Reappraising the Old High Churchmen

[Paidiske]

This was an interesting read. While this isn't necessarily the part of Anglicanism I most easily identify with, there's some food for thought here about what it might offer us today.

"High Church constitutionalism insists that we are shaped through participation, not agreement alone. Institutions bind us in three ways.

• First, they restrain—slowing us down, frustrating immediate desire, and requiring submission to procedures and norms.
• Second, they connect—placing us alongside people we did not choose, across differences of class, temperament, and belief.
• Third, they teach—cultivating habits of disagreement, reform, and authority over time through shared practice."
  
  
  

  Reappraising the Old High Churchmen

  Can they offer wisdom for our age of populism and polarisation?

  markclavier.substack.com

 

[Shane R]

That's interesting reading. Knowing something of the author, who came up in the US Continuing Movement and whose father was one of the more polarizing bishops of the early years of said movement, I appreciated his introductory comments about how he probably would not have appreciated his book when it was new. But he's been gone a while now and has had time to decompress and breath and that is good.

Peter Robinson, presiding bishop of the UECNA, also blogs extensively about the Olde High Churchmen. I think he considers himself one in spirit. I'm not claiming to be especially informed of that strand of Anglicanism but it seems to have more to offer than the rabid Anglo-Catholicism that most of the Continuum latched on to.

 

[Paidiske]

I don't know about more to offer? Maybe it's a more moderate, more balanced approach (or so it seems to me, product of a fairly broad tent of an Australian diocese).