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As churches navigate the “new normal” of hybrid/online worship and public health measures, history offers some resources that can help guide our thinking. Anglicanism has, from its birth in the sixteenth century, adapted to such epidemic challenges as sweating sickness, plague, smallpox, cholera, and influenza. Anglican theology favors corporate prayer (including dispersed, synchronous prayer) and encourages the idea of the sacramentality of the word. At the same time, it resists the idea of virtual sacraments apart from a physical gathering and rejects a eucharist at which only the celebrant receives the consecrated bread and wine. History rarely offers straightforward lessons, but it suggests that Anglicanism has sufficient resources within itself to sustain itself through even a prolonged pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines "Communion, Covenant, and our Anglican Future," Archbishop Rowan Williams's essay on the 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, in which he addresses legislation concerning the ordination of partnered gay clergy and the provision of rites to bless same-sex unions. This article finds Williams's essay deficient on three points: its distortion of the arguments made by pro-inclusion advocates, its a historical vision of how change happens in the church, and its idiosyncratic version of Anglican polity, in which national churches (provinces) are artificial constructs and the diocese is the only organic unit of communion. While Williams is a theologian of great renown and ostensibly seeks the maintenance of unity, this essay's failings will likely increase fragmentation in the church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 2005 report of the Theology Committee of the House of Bishops entitled "Forming Christians: Reflections on Baptism, Confirmation and Christian Formation". The authors of the report proposed the introduction of an initiatory theology alien to the Prayer Book and neglect the history of baptism and confirmation in the West.

Interprets the notion of writer Eugene Y. Lowe concerning the genesis of the Protestant Episcopal Church and problem of balancing diversity in Anglican Communion in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Recognition of the theology of the church; Comments about the works of William White, an elected rector of the United Parish of Christ; Profusion of churches and sects.