The Vowed Life

Description

This landmark volume from an influential group of Anglican theologians explores baptism as the foundation for living out all forms of Christian vocation – in confirmation, marriage, ordination, and religious life. It offers theological and pastoral perspectives on the centrality and significance of baptism for a Church that has perhaps lost a sense of the radical commitment that baptism calls for. It explores the meaning of vows today as promise, covenant, oath, Rule and explores the difference between religious and secular vows. It considers the nature of the vows under which all Christians live, and the particular vows such as marriage and ordination embraced by some. Together, these perceptive reflections offer a theological and pastoral resource for activating every Christian’s the sense of call and response whatever their mode of life.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Monasticism
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786221919
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Vowed Life
Other books from the Littlemore Group

Praying for England: Priestly Presence in Contemporary Culture , edited by Samuel Wells and Sarah Coakley.

Fear and Friendship: Anglicans Engaging with Islam , edited by Frances Ward and Sarah Coakley.

For God’s Sake: Re-Imagining Priesthood and Prayer in a Changing Church , edited by Jessica Martin and Sarah Coakley.

Holy Attention: Preaching in Today’s Church , edited by Frances Ward and Richard Sudworth.




The Vowed Life
The Promise and Demand of Baptism
Edited by
Sarah Coakley and Matthew Bullimore






© The Editors and Contributors 2023
First published in 2023 by the Canterbury Press Norwich
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www.canterburypress.co.uk
Canterbury Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Canterbury Press.
Acknowledgement is made for permission to use quotations from T. S. Eliot, 1942, ‘Little Gidding’, in Four Quartets , London: Faber and Faber.
The Authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Authors of this Work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
978-1-78622-189-64
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd



Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction: The Vowed Life – Its Demand and Promise
Sarah Coakley and Matthew Bullimore
Part I: Re-Thinking Anglican Vows: The Integrity of Vows in the Christian Life
1. The Revival of the Religious Life in the Church of England: How Vows Became Newly Contentious in a Victorian Culture of Convention
Petà Dunstan
2. ‘Name this child’: Speech, Identity and Life-long Commitment in Baptismal Vows
Joel Love
3. The Role of Confirmation in the Vowed Life: A Reassessment
Alex Hughes
4. Marriage: Vowing to Take Time
Matthew Bullimore
5. Clerical Vows: The ‘Wild Choice’ of Ordination
Jessica Martin
6. Religious Vows: ‘The Liberty to Bind’
Sr Judith, SLG
Part II: Contemporary Anglican Reflections on the ‘Vowed Life’ of Religious Community
7. Religious Vows in the Church of England, Then and Now
Petà Dunstan
8. Journeying into New Monasticism
Ben Edson
9. ‘Some Peculiar Genius’: The ‘Intentional Communities’ of Little Gidding
Frances Ward
10. Evangelical Monasticism: A Not-So-Strange Sympathy
Richard Sudworth
11. Choosing to be Beholden
Victoria Johnson

