A Feast of Anglican Spirituality [Paperback]

Robert Backhouse (Compiler)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2000

An anthology of the best of Anglican spiritual writings. Subjects include the Bible, sacraments and prayer in Anglican worship, the Christian year, Anglican doctrine, pastoral concerns, and the calling of the church in the world.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Canterbury Press Norwich (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1853111953
• ISBN-13: 978-1853111952
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,658,748 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Feast of Mediocrity, August 17, 2000

By 

Erica "Erica" (Washington State) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Feast of Anglican Spirituality (Paperback)

As a lover of anthologies, and as an Anglican myself, I was excited by this publication. Stuff like this sits on my nightstand for delicious evening perusal. But this collection of poems, maxims, and the odd sermon excerpt was disappointing. It's long on Rossetti and short on meaty passages of any sort.

The book is roughly set up along the organizational lines of the Book of Common Prayer (a smallish liturgical year reading selection) and the Anglican Hymnal (The Christian Life)and their are many gems here, including a collect by Jonathan Swift that is beautiful. But my irritation rose when I found that the compiler, Robert Backhouse, had sliced the most muscular verse out of Emily Brontė's most famous poem, "No Coward Soul is Mine". You know, the verse that starts, "Vain are the thousand other creeds of men, unutterably vain..." Given that this is an Anglican anthology, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

I'd love to own an intensive Anglican reader, filled with passionate entries of the sort that make me proud to be an Anglican. Someday I may. This one, although sweet, is a bit too fluffy and twee for me.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Compilation of Anglican Texts, December 10, 2007

By 

Chip Webb (Fairfax Station, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Feast of Anglican Spirituality (Paperback)

Robert Backhouse has done a fine job compiling the texts contained in A Feast of Anglican Spirituality. The subjects covered are, in order, the roots of Anglican spirituality, the shaping of Anglican identity, the Church, Anglican doctrine,the Christian year, the Christian life, and pastoral matters. The strongest section is that on Anglican identity, though all sections contain excellent, thought-provoking passages.

The faults herein are relatively minor. Some readers may quibble with choices of texts, but it's hard to critique Backhouse on that matter when the vast majority of what's in here is very, very good. Curiously, Backhouse uses several texts more than once, suggesting that some additional editing would have been of benefit. An index by author also would have been helpful and greatly appreciated.

Backhouse succeeds in presenting a more-or-less neutral point of view. The only section that may reveal the author's own background is "Conversion Stories" in chapter 6; all of the accounts are of evangelicals. (Other texts, however, seem to go against an evangelical understanding.)

I've used this text several times in teaching a class on Anglicanism at my parish. I highly recommend it in that context, and students seem to appreciate it.

4.0 out of 5 stars A worthy feast, July 22, 2004

By 

FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Feast of Anglican Spirituality (Paperback)

As Backhouse states in his introduction, this anthology draws on a wide range of material for the subject of Anglican spirituality - essays, sermons, poems, hymn texts, articles, books; one of the echoes that resonates most strongly is the Book of Common Prayer, which is the backbone of all things Anglican, but there is a rich diversity of material here. Another interesting detail to note is the number of non-Anglicans included here, from Augustine of Hippo (from before there was an Anglican church) to John Henry Newman (who left the Anglican fold for Roman Catholicism), works are included here not because their origin is Anglican, but because they have been influential in the over Anglican ethos, the spirituality.

Some authors included here are theologians (leaving aside the idea that all Christians are theologians) - from those in the past, such as Richard Hooker, F.D. Maurice, and the like, to more modern theologians such as William Temple and John Macquarrie. Authors such as C.S. Lewis and S.T. Coleridge give a wider range, and modern 'spirituality' writers such as Evelyn Underhill help flesh out the overall sense of Anglicanism.

There are two primary, yet somewhat contradictory, ways in which texts are used here - passages that show similarities across different times, and passages that show the diversity of opinion and understanding that exists within the overall Anglican umbrella. According to William Wolf (quoted in the text, himself an author of various works on Anglicanism), the spirit of the Anglican church is biblical, liturgical and pastoral; Anglicanism is said to rest on the three-fold foundation of scripture, tradition and reason. These are embodied in the passages selected by Backhouse. Similarly, Anglicanism is incarnational and sacramental, and that is reflected in the writings here.

This is not a theology text, although there is a section on Anglican doctrine - what Anglicans believe about God, the Trinity, the Church, and so forth. Other sections of the text concentrate on issues like the Church, the liturgical seasons of the year, the Christian life, and basic pastoral issues. Quoting William Temple in his section on 'The Shaping of Anglican Identity', he includes the description of the Anglican church as having a special character (often described as the via media, the middle way) of preserving the best of catholic Christianity while remaining open to the immediacy of approach to God typified by evangelical Christians, and a freedom of intellectual inquiry. Backhouse is similarly honest in including passages that aren't lock-step supportive of things in the present regime, such as the quote from Stephen Neil, who comments that it is 'unfortunate' that the church has retained medieval ideas of property, jurisdiction and ecclesiastical administration.

This is not a systematic text, nor a comprehensive text, but Backhouse freely admits that this was not his intention. It is a sampler, a good collection of texts that show a cross-section of spiritual sensibility.