakistan. Indeed ideally if there is a Christian print shop in Pakistan associated with the Church, the order would go to them, and thus all donations could go direct to the Church of Pakistan, which could also handle distributing the books as a souvenir (they might perhaps include the Prayer Book in use in that province, which is not as widely known or celebrated as the influential book from the Church of South India, which was the first major liturgical text whose rubrics encouraged celebration versus populum, but it is a beautiful and interesting text; if I recall it is similar to the prayer book of the Church of North India).

Of course a regular donation drive would also work, but sometimes having a souvenir can promote fundraising auctions and other events which result in more money being generated, in this case, for direct use by the Anglican Church of Pakistan to help its membership as they saw fit.

 

[Paidiske]

Would you want it to be something that people outside America actually used? Because I can't see it having much appeal globally.

If someone were to attempt something like that - a publication intended to raise funds for a particular Anglican church - I would imagine that something like a collection of the best liturgies from around the communion, made available digitally for a subscription fee, would have much more appeal.

 

[The Liturgist]

Would you want it to be something that people outside America actually used? Because I can't see it having much appeal globally.

If someone were to attempt something like that - a publication intended to raise funds for a particular Anglican church - I would imagine that something like a collection of the best liturgies from around the communion, made available digitally for a subscription fee, would have much more appeal.

That’s an interesting idea. Currently that material is freely downloadable, except the word “best” implies curation. And it would definitely be possible to curate something like that as a digital product with a shorter turnaround time.

 

[Paidiske]

Some material may be freely downloadable; some wouldn't be. But I was thinking more of a central database, rather than having to search through Common Worship and whatever other sites other provinces might have. And also that the subscription fee would cover permission to reproduce for local worship.

Hymnary I think does something similar with hymns, in that you can pay per hymn you want to publish in your booklets or whatever, and they manage the various copyright permissions and whatnot.

I don't know - I'm thinking out loud here - I was just really musing that I'd have no real use for an American prayer book as a stand-alone item.

 

[RileyG]

Prayers for those persecuted in Pakistan and incidentally in India and Bangladesh!

 

[seeking.IAM]

I don't know - I'm thinking out loud here - I was just really musing that I'd have no real use for an American prayer book as a stand-alone item.

Reading this made me curious about our differences. Is there an online version of your prayer book I can see?

 

[Paidiske]

I don't believe there's a free online version.

 

[Shane R]

Reading this made me curious about our differences. Is there an online version of your prayer book I can see?

Not wishing to launch an extensive thread on this subject, I will briefly summarize the major differences I have noted when comparing Prayer Books. They are: the order of certain prayers in the Holy Communion (particularly in what Anglo Catholics call the 'Canon of the Mass), how closely any alternative settings adhere to the contemporary Roman Missal, and what supplementary services are included.

 

[The Liturgist]

I don't believe there's a free online version.

What’s the name of your current prayer book?

Recently a ton of liturgical material has been released online, so one can now freely access the best and most well known translations of Orthodox liturgical texts such as the Triodion and Pentecostarion, and now, in the English language, all of the Byzantine Rite liturgy is now online, in addition to all Roman Catholic liturgy according to the Dominican, Sarum and Tridentine (16th century, the revisions under Pope St. Piux X, and the less well advised revisions under Pope Pius XII and John XXIII and the final obscure mid 1960s revision under Pope Paul VI before the reforms of the Concilium (which might not be fully freely available; I think there are parts of the Liturgy of the Hours, for example). However, it is even hard to find a complete Latin, Spanish or Italian missal or breviary of the Mozarabic and Ambrosian Rites, and since both of these were changed (especially the Ambrosian, which was modified almost as much as the Roman, and wound up with six Eucharistic Prayers rather than four). Additionally, as far as I am aware the Carthusian mass is available online in English but not the full Carthusian missal or breviary (the Carthusian and Dominican rite masses look a lot like each other, the only difference being the language is, as one would expect, slightly more penitential in the Carthusian and slightly more cheerful in the Dominican, but the two are more closely related to each other than to the Tridentine use - they represent earlier standardizations that were done for different reasons, from the era before the Tridentine standardization that marked the end of most regional uses (except for those of Lyon, Cologne, Braga and one or two others; the four English uses of Sarum, York, Hereford and Durham having been forced underground at this point).

Recently St. Bartholomew the Great did Candlemas in the Sarum Rite. I would be very interested in hearing a mass in one of the other ancient rites; a York missal translated into English along with interesting information on the York system of liturgical colors (which were limited to white, black, yellow and red, which is still more than the Mozarabic, which uses white vestments only, not unlike Coptic monasteries).

