{"id":668,"date":"2022-05-05T16:54:29","date_gmt":"2022-05-05T16:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theanglicanway.beckandstone.com\/?p=668"},"modified":"2022-08-18T21:25:32","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T21:25:32","slug":"fr-ralston-elizabeth-i-mae-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/fr-ralston-elizabeth-i-mae-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Fr. Ralston, Elizabeth I & Mae West"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dean McKeachie, in the first of a two-part article based on his presentation to the Prayer Book Society\u2019s most recent conference, pays tribute here to the remarkable personality and erudition of the late Fr. William Ralston. He was a man of formidable and diverse talents \u2013as reflected in his being a preacher of note who was also a pianist. He was a leading figure in the founding of the Prayer Book Society and a long serving Rector in the distinguished tradition of St John\u2019s Church Savannah. He was, as the article brings out, a man of wide ranging and always passionate convictions. His early study of the famous apologist William Porcher Dubose firmly grounded the way he deployed his wit and engagement with wider culture in defence of a classical Anglican tradition. Who else could juxtapose Queen Elizabeth I with Mae West to such theological advantage?<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I. MIXING MEMORY AND DESIRE<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf only the good were clever
And only the clever were good
This world would be so much better<\/em>
Than ever we thought it could;
But the good are seldom clever
And the clever are hardly good:
The good are so harsh to the clever<\/em>
And the clever so rude to the good.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such was the Sewanee version of a discerning ditty about fallen human nature the original of which is attributed to Elizabeth Wordsworth2<\/sup>. It was, like so much else, transplanted from the city of \u201cdreaming spires\u201d to old Sewanee\u2019s \u201ctower\u2019d city set within a wood\u201d, and it was still current there in 1947 when William Henry Ralston, Jr., went up to The University of the South from the Cumberland Gap in Kentucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wordsworth ditty comports well with the even pithier sayings of Mae (\u201cI\u2019m No Angel\u201d) West,
that bawdy 20th century American songstress so much beloved of Fr. Ralston. Incongruous as it may seem, the principal clerical founder of the American Prayer Book Society and Twelfth Rector of St. John\u2019s Church in Savannah adopted (so to say) Mae West as a kind of 20th century \u201calter ego\u201d to his favorite Englishwoman, \u201cGood\u201d Queen Bess! He often quoted Mae West to hilarious yet theologically pointed effect, not least in some of his most erudite essays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few of Fr. Ralston\u2019s favorite Mae West insights into human nature are worth citing as sardonically germane to the theme of the 2019 Prayer Book Society Conference, \u201cWhat is Classical Anglicanism?\u201d. Fr. Ralston himself was one who both knew and \u201clived\u201d the answer to such a question, even as that answer has always been implicit, theologically and liturgically, on every page of the classic editions of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer\u2019s Book of Common Prayer. In more facetious vein, is not such theology also implicit in many of Mae West\u2019s notorious one-liners? To wit \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI used to be Snow White, but I drifted.\u201d
\u201cWhen I\u2019m good, I\u2019m very, very good, but when I\u2019m bad, I\u2019m better.\u201d
\u201cThere are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out.\u201d
\u201cBetween two evils, I always like to choose the one I\u2019ve never tried before.\u201d
\u201cTo err is human, but it feels divine\u201d (Fr. Ralston\u2019s favorite).
