A year in review
Looking back on 2024
As we approach the end of the year, I wanted to reflect on some of my writing over 2024.
Here at Draw Near With Faith, I published thirty-three pieces on the intersection of church history and the contemporary church. I continue to be so very thankful for all of you who read and share my work, especially those of you who support it financially. These were my my five most popular pieces of 2024 in Draw Near With Faith:
#5: Communion through the Confession of Christ Crucified: On Inclusive Orthodoxy. This piece was a response to a piece by Yale PhD student Ed Watson in which he argues that there are very significant dangers in using the creeds to norm Christian identity or belonging. In it, I argued that Scripture tells us that the sort of community to which Christians are called is one oriented around the confession of Jesus Christ crucified and risen — and so a community normed by the creeds.
#4: On ‘Is the Episcopal Church Anglican’. This piece was also written in response to something else: to this post by the Very Revd Kevin Martin in The Living Church’s Covenant blog and the social media brouhaha that followed. In it, I argue against a purely formal definition of Anglicanism in terms of institutional membership and agree with Dean Martin that in many TEC circles Anglican identity is indeed under threat, but suggest that he was incorrect to place the break at the time of the debates around LGBTQ inclusion.
#3: On General Convention resolutions and our priorities. This piece was written in the lead up to the Episcopal Church’s 81st General Convention, held in June 2024 in Louisville, Kentucky. Looking at the resolutions under consideration, I argued that the church intended to spend an inordinate amount of time on relatively fruitless resolutions and to largely neglect evangelism, discipleship, and congregational vitality — the exactly matters a church in crisis should focus upon. I will note now that I am thankful that the Episcopal Church’s new presiding bishop, Sean Rowe, seems committed to doing exactly this. I pray for his success!
#2: Against Communion Wafers. Here I defended one of the least-kept aspects of traditional Anglican liturgical practice, namely, the use of ordinary but good-quality bread for the celebration of Holy Communion rather than the wafers now ubiquitous in many parts of the Anglican world. I drew upon Calvin and Bullinger to argue that such bread is better than wafers to accomplish the analogy at the heart of the sacrament, in which the physical elements represent the gifts that God gives through them.
#1: On meaning what you say (in the liturgy). In my most-read piece of 2024, I wrote about one of the things that I find most baffling and frustrating about mainline Anglicanism: as I put it, “the existence of a taken-for-granted disconnect or even opposition between, on one hand, the theological views held by many of our clergy and leaders and preached from our pulpits and, on the other hand, the stated doctrines of our church expressed in our liturgy and endorsed by our canons.” This, I said, is functionally a form of dishonesty, even ecclesiastical gaslighting: often we do not really hold things that our official doctrine and the liturgy we so love to talk about clearly do. It continues to be one of my deepest frustrations with mainline Anglicanism (and indeed mainline Christianity more broadly). But I am very thankful to have found corners of the Anglican world where this is not the case, where clergy and people alike are committed to believing the things that our church holds — not, of course, ultimately only because our church holds them, but because they are in accordance with Holy Scripture.
Writing Elsewhere
I’ve also been very thankful to have been offered platforms beyond this Substack for writing aimed at a popular audience. I was glad to get to write three pieces for Plough, one of my favorite magazines. Last Lent, I wrote a brief piece about early Protestant debates about the observance of Lent and drew upon Richard Hooker in particular to defend the Lent fast. It was great fun for me to get to make an argument for the relevance of my beloved ‘most learned and judicious divine’!
I also wrote two longer-form pieces for Plough this year. “American Freedom and Christian Freedom” was a chance to meditate on one of my favorite texts, Martin Luther’s 1520 The Freedom of a Christian. In the piece, I argue that the role that the idea of freedom plays in the American national mythos means that American Christians run the risk of confusing American and Christian accounts of freedom. In its most extreme forms, the two can be so identified that the goal of Christianity is rendered in terms of liberal democracy. But in fact, I argue, properly Christian freedom is about our relationship to God, and is available to us in whatever polity we live. It is the true freedom of which the American dream of endless individual self-fashioning is a false image.
