Evensong

£11.99

For a thousand years or so churches have been at the heart of things. Traditionally, churches were places where we marked turning-points in our lives. The parish church was where your parents took you to be baptised, and you took your parents to be buried after their deaths. In between, the church was a social and spiritual focus. But not now. Last year fewer than two citizens in a hundred attended an Anglican church. Many people have never been inside one. And since the underlying meaning of ‘church’ is its people, the buildings are fast becoming husks, outwardly part of the local scene but functionally mysterious. A similar combination of familiarity and unawareness surrounds the connection between church and nation. This book examines this topic.

In stock

Description

Parish churches have been at the heart of communities for more than a thousand years. But now, fewer than two in one hundred people regularly attend services in an Anglican church, and many have never been inside one. Since the idea of ‘church’ is its people, the buildings are becoming husks – staples of our landscapes, but without meaning or purpose. Some churches are finding vigorous community roles with which to carry on, but the institutional decline is widely seen as terminal.

Yet for Richard Morris, post-war parsonages were the happy backdrop of his childhood. In Evensong he searches for what it was that drew his father and hundreds like him towards ordination as they came home from war in 1945. Along the way we meet all kinds of people – archbishops, chaplains, campaigners, bell-ringers, bureaucrats, archaeologists, gravediggers, architects, scroungers – and follow some of them to dark places.

Part personal odyssey, part lyrical history, Evensong asks what churches stand for and what they can tell us; it explores why Anglicanism has often been fractious, and why it has become so diffuse. Spanning over two thousand years, it draws on new discoveries, reflects on the current state of the Church in England and ends amid the messy legacies of colonialism and empire.

Additional information

Weight 260 g
Dimensions 196 × 128 × 22 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

336

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

283.42 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K