From theEditor’s Desk

Dear readers,

As our days wane and the air turns chill, the calendar year draws to its close and the church year begins, with Advent. This focus on repentance jars with the commercial advertising surrounding us this time of the year. 'Every call to worship,' Eugene Peterson said, 'is a call into the Real World'; the same is true of Advent, the entryway of the church year.

'I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am' (Take & Read, p. 28).

This Advent Issue of The Anglican Way reflects on the Prayer Book as the best means for keeping us grounded in this reality; its patterns and rhythms renew our minds, proclaiming that 'God is sovereign and Christ is savior.'

The Prayer Book is the remedy for our amnesia, as PBS President, the Rev'd Gavin Dunbar, shows in the first article. While many assume the old Prayer Book couldn't possibly be used in our modern age, my own contribution — a paper given at last year's Anglican Way Conference — argues quite the opposite. Finally, we reprint a sermon, edited and introduced by Richard Mammana, given at St John's Church in Savannah in 1860 by the Rev'd George Henry Clark (the Rev'd Dunbar's predecessor in the rectorship) on the advantages of the Prayer Book over other forms for ordering public worship.

In our 'Great Anglican Profile' series, the Rev'd Matthew Rucker discusses Sir Edwyn Clement Hoskyns, sometime Dean of Corpus Christi College Cambridge. Best known today as the English translator of Karl Barth's commentary on Romans, his biblical scholarship sheds light on Cranmer's design for the Book of Common Prayer. In the 'Primer' series, I offer an analysis of W. B. Yeats's 'Second Coming' as an Advent poem. Rounding out this issue, the Rev'd Dunbar explains what the Prayer Book Catechism teaches about God the Father in the next installment, I Am His.