In 1820 Dr. William White, Episcopal bishop of Pennsylvania, published Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. The work catalogued and narrated the history of the Episcopal Church from its advent in 1789. White enlarged the work in...
Miles Smith
Ash Wednesday in the Pre-Tractarian Church of England
In 1809, well before the Tractarian controversy began to rage in the Church of England, a Dr. Riddoch took it upon himself to explain why Anglicans retained Ash Wednesday services. He prefaced his work by mentioning five books that communicants should read to prepare...
The Second Great Awakening, “Evangelicalism,” and Jan 6.
In the aftermath of the January 6 riots at the United States Capitol a flurry of journalistic and scholarly pieces warning about Christian nationalism overtaking orthodox Christianity have been written. Recently some of the writers who issue these warnings have...
Free Church in a Free State: Philip Schaff on Disestablishment
In his 1888 Church and State in the United States Philip Schaff argued that what made Christianity in the American republic unique was that it was a “FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE, or a SELF-SUPPORTING AND SELF-GOVERNING CHRISTIANITY IN INDEPENDENT BUT FRIENDLY RELATION...
The Protestant Defence of Prejudice
Presbyterian minister John Grier Hibben published A Defence of Prejudice in 1911. As a professor at Princeton University he gained a reputation as an opponent of university president Woodrow Wilson. In 1910 Wilson became governor of New Jersey and in 1912 university...
Epiphany in America, 2022
*I've chosen this week to post in its entirety the Epiphany homily written by Rev. Alan R. Crippen II, rector of Holy Trinity Parish, Diocese of the Living Word, Anglican Church in North America, in Hillsdale Michigan, delivered on Sunday 9 January 2022. Let the words...
J.C. Ryle and Religion in America
In 1885, J.C. Ryle, then Bishop of Liverpool, wrote a series of Disestablishment Papers addressing calls by Liberal politicians and Non-Conformist ministers to disestablish and disendow the Church of England. William Gladstone, a liberal High Church Anglican,...
The (Anglican) Church Aggressive
By the 1850s significant theological and ecclesiastical battle lines had been drawn the between sympathizers of the Tractarian Movement and the Low Church party in the Episcopal Church in the United States. Although not every devotee of the Tractarians could qualify...
A Nineteenth Century Anglican Christmas in Egypt.
Edmund Winder mounted the steps of his modest pulpit on Christmas Day, 1854. Christmas Day fell on Monday but the congregation gathered anyway. A British bishop gave Winder special license to preach; he wasn’t a rector, or even a curate; he was just a simple chaplain....
Anglicanism, Church and State, and the American Republic.
In January 1861 Bishop Stephen Elliott spoke to an ecclesiastical council in Savannah, Georgia to address how he and his diocese would respond to the eminent secession of his state from the United States. The bulk of Elliott’s speech was an explanation of why he...