Fitz Allison's new book

I've just reread Trust in an Age of Arrogance and am extremely grateful that someone in the U.S. Anglican tradition still believes in the sinfulness of sin and the greatness of grace, the bondage of the will in the sense of Article X. God gets all the credit for our salvation!

Bishop Allison catches the essence of the gospel with unforgettable phrases:

"This spiritual asthma [of religious self-righteousness] chokes our civilization and counterfeits the Christian faith"

"We have arrogated to ourselves the attributes of deity and given to God the responsibility to justify himself, repent, change, or disappear as irrelevant."

"Some theologians in England now applaud the sucking sound of this long departing faith."

"The amputation of purpose from the mystery of human identity is fatal."

"The Sermon on the Mount is the necessary, rigorous, and devastating purging of Pharisee yeast.  It's chemotherapy for the Pharisee cancer."

"The idiocy of our times that has emptied God of his awesomeness leaves us with no laxative for our arrogant constipation."

"Within Anglicanism, Jeremy Taylor placed the banana peel of Pelagianism on the cliff of Unitarianism."

"The decrees of the Council of Trent about sin and justification are to Pharisaism as cigarettes are to cancer."

"We come into this world unfree."

This book and his earlier, The Rise of Moralism, should absolutely be required reading for every seminarian, and for anyone who wishes to know the answer to: If the foundation of the English Reformation was so good (Cranmer, Hooker, Jewel, Andrews), how did it end up so bad?

She had a nametag that identified her, and I began to wonder about the rest of her life...

MAV

At the grocery store by my house,

surrounded by magazines touting celebrity breakups

and chewing gum in obscene varieties,

she mindlessly checks out every customer who steps into her lane.

“Did you find everything okay?”

she says dutifully with vague commitment,

even though I know she was trained to say this

and would be reprimanded for breaking the “did you find” protocol.

Once I thought of asking her “So, Mav, what’s your life like?”

and I imagined her launching into a colorful story

about hurts and disloyalties that explain her worn-out face,

and make me embarrassed that I asked.

I think also of the man I see watering his weeds

and a few spotty patches of grass at the house around the corner;

wondering if he is the victim of a tragic loss or torturous infidelity,

or perhaps no real explanation for his hunched shoulders and grimacing look.

Or the single older woman who is pulled

by her yapping dog early mornings past our house,

dutifully picking up the gifts with rubber-gloved hands

that are gifts because they are not surprises on the living room floor.

I sometimes walk the hallways of airports

wondering about the next person I see,

each one secretly hoping to be stopped and asked to tell about

the pieces that fit together to make the picture of their lives.

Chuck Collins