\u201cGoodness had nothing to do with it\u201d (Mae West\u2019s retort to a fan who had gushed, \u201cYou were so good in that movie!\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After his death, Fr. Ralston was remembered and celebrated (albeit not by everyone!) for his erudition and eloquence; for his passionate, often curmudgeonly convictions, his pointed wit, his unapologetic likes and dislikes in food for soul and body; for his winsome, faithful, and personally loyal, loving pastoral care for \u201call sorts and conditions of men\u201d; for his preferences in bourbon whiskey and baseball teams, as well \u201cthe beauty of holiness\u201d in worship; for his mentoring of those younger and greener than he, especially in love of serious music and literature; and for his insistently discriminating exercise of severe or magnanimous judgement, and sometimes both together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Above all, he was and is remembered for a Christian witness at once \u201cProphetic\u201d in an Old Testament sense, \u201cJohannine\u201d in New Testament terms, and philosophically \u201cPlatonic\u201d in a manner equally reflective of the \u201cAncients\u201d and the \u201cModerns\u201d. Fr. Ralston certainly agreed with Socrates that \u201cthe unexamined life\u201d is not a truly human life, even as he shared with Thomas Aquinas and \u201cold Calvin\u201d alike the sense that, in T.S. Eliot\u2019s words, the truest mode of knowledge \u2014 about \u201cthe world, the flesh, and the devil\u201d, about the self, about God, and about the beginnings and the ends of all things \u2014 is a discernment \u201cmixing memory and desire\u201d, pointing beyond any and all human horizons, literal or otherwise: the discernment that \u201cbeauty, truth, and goodness\u201d are three in one and one in three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spirit of Plato\u2019s \u201cSymposium\u201d and \u201cTimaeus\u201d, of St. Paul\u2019s apologetic at the Areopagus, and of St. Augustine\u2019s \u201cConfessions\u201d lives still in the writings, and the remembrances, of the Reverend William Henry Ralston3<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II. \u201cSEE, THEY RETURN, AND BRING US WITH THEM”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in 1929 in Middlesboro, Kentucky, young William Ralston came by his traditional Prayer Book ethos honestly \u2014 the old-fashioned way \u2014 inheriting it from the great-grandmother who had been a founding member of the family\u2019s local Episcopal Church. That inherited ethos was in due course nurtured and honed by William\u2019s schooling, especially at old Sewanee, in the perspective of both the Ancient (Greek and Latin) Classics and the literature of the Old (American) South. Such living legends among the faculty as Charles Harrison, \u201cRed\u201d Lancaster, and Andrew Lytle4<\/sup> seemed to consort with the brooding shades of Confederate Generals Leonidas Polk and Edmund Kirby-Smith, together with such scholars long-past (yet still \u201cliving presences\u201d there) as Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (the \u201cfather of philology\u201d), William Porcher DuBose (the \u201csage and seer\u201d of old Sewanee), and Sewanee\u2019s first professor of Biology (who had moved there from Harvard), John McCrady. And in All Saints\u2019 Chapel \u2014 at that time only one-third finished, covered by a wooden roof hewn from the abundant forests of that ancient Cumberland Plateau \u2014 the genius of Thomas Cranmer \u201cpresided\u201d over daily services of worship conducted according to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likewise, mid-20th century Sewanee\u2019s still highly traditional Liberal Arts curriculum introduced William to many of the \u201csaints\u201d, secular no less than sacred, who came to inhabit his imaginative and intellectual life, as well as his teaching, preaching, and writing, for the next five decades \u2014Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David and Jonathan, and the Hebrew Prophets; Homer and Thucydides, the Greek tragedians, Plato and Aristotle; the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Magdalene, St. Paul, St. John, Boethius, Alfred the Great, Dante, Shakespeare, George Herbert, John Donne, Dr. Johnson … all the way to T.S. Eliot among the living: \u201cSee, they return, and bring us with them\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus it was as a Sewanee undergraduate that William began to \u201cconnect the dots\u201d between the overlapping worlds of biblical doctrine, Christianity in the Protestant Episcopal tradition, and literature, philosophy, and music; moreover, it was then and there that he began to amass what became, reputedly, the largest private collection of recordings of classical music in the country. It was that collection, as it continued to grow right up to the first years of the new millennium, which Fr. Ralston eventually bequeathed to Sewanee, where today the University\u2019s exquisite and technologically nonpareil listening library-cum-audio-archive is named in his memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time William graduated (\u201coptime merens\u201d) in 1951, he had already developed a keen sense of the traditional meaning of the term \u201ccommon\u201d as expressive of the mutual rootedness of a \u201cCommon\u201d People of God, worshipping in adherence to the Book of \u201cCommon\u201d Prayer in places, however geographically and demographically disparate, spiritually united and brought together \u201cin Christ\u201d by the use, liturgically, of that one Book. For William Ralston, such places would come to include not only Middlesboro and Sewanee but Chelsea Square (New York), Harvard Yard (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Queen\u2019s Park (Toronto), St. Augustine\u2019s College (Canterbury), Hillspeak (Eureka Springs, Arkansas), and eventually Madison Square (Savannah, Georgia). In 2003, according to his long-standing wish and destiny, his body was returned to Middlesboro to be buried \u2014 \u201cin common\u201d\u2014 \u201cwith his fathers\u201d. Thus he came full circle to his original \u201cCommon Place\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III. “WE LOVE HER! WE LOVE HER! WE LOVE HER!