A biographical sketch of Pusey, and on conservative Christians trying to be cool

"Join me in spreading the gospel."

• A modern Anglican Evangelical writes and posts a bio of Pusey. This lady's husband. Not anti-high church. Right; Anglo-Catholics weren't Catholic wannabes to begin with (the Tractarians) and some still weren't. But those became the Episcopalians now: liberal high church. "We don't need Rome" means "we can change the matter of the sacraments of orders and matrimony" (some Anglicans don't think they're sacraments), and in theory change anything. Fallible church, invented to serve the state (which the Oxford Movement actually rebelled against, claiming Catholic divine institution and authority, better than Rome, for Henry VIII's and Cranmer's creation), where everything is changeable by decree, or now, synodal vote. Unlike Catholic liberals, they love the church's trappings (part of their charm), from claimed apostolic bishops to quotable saints to birettas, but they don't think the church as we know it is really necessary. Of course the Tractarians weren't liberals; they feared, with our teaching about the papacy, that we were! Newman on the development of doctrine (not itself part of our doctrine but so useful it might as well be) tried to set them straight. Pius IX on Pusey: "He's like the campanile, calling the people into the church but he stays outside." A movement that began to prevent people from coming to us (and reacting against a state reaction to its emancipation of Catholics: the Irish didn't go to the Anglican Church so why not downsize it there?) ended up imitating the church, before the movement turned liberal. Fr. Mitchican's "Biblical Catholicism" is... man-made, the conclusion Newman came to.
• Interesting follow-up to Rod Dreher's post yesterday on the Rev. Mrs. Warren (I know that's not grammatical): For conservative Christians, is trying to be cool/chasing respectability a dead end? The article in full. In a sense, absolutely yes. Certainly in an America that's secularizing, becoming less literate about religion: I told one of my Jewish secular co-workers about attending church camp and he immediately assumed it was like “Jesus Camp.” I responded “no, it was Episcopal.” We all know that means, right? Episcopal Jesus Camp. But he didn’t get that memo. Christians were Christians were Christians, in his book. In another, no: my suspicion given me by another that Dreher might really be telling us to give up and be schismatic high-church dhimmi, cute, harmless, quaint conservatives (if you can't buy out-and-out unbelief or the halfway house of liberal high church) in a "post-Christian" society. Surrender the public square. To which, as General McAuliffe said to the Germans in the Ardennes, I say "Nuts!" We may be driven underground as Catholics in the modern Ukraine were, not that I'm saying that will happen soon. But we should learn from our recent history.