Two Poems
Rachel Mann , with introduction by Edmund Newey

Afterword: The Vowed Life
Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

A Note on the Littlemore Group and Its Conferences




List of Contributors
The Revd Dr Matthew Bullimore is Chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and was formerly Vicar of Royston, St John the Baptist, and Felkirk, St Peter.
The Revd Professor Sarah Coakley served as part-time curate in the parish of St Mary and St Nicholas, Littlemore, from 2000 to 2009, during which time (2005) the ‘Littlemore Group’ was founded. More recently she has been an honorary canon at Ely Cathedral, and (in the United States) an assisting priest and theologian-in-residence at the parish of the Ascension and St Agnes, Washington DC. In her academic life as a theologian and philosopher of religion she was formerly Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School (1995–2007), and Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge (2007–18).
Dr Petà Dunstan is a Fellow of St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, and was for 30 years the Librarian of the Faculty of Divinity at the University. She is a historian writing on Anglican Religious life and serves on the Advisory Council for Religious Communities. She has taught on the inter-novitiate course for communities in the UK since its inception in 2012, as well as being a trustee for and advisor to several communities. She is also the founder and editor of the Anglican Religious Life Year Book (now online) which links Anglican communities throughout the world.
The Revd Dr Ben Edson is Director of St Peter’s House, the Chaplaincy to the Universities of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music.
The Ven. Dr Alex Hughes is Archdeacon of Cambridge, and was formerly Vicar of Southsea, St Luke and St Peter.
The Revd Dr Victoria Johnson is Canon Precentor, York Minster, and was formerly Residentiary Canon, Ely Cathedral; earlier she had been Priest-in-Charge of Flixton, St Michael.
Sr Judith, SLG is a member of the Community of the Sisters of the Love of God, Fairacres, Oxford.
The Revd Dr Joel Love is Vicar of Rochester, St Peter & St Margaret, and Priest Vicar, Rochester Cathedral.
The Revd Dr Rachel Mann is Area Dean of Bury & Rossendale, and was formerly Rector of Burnage, St Nicholas.
The Revd Dr Jessica Martin is Residentiary Canon, Ely Cathedral. She was previously Priest-in-Charge of Duxford, St Peter, of Hinxton, St Mary & St John, of Ickleton, St Mary Magdalene, of Whittlesford, St Mary and St Andrew, and of Pampisford, St John the Baptist.
The Revd Dr Edmund Newey is Rector of Rugby, St Andrew, and was formerly Sub-Dean of Oxford, Christ Church.
The Revd Dr Richard Sudworth is Secretary for Inter Religious Affairs to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was formerly Priest-in-Charge of Sparkbrook, Christ Church.
The Revd Dr Frances Ward is Priest-in Charge of Workington, St John, and of Workington, St Michael, and was formerly Chair of the Little Gidding Trust, 2012–19. She is Dean Emerita of St Edmundsbury Cathedral.
The Most Revd Justin Welby is Archbishop of Canterbury.



Introduction: The Vowed Life – Its Demand and Promise
SARAH COAKLEY AND MATTHEW BULLIMORE
‘Simply having to live together with people you wouldn’t have chosen yourself, and to pray together three times a day – this gives you a whole new sense of what Christian “community” is, and could be.’

‘You know something is happening to you but you can’t adequately describe it – it’s a going deeper, a new discovery of what “Church” could be and mean for others.’
So spoke two of the young members of the St Anselm Community at Lambeth Palace, when we visited and interviewed them a while ago. As of this year (2023), that new experiment in monastic living is into its eighth annual cohort, and has somehow survived – though not without difficulty – the multiple challenges of the global pandemic. It brings young ecumenical Christians (aged 20–35) from across the world into a year’s experimental life together, a life of prayer and service and community-building which leaves those who stay with it seemingly strangely changed in their perspective on the world and the Church. It was the brain-child of the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, for whom the conviction that a new Religious community at Lambeth was urgently needed was a missional leitmotif from the start of his arch-episcopate: ‘There has never been a renewal of the Church without a renewal of prayer and the religious life’, as he put it. 1 And so he made it happen at Lambeth itself.
But why this new and contemporary interest in a short-term (and frankly, somewhat artificially confected) monastic life for young people, precisely at the moment when the more stringent demands of the ‘old’ monasticism, with its demanding life-long vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, seem to offend and even repel some of our deepest cultural mores? As recent experiments in ‘new monasticism’ have serially taken flight, and an interest in spirituality, guided retreats, and tertiary commitments to Religious life has escalated, only a few of the classic Anglican Religious communities in the United Kingdom have re-burgeoned and attracted younger members, while others are visibly dying or have necessarily re-configured into new shapes of witness.
It is this core paradox about vowed commitment that this book seeks to reflect upon, first and foremost, and to illumine spiritually and theologically. But we also seek to look at the wider implications of this paradox for the Church more generally and for its other vows and promises. Why are the evident demands of monastic vows today simultaneously so strangely alluring to many, and yet also equally repellent or perplexing to others, in a culture of supposed ongoing secularization, seeming ‘erotic’ carelessness, and great existential fearfulness for the future? What is the meaning of any vow in a religious context, and how can it both bind and free the one who makes it? 2 More fundamentally, how do the vows made in the sacrament of baptism (the anchor for any further vows thereafter in a Christian’s life) relate to, and unfold into, the vows and commitments of the sacrament of confirmation (if it is undergone at all, these days), and then – rather differently – into the specific, and we might say vocationally intensified , vows of marriage, ordination, or the Religious life?
The Littlemore Group (a group of scholar-priests and Religious deeply committed to the parochial life of