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In recent weeks, and in connection with some personal research, we've become enamoured of The Church Eclectic, a major periodical published from 1873 to 1908 that did much to form North Americans' conception of their belonging to an Anglican Communion. With the subtitle A Magazine of Church Opinion, Religious Literature, and Ecclesiastical Miscellany (changed to A Monthly Magazine of Church Literature with Notes and Summaries, and still later to An Anglo-Catholic Monthly of Church Literature with Notes and Summaries), The Church Eclectic carried a wealth of original material by English, Canadian, Newfoundlander, American, German, Russian, and Greek theologians. Its readers received each month (on generous annual terms) a remarkable digest of contemporary ecclesiastical life, along with poetry, photographs, correspondence, gossip, advertisements and pointed commentary. In addition to specifically North American content—it's the only place to find material like anniversary sermons preached at St Mark's, Philadelphia, or the number of parish churches with a celebration of Daily Mass in Chicago—the magazine reprinted vast amounts of material from the eastern side of the Atlantic. In this way, the three or four generations of clergy and lay leaders formed and informed by its pages were also readers of what the Eclectic's editors called 'morceaux' from The Guardian, The Church Times, The Church Quarterly Review, and even the Revue Internationale de Théologie. They came to believe that British church life was their church's life, and that the vicissitudes of Anglicanism in Tasmania, Singapore, British Guiana, the Cape Colony, Japan, or India mattered in Utica, Baton Rouge, Lennoxville and Perth Amboy. They came to think, as many of us do still, that 'we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread'.
Although The Church Eclectic is but a footnote today in the field of Anglican journalism, its thoughtful guides' vision is still powerful in many parts of our church. The difference now, we fear, is a paradoxical contraction of focus for much church journalism even as our access to a wide variety of information has become much easier than it was for editors William Thomas Gibson (1822-1896), Frederic Cook Morehouse (1868-1932) and Arthur Lowndes (1858-1917). In place of a church eclectic, with voices in ongoing conversation and mutual awareness, many of us would have a church dogmatic or a church narrow. We know that you know that we think such a change is not a good one. Churches eclectic can be churches organic and churches eirenic. Churches that refuse the generous spirit of eclectic reading and thinking will soon grow lethargic, and phlegmatic, and static, and tannic. Long live the memory of The Church Eclectic, and those churches eclectic who still drink from its wells of generosity and curiosity. See you next week, as ever eclectic. |
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