Thanks to the efforts of members of both of the two jurisdictions in Malankara (which exist in parallel like the two Armenian Catholicoi, but unfortunately are still in a schism, albeit one that is fortunately not the result of the Soviet Union having annexed Armenia, which was the immediate cause of the previous schism between the two Armenian jurisdictions), there is now a workable amount of Syriac Orthodox liturgical material. But only 14 of the 86 anaphorae (Eucharistic Prayers) are easily available in English, and only the abbreviated propers in widespread use as opposed to the entirety of the hymns found in the Beth Gazo (Treasury) such as all of the translated Greek Canons and the Syriac Canons (Eniyono, plural Eniyoneh) has not been made available. Likewise, we have the whole Maronite rite post Vatican II, but not the historic pre Vatican II rite.

Thus only six of the 50+ Maronite anaphoras (many of which are basically the same as their Syriac Orthodox counterparts, the main difference being at some point, presumably after the Maronites resumed full communion with Rome several centuries after their schism with the Syriac Orthodox, the Theopaschite Clause was removed from the Trisagion Hymn, and perhaps they added the filioque; I don’t know, but it is the case that avoidance of the filioque was mainly limited to the Greek Catholic / Byzantine Rite Churches.

additionally all of the Coptic Rite is available through the Coptic Reader app, but getting all of the material costs about US $40, but this was available some time ago, and most of the material is also available for free, but the Coptic Reader is worth the money since it arranges the liturgical propers automatically, whereas otherwise one has to know the Coptic equivalent of what the Orthodox call the Typikon, the Syriac Orthodox and Assyrians call the Hudra (Khudro in West Syriac) meaninf Cycle, the Armenians call the Donatsuyts meaning Directory and the Western churches call the Ordo and in the Sarum Rite it was apparently called the Pie, based on this quote from older, more Cranmerian editions of the Book of Common Prayer:

“Moreover, the number and hardness of the Rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the Service, was the cause, that to turn the Book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.”

However by the 19th century the needs of the High Church community exceeded the rubrics in the BCP concerning liturgical propers, which led to the Directorum Anglicanorum and the Ritual Notes, and the inclusion of complete Paschal services in the 1979 Episcopal BCP, which the 1994 Anglican Service Book made entirely available in English (following a rubric that expressly allows doing this), as much of the additional material such as offices for midday prayer etc was only included in the contemporary language Rite II, as it was envisaged that parishes that preferred Rite I would simply rewrite them. The Anglican Service Book is completely available online as are Ritual Notes, the Directorum Anglicanorum and all Episcopalian editions of the BCP are in the Common Domain (apparently this is also the case with the 2019 ACNA BCP).

Given this, I would not be surprised to find the Australian book, but I can’t remember the name.

 

[The Liturgist]

Not wishing to launch an extensive thread on this subject, I will briefly summarize the major differences I have noted when comparing Prayer Books. They are: the order of certain prayers in the Holy Communion (particularly in what Anglo Catholics call the 'Canon of the Mass), how closely any alternative settings adhere to the contemporary Roman Missal, and what supplementary services are included.

That is very aptly put.

I would say my favorite Low Church BCP edition is the 1926 Irish book, and my favorite High Church / Anglo Catholic influenced edition is a tie between 1929 Scottish Book, the 1928 American Book when augmented by the 1914 Book of Offices, the 1928 Deposited Book, and the 1938 Melanesian Book, which is thrilling and answers the question of what would happen if you sent some Anglo Catholics to an island in the South Pacific as missionaries - they adapted the BCP to meet the needs of the Melanesian People, which resulted in a change in the relative importance of certain offices at different times of the day.

 

[Paidiske]

What’s the name of your current prayer book?

A Prayer Book for Australia. I would be surprised if it's available online for free somewhere because of copyright issues etc. Interested folks should take care to purchase the red or blue version, not the green version, which is abbreviated and leaves much out.

and the inclusion of complete Paschal services...

This, however, you can find online for us. You can find specific liturgies for Ash Wednesday, Passion/Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil here: Lent, Holy Week and Easter | Anglican Church of Australia

 

[The Liturgist]

A Prayer Book for Australia. I would be surprised if it's available online for free somewhere because of copyright issues etc. Interested folks should take care to purchase the red or blue version, not the green version, which is abbreviated and leaves much out.

This, however, you can find online for us. You can find specific liturgies for Ash Wednesday, Passion/Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil here: Lent, Holy Week and Easter | Anglican Church of Australia

This is the older version, the 1978 version, no longer in common use, right? https://jamberooanglican.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/AAPB.pdf

 

[Paidiske]

Correct. I believe it's still used more in the diocese of Sydney, which has never authorised the '95 book for general use.

 

[The Liturgist]

H

A Prayer Book for Australia. I would be surprised if it's available online for free somewhere because of copyright issues etc. Interested folks should take care to purchase the red or blue version, not the green version, which is abbreviated and leaves much out.

