Letter to Donors, Contributors, and Supporters
Today’s most media-celebrated church leaders, theologians and intellectuals are raising urgent existential questions related to what is sometimes described as ‘The Machine’. That is, our economic-driven, surveillance, and data-collecting global culture that rejects both transcendent reality and the need for roots in any religious or spiritual tradition. Just in the past few years ‘Machine Learning’ artificial intelligence has given way to a more powerful ‘Deep Learning’ artificial intelligence that responds to its environment in creative ways beyond the sheer manipulation of billions of bits of inputted data. Yet the writings and sermons of Robert Crouse seem strangely to have anticipated ‘The Machine’, and Crouse offers for us the antidote to this anxiety-producing secularity through a deeper recovery of memoria. In his many reflections on St Paul’s exhortation “be not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds”, Crouse points us to the Hope that does not disappoint, even in our troubled and confused world of the second quarter of the 21st century.
It would be such a delight to receive your comments on the WORC and its activities. Our goal is to make the writings of Robert available as broadly as possible, thus encouraging an intellectual and spiritual community that continues to reflect upon Robert’s teaching and preaching in our current cultural context.
At any rate, here is what we are up to!
Books.
We hope to follow up our current three publications (Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Spirituality, 2023; The Soul’s Pilgrimage, vol I: Sermons from Advent to Pentecost, 2023; The Soul’s Pilgrimage, vol II: The Descent of the Dove and the Spiritual Life, 2024) with three publications currently being prepared. In early 2027 we hope to publish Theological Essays of R.D. Crouse (the complete collection of 25 papers given at the Atlantic Theological Conference, 1981 - 2005); in late 2027 we hope to publish our third and final collection of RDC sermons, The Soul’s Pilgrimage, vol III: The Pilgrimage in the Life of the Trinity Unfolded in Trinity Season; finally, we hope to publish a book, The Crouse Devotional Readings for the Christian Year in 2028.
Newsletters.
We hope you have enjoyed receiving our three WORC Newsletters. In 2026 we shall publish two Newsletters, in May and in November. In addition to a feature piece by Robert, and the usual anecdotes, and news, in the May Newsletter we hope to consider the theme, ‘Robert Crouse and the Machine’. We are looking for contributions. Don’t be shy in offering to write something yourself, or to volunteer your intellectually and spiritually gifted friend to write something for us!
The WORC Website.
Our newly redesigned website helps to make the writings of Robert Crouse and the goings-on of WORC broadly accessible. The website’s ‘news’ section now features our newsletter articles, unpublished sermons of RDC, and more—inviting the curious to participate more deeply in the growing community of Crouse readers.
Please visit us often: www.worksofrobertcrouse.com
The WORC Saturday Seminars.
The local Maritime branch of the WORC has begun a series of Saturday Seminars to help prepare postulants for Anglican ministry and laity generally to think deeply about the Christian faith in a time of increasing despair about Anglicanism. These have become very popular family events with childcare provided for twenty or more children! Why not consider the same where you live?
Each WORC Saturday includes two significant lectures given by priests and theologians, followed by Q&A. The presenters contribute to a curriculum devoted to the history, ecclesiology, spiritual pilgrimage, liturgy, pastoral orientation, and theology of the Christian Tradition from the early Church through to the contemporary. These WORC Saturday Seminars are inspired by a comment that Robert Crouse made at the very first Atlantic Theological Conference in 1981, when he advised that we can best contribute to the renewal of our parishes by all of us becoming theologians. He suggested,
First of all, we must ourselves become better theologians. And that means, I think, that we must immerse ourselves more and more fully in the Scriptures and the theological tradition of the Church. This is difficult, of course, as all intellectual work is difficult; but surely we are not so intellectually degenerate that we cannot read and begin to understand the great classical works of Christian theology. As Fr. Mascall remarks, “The first duty of the Christian theologian, I would maintain, is to set his own thinking firmly within the great tradition which he has inherited from the Church and its thinkers, sentire cum ecclesia.” If we cannot find time for that, our priorities are wrong.
The WORC ‘Penny in the Dust’ Summer Family Camp.
This initiative was highlighted in our last Newsletter: a one-week family camp where we gather to share the joys and challenges of a rooted Christian family life in the age of the Machine. Above all else it is family fun in God’s creation, a time of biblical and theological teaching, and 24/7 holy conversation!
The Works of Robert Crouse Memorial Library.
Inspired by RDC’s teaching on the Anglican understanding of the Consensus Fidelium (see Crouse, "Essence of Anglicanism"), at Saint George’s Round Church in Halifax we hope to establish an intentional "Anglicanism without gaps" Memorial Robert Crouse Library. It is a small space about 20 metres of shelfspace. The idea is to achieve a carefully curated collection that begins with Plato and Philo, continues through the Scriptures, to the Apostolic Church, Origen and the Ante-Nicene/Nicene Fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite, through Boethius and Eriugena, to St John Damascus, the whole of the Middle Ages (including Dante of course) to the Reformation, Caroline Divines, Parker Society, etc. to the contemporary Church. Philosophy, Biblical Studies, Liturgy, Spirituality, Pastoralia, Poetry, etc. This library will be a space for research and study especially for young people seeking a generous Spiritual Tradition rooted in the Early Church and continuously shaped by the Holy Spirit in every generation since, until ours. We hope to acquire these books through donations, and we look especially to older clerics, like myself, who are long in the tooth and who want their precious theological libraries collected over a lifetime of ministry, to have a lasting legacy for the renewal of the Church. This is your chance!
Contact Erin Wagner for more information about how you can help.
Conclusion
From this email I think you can appreciate that the WORC project is very much a ‘Mom and Pop’ operation. None of our contributors are paid. It is, of course, costly to publish the volumes, and to print and mail the Newsletters, but so far God has inspired hearts to donate generously to WORC. If your heart moves you to donate, we would be even more blessed. Sometimes our lives at WORC become so busy that it is a challenge to get the Newsletters out on time. From start to finish, WORC is a labour of love for Robert’s students and colleagues who are determined to distribute his teaching and preaching of ‘Memory and Hope’ as broadly as possible to a world increasingly searching for that which it cannot find in a global secularity that has forgotten its sacred roots.
For more information about any of the above, please contact our one and only (very part-time) administrator, Erin Wagner. Since 2003 Erin has single-handedly (and lovingly) kept this project going, keeping track of the manifold aspects of the WORC described above. Without her, there would be no Newsletters. Under her direction, each week Peter Bullerwell and I continue to review the many boxes of Crouse material housed in the University of King’s College Archives in preparation for our future publications and the release of the book of Crouse Devotional Readings for the Christian Year mentioned above.
I hope this update has made clear the ‘Mom and Pop’ character of the WORC Project, and that you will continue to pray for us. Think of contributing an article to the ‘Robert Crouse and the Machine’ Newsletter. And please help us establish the Robert Crouse Memorial Library “Anglicanism without Gaps”.
Gary Thorne
Managing Editor, The Works of Robert Crouse project
For
Neil Robertson, General Editor
Stephen Blackwood, General Editor
Susan Dodd, Editor
Lawrence Bruce-Robertson, Editor