Month: February 2006

In the ancient rite of baptism the catechumen (after many prayers of exorcism and the anointing with the oil of exorcism) spits to the West, renounces Satan, and turns to the East where the ‘Son of righteousness’ shines. In our world, like Christ on the mountain, we are tempted to have ‘all the kingdoms of […]

Ash Wednesday is coming very soon. I am wrestling with what my ‘rule’ will be for Lent. I am attracted to a ‘desert’ theme but I haven’t worked out the details. The Book of Common Prayer has a great description of Lent: Dear People of God: The first Christians observed with greatdevotion the days of […]

I see survey after survey of church-going folks who just don’t know their Bibles. I know more and more liturgical church-going folks who not only don’t know their Bibles, they don’t know their Tradition either. I gravitate towards material that some consider obscure (ancient monasticism and the third century Christian catechumenate) because the ancients seemed […]

What brings renewal to the church? There is no doubt that we are experiencing decline in the church and have been since the end of the 1960s. The membership of the Episcopal Church is supposedly over 2 million, but the people that actually show up on a given Sunday is under 800,000. Contrast that with […]