“Why We’re Failing to Pass on Christianity,” then, was a chance to reflect on some of the strategies that sixteenth century church leaders used to attempt to rechristianize Europe and think about what they might have to teach us today. I suggested that there is a sort of analogy between the state of the church in the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries: in both cases, what was holding people back from real engagement with Christ was not so much unfamiliarity with Christianity but overfamiliarity with a decayed version of it. For the reformers (and especially the capital-R Protestant Reformers) of the sixteenth century, Gospel-centered worship, Scripture reading, catechism, and church discipline were key means to lead people to a deeper life in Christ. I wrote (and believe) that such means may be the ones we need as well.
I also had the chance to write for the first time for The Anglican Way, the excellent magazine of the Prayer Book Society (USA). I wrote a brief piece for them on the prayer book commentary genre, a genre of exposition of and devotional reflection upon the text of the English liturgy that began in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England and exploded in popularity during the long eighteenth century.
They also published the paper that I gave at their 2024 conference, entitled “The ‘Decent and Godly Ordre of the Ancient Fathers’: Cranmer’s Daily Office, Scripture, and the Liturgical Movement.” In it, I traced the increasingly negative judgment of Liturgical Movement scholars regarding Cranmer’s orders for morning and evening prayer and showed how this judgment has affected recent Anglican revisions to daily prayer. I then argued that the Liturgical Movement critiques need not be granted. Rather, I sought to demonstrate Cranmer’s pattern for daily prayer remains a rich and valuable one today. In fact, this year for the first time I have begun praying morning and evening prayer using the Cranmerian (or, strictly speaking, Parkerian) lectionary. I had already been using the 30-day psalter for years, but adding the longer Scripture lessons has really deepened my experience of daily prayer.
Finally, I wrote “The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Protestant Episcopal Church,” in which I sought to debunk a long-established myth that the Articles of Religion were never important in the the history of post-Independence American Anglicanism. In fact, I argued that the Articles were adopted after long and serious conversation about the necessity of a doctrinal standard for the Episcopal Church, and that they were widely understood to be binding on ministers and to also define the church’s doctrine for the laity as well.
Other matters
Beyond this public writing, I’ve been kept busy this year in both my academic and ecclesiastical work. I taught a course, completed my PhD comprehensive exams, and am now moving onto the dissertation proposal. I’ve also continued presenting at conferences: on Perkins, Hooker, and the doctrine of repentance at the Renaissance Society of America conference; on John Boys at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference. I’ve also had a few academic pieces come out: a chapter comparing Hooker and Calvin’s account of the legislative power of the church in Richard Hooker and the Christian Virtues and a review of Philip Hobday’s recent book on Richard Hooker for the Journal of Anglican Studies.
I also began serving at a new church at the very end of 2023 and beginning of 2024. St. George’s Anglican, Montreal has been a great home for me; I am blessed to serve under a wonderful rector and with a lovely congregation. Something that has been particularly fun is a Christian formation class that I’ve developed for the congregation. Called ‘A Great Cloud of Witnesses,’ it is an introduction to church history and the history of theology. Each time, we focus on a different figure (or group of figures); I provide a brief introduction and then we read a few selections by or about the person together and discuss them. It has been such a privilege to see the attendees spend time getting to know some of their fellow Christians across space and time. The Cappadocians, Hildegard, and Bonaventure were particular hits!
At present, my wife Sarah and I are about halfway through a year of research in Europe. It is one of the great joys of PhD studies to have the opportunity to travel so much for work, and we are trying to make the most of it. We spent the summer in Germany at the summer course run by the Wittenberg Center for Reformation Studies studying the relationship between the Wittenberg and English reformations. We are now wrapping up a term in Edinburgh where Sarah was a visiting student at New College, University of Edinburgh. We will be heading to England for some archival work early in 2025, and then will be spending the bulk of the spring in Zurich where I’ll be a visiting student at the Institute for Reformation Studies at the University of Zurich. If you find yourself in the neighborhood, give us a shout!
Let me conclude with another word of thanks. It is a privilege, and not one I take lightly, to have my writing read. I still pinch myself sometimes to think that people are actually interested in reading what I have to say — even about such less-than-mainstream topics as the Berner Synodus of 1532! I hope that you have been edified in one way or another by my writings over the last year, and that you’ll continue to be part of the conversation here in the coming year. Thank you again, and best wishes for 2025!