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just over half a century earlier, in order to prepare for ordination, William was sent by his Bishop
to The General Theological Seminary (Chelsea Square) in New York City. There he came under
the deep and abiding influence of its Professor of Old Testament at the time, the Canadian native, Dr. Cuthbert Simpson (a graduate of both King\u2019s College, Halifax, and the University of Oxford), who taught him how to combine a moderate form of the \u201ccritical\u201d and \u201chistorical\u201d method of biblical exegesis with his already well-honed literary and musical sensibility, in the enhancement of a maturing Christian faith. It was, indeed, in this particular way that Fr. Ralston came to understand \u2014 to \u201cstand under\u201d \u2014 the single Word of God as authoritative, affirming that the Bible is \u201cHoly\u201d in and through the words of \u201call sorts and conditions\u201d of human authors of the \u201cdivers and sundry\u201d texts whereby Divine Revelation is disclosed to Human Reason, the Word Eternal and the Word Incarnate made manifest as the Word Written. Thus, Platonist that he was by classical education, as well as traditional Prayer Book Episcopalian by liturgical formation, William Ralston came to appreciate that \u201cthe Many\u201d are the \u201cdivinely inspired\u201d vessels of \u201cthe One\u201d or, rather, of the One-in-Three and Three-in-One; and to avoid \u201cfalling into history\u201d (\u201cthe second fall\u201d, according to Andrew Lytle). He acquired, to the contrary, the conviction that history and historiography both \u201cdepend\u201d on the God who is Sovereign over all things, sacred and secular alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI used to be Snow White, but I drifted.\u201d \u201cWhen I\u2019m good, I\u2019m very good, but when I\u2019m bad, I\u2019m better.\u201d
\u201cThere are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out.\u201d \u201cBetween two evils, I always like to choose the one I\u2019ve never tried before.\u201d
\u201cTo err is human, but it feels divine.\u201d \u201cGoodness had nothing to do with it\u201d (Mae West\u2019s retort to a fan who had gushed, \u201cYou were so good in that movie!\u201d)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Following ordination in his home church (as Deacon in 1954, Priest in 1955), Fr. Ralston returned to General Seminary to write his Master\u2019s thesis on the theological methodology of William Porcher DuBose (1836-1918), who, as both a classical scholar and contemporary apologist, was widely said in his own day to have \u201cvindicated\u201d orthodox Christianity. According to Professor William Sanday of Oxford, DuBose was \u201cthe wisest Anglican theologian on either side of the Atlantic\u201d5<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was the melding of all these influences \u2014 Harrison\u2019s in literary and musical judgement; Simpson\u2019s in the de-construction and re-construction of Biblical texts, thereby confirming the inherently Triune integrity and \u201cintentionality\u201d of biblical narrative and witness; and DuBose\u2019s in a theology of Incarnation, Atonement, and Reconciliation, at once Evangelical, Catholic, and Humanist \u2014 that enabled Fr. Ralston to absorb, transform, and transcend the prevailing shibboleths of historicism without embracing any single \u201cschool\u201d of Metaphysics or Logic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like the \u201cClassical\u201d Anglican Divines of the 16th and 17th centuries (from Bishop Jewel to Bishops Andrewes, and beyond), Fr. Ralston was no ideologue. Rather, like the greatest of them, perhaps especially like John Donne and George Herbert (and Dr. DuBose 250 years after them), Fr. Ralston \u201clived\u201d Anglicanism in flesh and blood, in mind and spirit, in liturgy and pedagogy, not arguing abstractly about disembodied theory but appropriating and embodying \u201ctradition\u201d with vivid particularity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1956, Fr. Ralston was awarded a Church Society Fellowship in postgraduate research at Harvard, where he began a collegial relationship with the second most influential Canadian Maritimer in his life, the Reverend Robert Darwin Crouse. During the course of that lifelong friendship, Fr. Crouse became Professor of Classics at Dalhousie University and King\u2019s College, Halifax, acquiring a reputation as North America\u2019s most distinguished Anglican scholar of the mutuality between the Hellenic heritage of Western philosophical tradition and the Hebraic heritage of explicitly biblical Christian theology. Fr. Crouse was a founder of the Canadian Prayer Book Society as well as of the annual Atlantic Theological Conferences, to which Fr. Ralston became a recurrent contributor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From 