How to save the Church of England
The really fundamental issue is how the CofE can reverse that drift, how it can renew itself. This is harder to talk about, as it has little connection with the news cycle. The renewal of the Church depends on the quality of its worship culture, and the traditional forms seem unable to generate new excitement.
Its main historic attempts at renewal were rooted in worship culture. The Catholic revival of the mid-nineteenth century, known as the Oxford Movement, involved lots of ritual finery and theatrical pomp. It produced many good things, but the 'high' style could not really unite a Church rooted in Protestantism.
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Spectator
10 hours ago
- Spectator
The spiritual journey of St Augustine
When I lived in south London, my Algerian barber used to tell me that he came from Souk Ahras, 'the home town of Augustine'. I found it strange to hear a forbidding doctor of the early church described as a local boy made good, but Catherine Conybeare shows me that I should not have done. Algerians have remembered what the Church has often overlooked: that Augustine's thinking owes everything to his birth in 354 in what was then Roman North Africa. Although five million of his words survive, they come to us from the hands of medieval copyists who were more interested in setting out his doctrines than in recording his life. They cut up his sermons and letters, removing irrelevant or cryptic local allusions. Conybeare resurrects Augustine the African by sifting this heap of words for surviving references to people and places. Although wryly describing herself as a philologist, she is also a perceptive traveller, enlivening her textual work with vivid descriptions of Augustine's cities in their prime and as they survive today. These literary devices are hardly new. They have defined the study of late antiquity ever since the 1960s, when Peter Brown first composed a satisfying biography of Augustine of Hippo by reading his theology against the grain. They also bring diminishing returns. Augustine was too intent on spiritual realities to notice the material and urban world around him much. Even the most evocative descriptions of temples or amphitheatres he must have seen may not bring him much closer. Nor are his local observations always revelatory. It is true that his description of humans as caught in God's olive press must have resonated with African farmers who lived for the olive harvest, but the example seems as slight as an English vicar describing the Christian life as a difficult wicket or a game of two halves. The test of Conybeare's book is not whether it generates new information but whether it refreshens and deepens appreciation of Augustine's thought. Here it succeeds brilliantly, convincingly relating his greatest achievements to his sense of being caught between Rome and North Africa. Although he had viewed his education in Thagaste (now Souk Ahras) and Carthage as just a means of escape to Rome, the city disappointed him. It struck him as London might an ambitious young writer today – filled with politicians trading off past imperial glories and a public that prized cultural polish but refused to pay for it. He preferred Milan, the seat of the powerful bishop Ambrose. But even here he ended up mainly hanging around with people he knew from home. Conybeare neatly points out that what initiated the conversion to Christianity, described in his Confessions, was a conversation with his hometown friend Alypius and an African acquaintance about the impressive piety of Antony – an African monk. Augustine was always conscious of an inferiority when dealing with Romans, who made fun not of his race but of his tongue: he tended to mispronounce Latin. When they turned really nasty, they mocked him as a 'Punic pamphleteer' who gabbled in the native language of his country. When he returned to Africa, though, becoming a priest, then a bishop, in the coastal town of Hippo (now Annaba), he was impatient with its narrow mental horizons. His new largeness of view explains the cryptic and violent controversy he waged for decades against the Donatists, who ran a rival church in Africa. He had come back home as a proud member of a universal institution, writing that 'we are the good fragrance of Christ in every place'. Yet the Donatists said that a church's rites were only powerful if enacted by priests whose purity they had judged themselves – a principle that Augustine mocked as African self-satisfaction run mad. Caught between two places, he now had no real home. When posh refugees from Rome turned up in North Africa after Alaric sacked the city in 410, he began The City of God to quieten their unsettling whingeing about its collapse. Augustine did not care about the looting or destruction of buildings – a city was its people. But as his giant work slowly progressed, he shifted gear, coming to argue that all Christians should consider themselves peregrini. We now often render that word as the quaint 'pilgrims', but it began as a technical term for legalised aliens. Augustine's life on the outskirts of a disintegrating empire taught him that we are all citizens of nowhere. Italy ultimately claimed Augustine. Centuries after his death in 430, his body ended up in Pavia, under a pompous monument that makes no reference to Africa. Perhaps he would not have minded. The lesson of this book is also his teaching: even if our origins explain us, they should not limit who we become.
BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
Locals 'thrilled' by £66k lottery grant for Cornwall church spire
Campaigners fighting to save a historic Cornwall church spire are celebrating after winning a £66,000 90ft (27m) spire at St Gerrans Church on the Roseland Peninsula is in a bad state and there have been concerns it could collapse.A fundraising campaign was started to save the landmark, which was added to the existing church tower in the 15th or early 16th Century to provide sailors and fishermen with a daymark. It is visible for miles and is still featured on admiralty charts as a navigation award of £66,427 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund means building work can begin in autumn. Chair of the fundraising committee, James Leggate, said everyone was "thrilled". St Gerrans Church is a focal point and connection between the two villages of Gerrans and Portscatho, but the state of the spire has caused concern for stone exterior is so badly eroded water has to be collected in buckets whenever it rains, and there are concerns about the wooden framework that holds up the whole edifice. Once the state of the building became clear, a Save Our Spire fundraising campaign was started. After a packed public meeting to discuss ideas, the money started rolling in, but Mr Leggate said they still needed the grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to reach their target."We were never sure of getting the lottery funding but I have to say they've turned up trumps so we feel that we can celebrate now," he said."Everyone is thrilled, to me personally it's an iconic spire, I'm a sailor, we've all used the spire for sailing navigation points of view."It's also personal to me because I've worshipped here for more than 30 years."He added: "Everyone in the village, whether they have a faith, or no faith, or a particular faith that isn't the Church of England, it doesn't matter to them, we're all keen to get this repaired and preserved for the next generation and beyond."The plan is to use local firms for the job, and work to begin erecting scaffolding could start as early as September, with the restoration and repair work commencing in mid-October.
The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Scottish history is rich with kings but what about ordinary folk?
My debut novel, The Foreshore, is set on a fictionalised version of the islands in the first half of the 18th century, a critical era of Scottish history and one of both enlightenment and violent conflict. I had always been fascinated by this era, and writing historical fiction was always going to be the natural path I took as a novelist, but it was the marginalised people of St Kilda who lit the spark. Scottish history has always been rich with sagas of kings, queens and warriors, but what about those forgotten people who existed on the fringes of these narratives? There are no grand statues to these people, nor do they feature on any shortbread tins, but their presence still haunts the loneliest corners of this country. Author Samantha York's debut The Foreshore (Image: free) Beginning my journey as a published author, I devoured any records I could find of the populations of our farthest flung islands. Their way of life became the backdrop, and their folk tales and ballads became the soundtrack to every page I typed. Listening to the waulking songs of the women (Gaelic folk songs sung to the rhythmic beat of fulling cloth) and reading the early 18th-century records of the first Church missionaries on the island, made it possible to capture a fleeting murmur of lost voices. I learned of the hardships of remote island life and used them as a backdrop to the human tragedies within my story. For instance, in 1727, the year The Foreshore is set, an outbreak of smallpox reduced St Kilda's population by more than half. It is moments like this that are often lost to history: the tolls taken by poor, working people reduced to dry statistics. Even in those larger moments in Scottish history, true tragedies are often forgotten or romanticised. When we think of the Jacobite uprisings, which were somewhat dormant, but certainly simmering during the year in which The Foreshore is set, we often forget the shameful legacy of a corrupt class system, extreme religious divisions and the cultural displacement embroiled in them. The British Isles in their entirety and a large portion of continental Europe took part, but it was poor Highlanders who paid the price. Undervalued and bound by fealty to those who would eventually evict them in favour of more profitable livestock, they were dragged into a dynastic conflict which brought no benefit to them, purely to appease the lairds and landowners who owned their homes, and who tactically shifted from one side to another in an attempt to garner the most political favour. It is a tale of class exploitation as old as stories themselves, but one that is often overshadowed in favour of a more glorified interpretation of history. Fifty years after the final rebellion, Scotland's most famous bard would pen the protest poem, Ye Jacobites By Name, which includes the words, 'your doctrines I maun blame', and 'what makes heroic strife … to hunt a parent's life wi bluidy war?'; yet today, Burns' clear cry of outrage is often sung in a sentimentalised, pro-Jacobite context. To ground the lives of my characters, it was important for me to weave these ominous early signs of national upheaval into my narrative, to show how the lives of Scotland's oldest communities became blighted by events which often held no advantage to their own existence. Read more These two worlds are embodied in The Foreshore by the two main characters: aging islander and matriarch Flora McKinnon, and dogmatic outsider Reverend Thomas Murray. Flora's concerns reflect those of her fellow islanders. Grief and famine are natural occurrences in her community's daily struggles to survive and uphold their traditional way of life. In the novel, Reverend Murray's dedication to spreading new religious doctrines and ideas of a more 'enlightened' society, hold little sway over the lives of those he is sent to convert, reflecting the conflict between the culture of the Highlands and islands when confronted with the new ideologies which would pave the way for a modern, industrialised Scotland. The mystery at the heart of The Foreshore, the sudden appearance of a young girl on the island, without giving anything away, is itself grounded in historical narratives of a fear of outside influences and exploitation of the vulnerable. As a novelist, one can never claim to be a chronicler of history, merely someone who uses its influence as a canvas. To capture this inspiration for yourself, I would recommend seeking it out: next time you take a hike in our mountains, glens and coastlines, look out for those ruins of former black houses, those crooked drystone walls turned green with age, nature reclaiming what was lost by humans. See if you can catch a long-lost scent of peat smoke, the warmth of livestock breathing in the byre. Manifesting such stories keeps the voices of marginalised and working people alive. We may bring our own interpretations to their lives, but in conjuring their existence, I hope we can bring some honour to them. The Foreshore by Samantha York is out now on Salt Publishing at £10.99