This, however, you can find online for us. You can find specific liturgies for Ash Wednesday, Passion/Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil here: Lent, Holy Week and Easter | Anglican Church of Australia

Prayer Book for Australia: Full Edition Red : various : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

archive.org

This is freely accessible for up to 14 days for print-disabled people (like myself; due to the marfans affecting my hands it has become increasingly difficult and sometimes painful for me to use a printed book unfortunately; but lately most of my library has been uploaded, including the most valuable volumes.

The real tragedy is that some books I have, most notably, the R.E.G. Davies series on airline histories illustrated by noted aviation painter Mike Machat including Pan Am: An Airline and Its Aircraft, Aeroflot: An Airline and Its Aircraft, Eastern: An Airline and Its Aircraft, Lufthansa: An Airline and Its Aircraft, and my personal favorites, Delta: An Airline and Its Aircraft, which was given to me as a gift when I was 16 or 17, and TWA: An Airline and Its Aircraft, (the content of which partially overlap because TWA resulted from a forced temporary merger of Transcontinental Air Transport and Western Air Express, hence Transcontinental and Western Airlines, which Howard Hughes later changed to Trans World Airlines with his usual flair, and by the way QANTAS stands for Queensland And Northern Territories Aerial Services; at any rate Western after it regained its independence from TWA was later acquired by Delta when I was around ten) complete my collection; his book on Continental, along with his books on Saudia and Trans-Brasil, which are splendid, all illustrated by Mike Machat, I only have electronic copies of.

This is a problem along with the difficulty of reading these books because these books use special metallic inks (to illuminate the fuselage or parts thereof) which are ruined when scanned, so they look much better in print. And they are not the only examples. eBook technology also still has problems with resolution of raster-based scans - while it is true that the resolution of modern computers exceeds the theoretical resolution of offset presses, the problem is that offset presses generate patterns of dots rather than a grid of pixels, and perfectly replicating offset with no data loss will require much more resolution than we presently have or alternately a futuristic vector-based display system which can dynamically reproduce images without rasterization. This would also improve the fidelity of conventional analog video recordings such as the early seasons of Star Trek Voyager and Deep Space Nine, which look disappointing.

 

[The Liturgist]

Correct. I believe it's still used more in the diocese of Sydney, which has never authorised the '95 book for general use.

Interesting. Sydney also has a really stripped down prayer book of their own which is extremely minimal, and I do have a copy of it in ebook form and found it to be really surprisingly minimalistic. I also find it a bit shocking that their clergy at their cathedral don’t wear any kind of vestments; I would be more upset, since they have retained a traditional Boys Choir, except they don’t seem to rehearse them to the degree they used to in the late 1990s and early 2000s, or else they need better recording equipment for their livestreams (the boys’ choir at Christchurch in New Zealand is very good, and the Transitional Cathedral provides good acoustics).

 

[Paidiske]

Interesting. Sydney also has a really stripped down prayer book of their own which is extremely minimal, and I do have a copy of it in ebook form and found it to be really surprisingly minimalistic.

From what I understand, it's meant to supplement rather than supplant earlier resources.

I also find it a bit shocking that their clergy at their cathedral don’t wear any kind of vestments;

Sydney Anglicans have a theology of ministry with which I suspect you would have extremely little in common.

I have never set foot in their cathedral. But I would not be surprised to learn that they do not value a traditional choral liturgical expression.

 

[The Liturgist]

From what I understand, it's meant to supplement rather than supplant earlier resources

Indeed, that is the case.

There are Anglican parishes in the diocese where I suppose I could go; there are a few Anglo Catholic parishes such as, St. James King Street, since the prohibition on wearing “the vestment” apparently only bans chasubles, but not copes. Which is amusing, since the chasuble worn by Assyrian, Syriac Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic Christians is a cope, but the most important vestment is the stole, and Copts seldom wear a cope, but only the stole, due to heat (except for bishops), with the exception of monks, who wear unusual vestments which appear to be a special alb and hood over their regular alb and hood, which gives them an angelic appearance.

A Coptic monastic hood is worn incorrectly by the very controversial ethnically Assyrian bishop, Mar Mari Emanuel, who was the victim of an unfortunate knife attack but who does cause a negative image for Syriac Christians with his politicized preaching who was excommunicated by the Ancient Church of the East and now operates an “Assyrian Orthodox Church” which is an extremely frustrating name, since some canonical Syriac Orthodox parishes call themselves that (the Syriac Orthodox community seem divided on whether to embrace Assyrian Nationalism; I think those from Iraq tend to favor it whereas those from Syria, Turkey, Palestine and Lebanon are equally likely to embrace an Aramaean identity or a Syriac identity, since they are not among the seven tribes that speak or in the case of the Chaldeans formerly spoke the Neo-Assyrian Eastern Neo-Aramaic language but rather when they speak Aramaic, it tends to be a different dialect like Turoyo, and they even pronounce Classical Syriac Aramaic differently, with five vowells and “o” replacing “a” in words like Qurbono (instead of Qurbana) or Suroyo instead of Suraya except when A constitutes a consonant, such as in the words Aloho or Barekh.