1957-1960, Fr. Ralston served as Chaplain and Tutor at Trinity College, Toronto, before taking up a two-year appointment as American Fellow at St. Augustine\u2019s College, Canterbury, at that time the Central College of the Anglican Communion. By 1962, Fr. Ralston was back on Sewanee Mountain, teaching for four years in the School of Theology followed by seven years mentoring undergraduates in English, European, and American literature \u2014 and in \u201cthe old ways\u201d \u2014 as a member of the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences. During those latter years, he also served as Associate Editor \u2014 alongside Mr. Lytle \u2014 of The Sewanee Review, America\u2019s oldest literary quarterly. A generation of Sewanee undergraduates came down from the Mountain with a lifetime store of anecdotes about Fr. Ralston\u2019s literary likes and dislikes, indeed his forthrightly expressed loves and hates. One of the most vivid of such anecdotes was about his annual classroom quiz on Tolstoy\u2019s \u201cAnna Karenina\u201d: \u201cDon\u2019t you love Anna?\u201d \u2014 \u201cDon\u2019t you love Anna\u201d \u2014 \u201cDon\u2019t you JUST LOVE ANNA?\u201d he would ask or, rather, importune the students \u2014 repeating the question over and over with persistent and mounting fervor, until the entire class fervently responded in unison, \u201cWe LOVE her! We LOVE her! We LOVE her!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPlatonist that he was by classical education, as well as traditional Prayer Book Episcopalian by liturgical formation, William Ralston came to appreciate that \u2018the Many\u2019 are the \u2018divinely inspired\u2019 vessels of \u2018the One\u2019 or, rather, of the One-in-Three and Three-in-One; and to avoid \u2018falling into history\u2019 (\u2018the second fall\u2019, according to Andrew Lytle). He acquired, to the contrary, the conviction that history and historiography both \u2018depend\u2019 on the God who is Sovereign over all things, sacred and secular alike.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

IV. “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER GIVE IN”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the legacies of Fr. Ralston\u2019s time on the Sewanee faculty was his 1966 Founders\u2019 Day address affirming, commending, \u201cmagnifying\u201d (so to say) The University of the South\u2019s heritage and status within American academe as \u201cA Common Place\u201d: not that what it stood for was common in the colloquial sense of demotic but, rather, common in terms of the very definition of humankind as created in the image and likeness of the Creator. As with a \u201ccommonplace\u201d book, a University constituted as both academic and ecclesiastical in character, and true to its defined stature as such, must be a repository and transmitter of what is \u201ccommon\u201d, that is, perennial, providential, what Russell Kirk called \u201cthe permanent things\u201d, what underlies \u201cla condition humaine\u201d, fallen but redeemed. Along similar lines, another legacy of Fr. Ralston\u2019s Sewanee years was his founding, together with a small group of nationally prominent writers, of the Society for the Preservation of the Book of Common Prayer. But most of all, there was his sheer (as it were) evangelical fervor in promoting the highest, most discriminating standards, customs, and tropes of culture generally, and music in particular, in the name and to the glory of God. Such gestures of witness were widely, as well as locally, perceived as gauntlets of defiance and challenge in the face of revisionism in theology and progressivism in politics; and from that time on, Fr. Ralston became a controversial, not to say polarizing, public figure in both the groves of academe and the corridors of ecclesiastical power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following a year as Associate Editor of The Anglican Digest, Fr. Ralston was called to be the Twelfth Rector of historic St. John\u2019s Church, Savannah. Its first Rector, Stephen Elliott, had served also as first Bishop of Georgia, as a founding Bishop of The University of the South, and as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the Confederacy. His sixth successor, Paul Reeves, Diocesan Bishop at the time of Fr. Ralston\u2019s induction and institution, was a kindred spirit, one of the few bishops of the Episcopal Church in the late 20th century to share Fr. Ralston\u2019s convictions in literature, liturgy, theology, and ecclesiastical politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During his Rectorship, Fr. Ralston had two honorary doctorates conferred on him, one by the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Kentucky, the other by the University of King\u2019s College in Nova Scotia. Alas, his outspoken, widely circulated \u2014 and widely read! \u2014 jeremiads, lambasting what he called the \u201cdeliquesence\u201d of the Episcopal Church, doubtless kept him from receiving similar honors from his own Alma Maters. But Fr. Ralston never shrank from taking a stand! Thus, in 1991, when six Episcopal priests in the Diocese of Maryland (including the present writer) co-authored a jeremiad of our own, taking our national denomination to task for incipient apostasy, Fr. Ralston telephoned me immediately to say he wanted to be among the first to endorse our Declaration. He allowed that he detected a certain influence of Karl Barth underlying it \u2014 warily unacknowledged as it was by the Declaration\u2019s authors! \u2014 and that thereby we surely also had the supernal endorsements of both Bach and Mozart. \u201cWhat about Beethoven?