Category The Parish Paper

Vol. 57 No. 49 | All Saints’ Sunday (Trinity 22) | November 1, 2026 Identity matters. Unless we know who or what we are, we cannot make rational choices about what to do. Our choices will be determined instead by passing impulses or social pressures. Contemporary culture locates identity in the autonomous self, while also (paradoxically)…

Vol. 57 No. 48 | The Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity | October 25, 2026 Last week Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle showed us how God brings our own individual gifts to perfection by bringing us into communion with others. C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce approaches the same truth from another direction. In a parable that has…

Vol. 57 No. 47 | The Feast of St. Luke (Trinity 20) | October 18, 2026 “Pie in the sky, by and by, when you die”: the unbeliever’s taunt may carry more weight than we care to admit. By and large, Christians are not very heavenly minded. Heaven is vaguely imagined as the “place” we go…

Vol. 57 No. 46 | The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity | October 11, 2026 The reports of the attack aboard flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv last week were riveting. Two hours into the flight, the Omani-Syrian co-pilot Hamam al-Hammami attacked Captain Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, with the emergency crash axe kept in the…

Vol. 57 No. 45 | Michaelmas Sunday (Trinity 18) | October 4, 2026 Some years ago, I attended Sunday worship with some friends at an Anglican church in the Caribbean. The service was… leisurely. Just when I thought we were almost finished, there was a second collection, or the children in the village school came up…

Vol. 57 No. 44 | The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity | September 27, 2026 Savannah would hardly be Savannah without its trees. The great canopy of live oaks spreading above our streets and squares seems almost timeless. Yet much of the canopy we now inherit is the result of deliberate choices made more than a century…

Vol. 57 No. 43 | The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity | September 20, 2026 This reflection is based on the first of three Forums on the Anglican Future, concerning Memory. The next Forum is Sunday, October 25th, on Identity. When we are talking about the Anglican future, why begin by thinking about the past? Why does…

Vol. 57 No. 42 | The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity | September 13, 2026 When the Gospel Goes Missing Some people on their vacations go wine-tasting, but I go sermon-tasting. It is a rare opportunity for me to hear what other preachers are teaching their people. What are they saying is wrong with the world? How…

Vol. 57 No. 41 | The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity | September 6, 2026 The Last Old Book Years ago, in my final year at seminary, I was in the library when another seminarian returned a book of assigned readings. It was Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a monument of English prose and Anglican theology.…

Vol. 57 No. 40  The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity  August 30, 2026 For the Edifying of the Body The Prayer Book of 1552 explains that Confirmation should be administered “to the more edifying” of those who receive it, appealing explicitly to St Paul’s doctrine that everything in the Church should be done for its edification (1…

Vol. 57 No. 39  The Twelfth Sunday after Trinity   August 23, 2026 Strengthened for the Fight The classical Prayer Book’s Confirmation prayer asks for the baptized to be strengthened by the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit—wisdom and understanding, counsel and strength, knowledge and godliness, and holy fear. But if Baptism has already given regeneration, forgiveness, why…