I think I’d prefer Melbourne given my love of trams, and the system in Melbourne has in recent years gone from being the largest in the Southern Hemisphere (not that it had much competition alas) to the largest in the world, exceeding even massive European systems like those in Vienna, Budapest and St. Petersburg. And other formerly massive systems like Moscow and especially Calcutta have receded. In case anyone is interested, which probably no one is, but nonetheless, the largest traditional tramway network in the Americas is that in Toronto, followed by that in San Francisco, with Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans also having impressive systems which have some tourist appeal; likewise San Francisco has the largest trolleybus network, followed by Mexico City, Seattle and Vancouver, with small systems in Philadelphia and Dayton, Ohio.

Strangely the largest trolleybus network in Western Europe is the expansive system in Salzburg, and sadly Wellington and Boston recently closed their trolleybus system, which is a shame; trolleybuses are more environmentally friendly than battery powered buses (which were the reason for closing the Boston system, so that the garage could be rebuilt to handle battery charging, but they switched from an actual running electrical system to a hypothetical future one, and also in so doing have caused the students and other users of the Harvard Bus Tunnel to be exposed to increased levels of bus exhaust for the next few years until the battery powered busses arrive; the whole raison d’etre of their trolleybus system was to serve the Harvard Bus Tunnel without filling it with diesel exhaust, and the trolleybus network in Wellington was the only such system in the Southern Hemisphere outside of South America (which has a few, including one declared a national monument in Valparaiso de Chile) and also the only remaining right hand drive trolleybus system (they were once used in London and elsewhere in the UK). The main problem trolleybuses seem to experience is that people hate the overhead wires.

 

[Shane R]

I rode the incline in Pittsburgh up to Mount Washington 2 years ago. My kids thought it was great fun.

 

[The Liturgist]

I rode the incline in Pittsburgh up to Mount Washington 2 years ago. My kids thought it was great fun.

Splendid. There are actually two of them in Pittsburgh so if you are brought that way again there is another one less visited by tourists which can be travelled on.

Now in Dresden, they have a monorail funicular, which is a funicular (incline railway like the one in Pittsburgh hauled by a counter-balanced cable) that is also a suspended monorail, suspended from an overhead track like the famed Wuppertal Schwebebahn. There is also a vintage funicular with historic wooden bodied cars that runs next to it. Unfortunately, while I have been on the Wuppertal Schwebebahn and found it to be one of the most fantastically thrilling experiences of my life (and also the only reason for going to Wuppertal aside from the lovely people; i found them to be very nice, but the town lacks major tourist attractions aside from the Schwebebahn, which means “Swinging Railway” )literally “Swinging Way”), since the cars, being suspended from one rail, can swing, but unfortunately when I was last in Dresden in 2003, at which time the lovely Frauenkirche was under reconstruction but not finished, the Schwebahn funicular was also being restored.

But i can’t wait to go back, because from my perspective I can’t think of many earthly pleasures which could compare with that of swinging from a suspended monorail while being pulled up a beautiful hillside with a gorgeous view of the Elbe on a counterbalanced inclline like the famous inclines in Pittsburgh, Des Moines and Los Angeles (we have the famed Angel’s Flight and we used to have one other which closed during WWII due to lack of manpower, the Court Flight, both of which were very short and take you up about 300 feet from the bottom station to the top, but the Angel’s Flight is a much loved part of LA heritage along with the two restaurants that claimed to have invented the “french-dipped sandwich”, Cole’s and Phillipe’s, and the Grand Central Public Market and the Bradbury Building which are right by the current location of the Funicular.

I’ve actually been blessed to travel on a number of inclines which were operational, the most thrilling of which was the funicular in Bergen, Norway. Also since I last travelled on it, the funicular in Innsbruch has been rebuilt, so it once more crossses the Inn and reaches the city centre directly, which is a delight since the adorable tram one used to take to replace it has been replaced by some of the ugliest modern articulated trams in Europe. Some of the new articulated trams are beautiful, I have to admit that, even though I am biased against them, but in Innsbruck they selected a boxy design and an ugly red color which bear little resemblance to the historical appearnce of trams in that city.

Thus even a worldly pleasure as relatively innocent as riding an inclined railway can lead to discontentment.