Reforming tradition: Anglican spirited continuity

For Anglicans, tradition entails continuity with a past mediated into present circumstances in ways that ever reshape understandings of God’s work in the world. Tradition is a concept with wide-ranging connotations that have changed over Anglican history. This essay highlights poignant moments that especially shaped contemporary Anglican notions of tradition, such as the medieval Conciliar Movement, the contributions of Richard Hooker, the Oxford Movement, and twentieth century ecumenism. Today Anglicanism’s global identity is reshaping its understandings of tradition, as the Holy Spirit reveals an ever wider and more intercultural picture of Christ. Through the process of handing on faith, our tradition reforms and grows.

Decadent Rituals

Anglo-Catholicism, the nineteenth-century movement within the Church of England that sought to reassert many of the forms and rituals of Roman Catholicism, exerted a significant shaping influence upon the religious aesthetics of English decadent writing. While the space that Anglo-Catholicism offered for a decadent performance of sexual difference has been examined before, this article offers a complementary argument, emphasizing a strand within decadence arising from the role of personality in reconceptualizing, and possibly distorting, religious orthodoxy. The first part provides a history of the discourse of degeneracy around the early Oxford Movement and the mediation of Anglo-Catholic ideas into English decadence through the writings of Walter Pater. It then discusses the ways in which decadent writing in England explored a distorting excess of personality through the aesthetics of religious ritual and asceticism.

William Gore: A Puseyite in Parramatta

This article examines the way one nineteenth-century clergyman of the Church of England in Australia, William Gore, was influenced by the Oxford Movement. Gore was the incumbent of the parish of All Saints Church, North Parramatta in Sydney. He implemented liturgical practices valued by the Oxford Movement, including wearing a surplice to preach rather than a Geneva gown, reading the Offertory sentences in the service of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer, celebrating the Holy Communion on the saints days set in the Prayer Book and placing a cross on the holy table. He was supported by his bishop, William Grant Broughton. The reaction from parishioners was surprise, shock and opposition and he was branded as a ‘Puseyite’. This article uses local primary material, including press reports of parish meetings, to describe the reactions of parishioners in parish meetings against Gore’s liturgical uses. Gore’s activities are assessed as an important early example of the Oxford Movement’s influence in the Church of England in Australia. Gore’s practices, discussed in the public domain, provide evidence that the Oxford Movement was beginning to transform the nineteenth-century liturgical worship of the Church of England in Australia.

‘An Amazing Want of Christianity’: Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and John Henry Newman’s Tense Relationship

This paper will examine the relationship between Samuel Wilberforce and John Henry Newman. The two priests had a common cause in their wish to see the Church of England rediscover its Catholic identity – which led them to work alongside one another at the beginning of the Oxford Movement – but quickly drifted apart because of their strong divergences on the nature of the Church and the place of Tradition, as well as Samuel Wilberforce’s strong hostility to Rome. The paper also examines the place of Samuel Wilberforce’s young brother in this relationship.

The Oxford Movement, Asceticism, and Sexual Desire

The chapter is set in the context of the history of the denominational evolution of monasticism and sainthood within Victorian Catholicism in both its Roman and Anglican forms. It explores, by means of a series of key examples, the battle between the proponents and opponents of medieval and contemporary monasticism and sainthood. The aim of this is to explain the range of views towards religious asceticism within Victorian society and their relationship to contemporary constructions of gender and forms of sexual desire. Examples of key figures, notably John Henry Newman, Charles Kingsley, and Joseph Leycester Lyne, provide instances of some of the ways in which sexual desire became associated with Catholic forms of devotion which, on the face of it, championed celibacy and resistance to fleshly desires.