BCP COLLECT FOR EVERY DAY

Cranmer's Curate is blogging off until the New Year due to Christmas commitments.

He leaves the youth group with the wonderful Book of Common Prayer Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent, which is actually an urgent prayer for every Christian disciple for every day of our journey through the wilderness of this world:

Blessed Lord, who has hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Youth group prayers would be appreciated for a fruitful outreach through our Christmas services and a positive impact for Christ's gospel from our Christmas newsletters going God willing to every home in the parish.

This piece - The end of the traditional church wedding? - appeared on Archbishop Cranmer

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Update AD 18/12/11 This piece about Christmas carol singing in pubs appeared on Heresy Corner.

Update 19/12/11 This opinion piece about the significance of David Cameron's Christ Church Oxford speech in support of biblical values appeared on Christian Today.

Update 20/12/11 Another piece on the implications of the Christ Church speech appeared on US-based orthodox Anglican news service VirtueOnline.

KOBA THE DREAD AND LATTER-DAY POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Martin Amis's book about Stalin's terror, Koba the Dread - Laughter and The Twenty Million (Hyperion, New York, 2002), is powerfully theological.

Its message is arguably more urgent ten years on, because of the spiritual and moral kinship between Stalinism and political correctness, whose tendrils have now more deeply penetrated the foundations of Western democracy.

Mr Amis, whose descriptions of the terror cannot but get under the skin of any thoughtful person, wrote (pp30-31):

It has been said that the Bolsheviks ruled as if conducting a war against their own people. But you could go further and say that the Bolsheviks were conducting a war against human nature. Lenin to Gorky:

'Every religious idea, every idea of God...is unutterable vileness...of the most dangerious kind, "contagion" of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions...are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of God decked in the smartest "ideological" costumes...'

Religion is reaction, certainly (and wasn't the Tsar meant to be divine?). But religion is also human nature. One recalls John Updike's argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so. The war against religion was part of the war against human nature, which was prosecuted on many other fronts.

Clearly, Nicene Christians would disagree with the notion that the objective existence of God depends upon human nature. The truth is rather that the human yearning for the transcendent flows from our dependence upon the almighty and self-sufficient Trinitarian God, not from his depedence on us.

But that Lenin's and then Stalin's terror against humanity stemmed from their hatred of the God whose eternal Word became human flesh in Jesus Christ is an urgent insight.

It is a spiritual insight that shows why godless political correctness, which harbours the same hatred, must ineluctably lead to terror if it is allowed to gain control of the state.

This piece - The Church and the re-moralisation of Britain - appeared on Christian Today.