In a few days I will be travelling to Savannah, Georgia, where I have been invited to give a paper at a conference sponsored by the Prayer Book Society of the USA and the Elliott House of Studies, February 16–18, 2017:

Anglicanism: Catholic and Reformed; Revisiting the Reformation Legacy, 1517–2017

A fuller explanation of the purpose and themes of the conference is here. There is also a draft programme of sessions available, but I gather that there have been a few adjustments. I myself am now tentatively scheduled to speak on Friday, February 17, at 1:45pm.

I plan to speak on the Book of Common Prayer as a “catholic” liturgy, arguing that an irreducible (even aggressive) Swiss Protestantism discerned in the book by scholars ever since Bishop and Gasquet’s ground-breaking book Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer isn’t the only, or indeed the obvious, explanation of Cranmer’s work. Rather, a pre-Reformation Erasmian philosophia Christi, giving priority to the simple Gospel message of scripture, found expression in a re-presentation of the Catholic tradition limited by a “biblical compass.”

This made possible the characteristic (and sometimes incoherent) “comprehensiveness” of Anglicanism. But once the continuity of the Prayer Book with Catholic tradition is recognized, the interpretation of the book will depend absolutely on an”ecclesial” reading of Scripture within that tradition. The Prayer Book says no more and no less about worship and sacraments than what scripture says. But scripture, as interpreted by the Church’s collective mind, says a great deal about these things indeed!

UPDATE: An audio recording of my paper at this conference can now be heard here: https://anglicanway.org/2017/05/22/audio-drs-joan-odonovan-george-westhaver-jesse-billet-pbs-conference-2017/

On January 15, 2016, I had the honour of delivering the inaugural Robert Crouse Memorial Lecture in the chapel of the University of King’s College, Halifax. (Gallery of photos.) I never met Fr. Crouse, but his writings have been a great help and inspiration to me in my own work and faith. It was a privilege to spend a few days in the community that was so profoundly shaped by his thought and example.

The title of my lecture was “A Spirituality of the Word: The Medieval Roots of Traditional Anglican Worship.” In it, I took issue with the consensus of modern liturgical scholarship that it was a “Reformation Fallacy” (as Robert F. Taft dubbed it), undreamt of before Martin Luther, to put the reading of scripture at the centre of the Divine Office. I argued that this characteristically monastic mode of prayer was integral to English liturgical spirituality for a thousand years before the Reformation, and that one of the Reformation’s aims was to make it possible for the laity to participate in it fully.

I suggested that the fundamental turning point was in the fourth and fifth centuries, when the psalter in particular ceased to be treated as readings to be listened to, and was transformed into a collection of prayers to be recited as one’s own. (This had a significant musical impact: a whole choir of monks chanting the psalms together as prayer needed a much simpler, more regimented singing style than had been used by solo cantor-lectors. I sang some examples to illustrate the difference.)

In this new understanding, reciting the words of scripture became the principal means both to learn how to pray, and also to be transformed into the kind of person who can pray these words—an insight later picked up by Richard Hooker in his defence of the Book of Common Prayer. As someone suggested to me afterwards, praying the scriptures in the Divine Office “offers all that is needed by the human soul for its ongoing conversion, sanctification, and ultimate deification.”

Apart from such serious considerations, it was great fun to go over some of the complaints by medieval bishops and preachers about clerical misbehaviour during the liturgy. The canons of Exeter in the fourteenth century seem to have been especially incorrigible!

I hope that the text of the lecture will be published in due course.

[UPDATE: A lightly revised and expanded version of my lecture has now appeared in Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 27, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 157–79. Google Preview (alas, not including my article) here.]