For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead. It offers its sacraments to a population that lives without rites of passage, and which regards the National Health Service rather than the National Church as its true spiritual guardian. Here, Scruton argues that the Anglican Church is the forlorn trustee of an architectural and artistic inheritance that remains one of the treasures of European civilization. He contends that it is a still point in the centre of English culture and that its defining texts, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are the sources from which much of our national identity derives. At once an elegy to a vanishing world and a clarion call to recognize Anglicanism's continuing relevance, Our Church is a graceful and persuasive book.

The first systematic study of the financing and management of parish church construction in England in the Middle Ages.

Traces the global reach & influence of the Gothic Revival throughout Britain's empire. Focusing on religious buildings, this book examines the reinvigoration of the colonial & missionary agenda of the Church of England & its relationship with the rise of Anglian ecclesiology.

Were mid-Tudor evangelicals roaring lions or meek lambs? Did they struggle with a minority complex, or were they comfortable with their position of political ascendancy under Edward VI? How did their theological blueprint of the ‘True Church’ fit their temporal realities? By relocating the Book of Common Prayer at the centre of the English Reformation, Stephen Tong gives new significance to two underacknowledged drivers of reform: ecclesiology and liturgy. Edwardian reformers caused a sensation in England by engaging with these questions, which spilled over into Ireland, and continued to cast a shadow over subsequent generations of the English Protestants.

Offers liturgical material for the journey of each individual through life. For each key element of this journey (birth, marriage, healing, death), it provides both material for key ‘public’ events and resources for ‘private’ pastoral care.

The title of this book gives a general idea of its subject matter--a sideline of the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival in art and literature. This took the form among High Church Anglicans, not only of restoring parish churches and cathedrals, but also founding brotherhoods on supposedly medieval lines. "Olde Worlde" externals, such as flowing black robes, shaven heads, sandals and rosary beads, helped to make young men forget that they were living in the midst of an industrial revolution. To a large extent, the whole business of building up monastic waste places was a form of escapism. As the reader will discover, the result was often as unreal as the twilight world pictured by Alfred Tennyson in his series of connected poems entitled Idylls of the King, which appeared at intervals between 1842 and 1885. The earlier "monkeries," with their dim religious light and Gothic gloom described in these pages, were contemporary with Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series of novels. Anson has dealt already with the revival of the religious life for men and women within the Anglican Communion in The Benedictines of Caldey (1940), The Call of the Cloister (1955), and Abbot Extraordinary (1958). In his latest book, he concentrates on Father Ignatius of Jesus, Abbot Aelred Carlyle, and Father Hopkins, each of whom tried to restore Benedictine monastic life in the post-Reformation Church of England. Much new material has been discovered in recent years that debunks more than one lovely legend. The octogenarian author has not been afraid to disclose many facts which some readers may feel ought to have been kept hidden, for they are not exactly edifying. The entire book might be summed up in Lord Byron's words: "'Tis strange--but true; for truth is always stranger than fiction."