\u201d I asked. \u201cI bring that endorsement with my own!\u201d he assured me6<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fr. Ralston\u2019s articles week in, week out in the St. John\u2019s Parish Paper, tracking the spiritual, liturgical, and ideological \u201cnegligences and ignorances\u201d of the denominational leadership of the Episcopal Church nationally, provide in retrospect the most comprehensive accounting at the time of the Protestant Episcopal Church\u2019s self-betrayal, theological inanity, and numerical implosion in the late 20th century. Nevertheless, Fr. Ralston and his Vestry resolved, in Churchillian fashion, \u201cnever, never, never, never [to] give in\u201d; by the same token, they were resolute in never, in any way, initiating a formal schism or seeking to sever their historic ties to the national church body. But twenty-five years after his accession as Rector, and in failing health, Fr. Ralston retired in 1999. Named Rector Emeritus, he remained as socially and culturally active as possible. He died in 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Part II of this article will be in next edition of the Anglican Way]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. This essay incorporates material used for my presentation to the Prayer Book Society (USA) Conference in October of 2019 at St. John\u2019s Church in Savannah; my hope is to publish a considerably expanded version of it in book form for the 20th anniversary, in 2023, of the death of the Reverend William Henry Ralston, Jr., in Savannah. Twelve of Fr. Ralston\u2019s essays were brought back into print \u2014 \u201cThat Old Serpent\u201d \u2014 and made available at the Conference, to be savored anew, in recognition of the 90th anniversary year of Fr. Ralston\u2019s birth in 1929, the 45th of his call to St. John\u2019s in 1974, and the 20th of his retirement in 1999. Thanks to Professor Thomas Carlson at Sewanee and Fr. Gavin Dunbar at St. John\u2019s, these essays have been republished by the Prayer Book Society as a memento of its 2019 Conference. Copies are available from the Society. The Reverend Douglas Dupree and the Reverend Frederick Buechner shared personal reminiscences with me as I was preparing my paper, but they bear no responsibility for any errors, omissions, or false judgements of my own.
    <\/li>
  2. The poet\u2019s niece, the bishop\u2019s daughter, the liturgiologist\u2019s sister, and herself the founder of both Lady Margaret Hall and St. Hugh\u2019s College, Oxford
    <\/li>
  3. In assembling these recollections of Fr. Ralston\u2019s embodiment of the Christian Way, I am conscious \u2014 to adapt Andr\u00e9 Malraux\u2019s apologia for his memoir of Charles de Gaulle and de Gaulle\u2019s \u201ccertaine id\u00e9e de la France\u201d \u2014 that my personal witness to Fr. Ralston, and to his own \u201ccertain\u201d ideas and life, is a scholarly monograph in the same sense as Boswell\u2019s Life of Johnson, \u201cc\u2019est-\u00e0-dire, pas du tout\u201d. The transcendent and symbolically significant aspects of a Great Soul\u2019s life are most truly recalled and transmitted as matters of personal recollection, at least as much as matters of fact.
    <\/li>
  4. Mr. Lytle \u2014 novelist, essayist, editor, raconteur \u2014 was one of the so-called \u201cSouthern Agrarians\u201d, notable or (in our \u201cpolitically correct\u201d times) notorious critics of the 20th century erosion of the \u201ctraditionalist\u201d point of view about our \u201ccommon\u201d human nature as creatures of God but, by our own sin, \u201cfallen\u201d from that perfection; individually and corporately, socially, politically. Dr. Lancaster was quondam Commandant of the Sewanee Military Academy, subsequently Professor of Political Science and Dean of Sewanee\u2019s undergraduate College of Arts and Sciences, and perpetual Virginian; Dr. Harrison was long-time Spalding Professor of English, Dean of the College, renowned Shakespearean, and the mentor who inspired William Ralston to begin his lifelong collection of classical records.
    <\/li>
  5. William Sanday (1843-1920) was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford during the years when all of DuBose\u2019s books were published.
    <\/li>
  6. The famous Barthian story about the status of Bach and Mozart in heaven was introduced to an English language readership by Thomas Merton in the pages of The Sewanee Review (several years before Fr. Ralston\u2019s associate editorship). Fr. Ralston himself likened Bach to God the Father, Beethoven to the Son, and Mozart to the Holy Spirit. The profound importance of music for Fr. Ralston requires more space to explore than is available here; I hope to devote a substantial section of my fuller monograph to this topic.<\/li><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Dean McKeachie, in the first of a two-part article based on his presentation to the Prayer Book Society\u2019s most recent conference, pays tribute here to the remarkable personality and erudition of the late Fr. William Ralston. He was a man of formidable and diverse talents \u2013as reflected in his being a preacher of note who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10341,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":{"subscribers_only":true},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10357,"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions\/10357"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anglicanway.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}