Anglicanism Without Gaps

Did you know...

...that a little parish church in Halifax, Nova Scotia is trying to establish a most peculiar library named for Robert Crouse? Its collection policy is a strange one: it seeks to represent ‘Anglicanism without Gaps’.

Well … perhaps in the feature article of this newsletter, Father Crouse makes sense of it all. Clearly to build a library of ‘Anglican theology’ is impossible because it would include the entire tradition of Christian thinking, worship, and prayer from the earliest Church through the Middle Ages, and all the way to the present. As Crouse makes clear, Anglicanism doesn’t stand for ‘this’ or ‘that’, but gathers up the whole of the Christian tradition, both East and West. So the proposed Robert Crouse Memorial Library of Saint George’s Anglican Parish simply seeks to be a well-curated selection of books that symbolizes or represents true Anglicanism that is ‘Anglicanism without gaps’: the common mind of the Church over the centuries. In Crouse’s words, “the living developing tradition of the universal church as it is guided by the spirit in relation to the revealed word of God”. A Reformed and Catholic Anglicanism insists that the universal consensus fidelium is the only fundamental authority in the Church of God. Indeed, the renewal of the Anglican Church today, says Crouse, “requires an understanding of the tradition in all its fullness and unity and a certain humility of spirit in relation to that tradition.”

So help us! Given our limited shelf space, send us your suggestions of the books that you think should be included in our select curated collection representing the essentials of the Christian tradition, both East and West. ‘Anglicanism without gaps’ is simply our Anglican tradition.