During the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church, the Rev. Dr. Robyn M. Neville, President, honored the work of Dr. Ed Bond as Editor-in Chief of Anglican and Episcopal History, the journal of the Society. Below is the citation presented.

Citation in honor of the work of Dr. Ed Bond

Dr. Bond came to the editorship of Anglican and Episcopal History as a seasoned scholar.  He received he B.A. in religion from the College of William and Mary; an M.A. from the University of Chicago; and a Ph.D. in history from Louisiana State University.  His scholarly work is significant and wide-ranging.  He has published works on colonial Virginia, including Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-century Virginia and Spreading the Gospel in Colonial Virginia, comprising two volumes dedicated to preaching and sermons in the Old Dominion. He also lent his expertise to local history publishing a book on the history of St. James Episcopal Church in Baton Rouge Louisiana, as well as co-authoring, with Joan Gunderson, a volume on the history of the Episcopal Church in Virginia, which commemorated the 400^th anniversary of the founding of the Commonwealth.  As a teacher, Dr. Bond served as professor of history at Alabama A&M University and as a Visiting Professor of Church History of the School of Theology at the University of the South. 

In 2006 the Board of the Historical Society approved the appointment of Dr. Bond as the editor of Anglican and Episcopal History.  The Society’s minutes reflect (then) President Fredrica Harris Thompsett noting that “Dr. Bond will in June 2007 succeed the longtime editor, the Rev. Dr. John F. Woolverton upon his retirement.”  Since his first number of the Journal in September 2007, Dr. Bond admirably served as the John F. Woolverton Editor of Anglican and Episcopal History for the next 56 numbers, totaling 14 years of service. Under his capable leadership, the journal maintained excellent scholarship with an international scope including authors hailing from every continent of the globe (except Antarctica).  Dr. Bond also supervised the transition of the journal to the twenty-first century, supporting the changeover to an electronic format for members and various subscription services, which vastly expanded the accessibility and readership of AEH. Dr. Bond, in recent years, also forged a strong working relationship with the Board’s Publications Committee, whose chair remembers gratefully regular dinner meetings and fellowship in Richmond, while Dr. Bond worked with his newest co-author on their latest book project about the Episcopal Church in Virginia.

Such career accomplishments are worthy indeed of praise, but the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church also recognizes that Dr. Bond’s efforts were not for his own sake alone but for the greater service of the Church.  To this end, Dr. Bond’s service furthered the mission of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church by promoting “the preservation of the particular heritage of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America and its antecedents in order that the Church may be served in its mission of proclaiming Christ crucified and risen, and in its servanthood in the world.”  For this, Dr. Bond has the thanks of the Publications Committee, the Board, this president, and the membership of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church.

We have come to understand that Dr. Bond collects vintage cufflinks. We present to Dr. Bond, as a token of our esteem and gratitude, this pair of vintage Soviet-era Amazonite cufflinks.

In my own undergraduate years at the College of William and Mary, I double-majored in both Religious Studies and Geology. It might interest Dr. Bond to know that potassium feldspar, which is what Amazonite is (in the "microcline" family of potassium feldspars), actually has a storied history. It was used by the Egyptians in funerary decorations (on King Tut's funeral mask, for example), and by Amazon peoples in religious rituals (although what those rituals entailed, we simply don't know). The cufflinks as they appear here have a number of Albite inclusions (those are the white, wavy-looking strata that appear in alternating patterns), which would have seeped in during the process of igneous formation. Igneous minerals form in the Earth's crust out of the dual processes of both pressure and time. It seems to me that both historians and editors operate under analogous processes of pressure and time, with demonstrably beautiful results.

We are grateful to Dr. Bond for his dedicated service, witness, and sense of Christian mission. I invite us now to bow our heads for a prayer in thanksgiving of Dr. Bond’s work as editor, a ministry that he has imbued with his own personal style and expertise.

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Let us pray.

We give thanks to you, O Lord our God, for all your servants and witnesses of time past: for Abraham, the father of believers, and Sarah his wife; for Moses, the lawgiver, and Aaron, the priest; for Miriam and Joshua, Deborah and Gideon, and Samuel with Hannah his mother; for Isaiah and all the prophets; for Mary, the mother of our Lord; for Peter and Paul and all the apostles; for Mary and Martha, and Mary Magdalene; for Stephen, the first martyr, and all the martyrs and saints in every age and in every land. In your mercy, O Lord our God, give us, as you gave to them, the hope of salvation and the promise of eternal life; and we ask especially for your continued blessings on our colleague, Ed Bond, in gratitude for his ministry and service; through Jesus Christ our Lord, the first-born of all who serve the Kingdom through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church awarded grants to 8 recipients in 2021 to support significant research, publications and projects related to the history of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. Recipients are encouraged to publish, when appropriate, in Anglican and Episcopal History, the quarterly journal of the Historical Society. Applications for consideration were reviewed by the Grants Committee with final awards determined by the Board of Directors at their meeting in June. $13,000 was available for grants in the 2021 budget.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Tobin, Chair of the Grants Committee, announced recipients from applications received.

• Sade Oluwakemi Ayeni, MA candidate at the University of Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria, to pursue fieldwork in Akokoland, as part of her research into the role of women in the growth and development of the Anglican Diocese of Akoko, 1983–2019.

• Mary Báthory Vidaver, PhD candidate at the University of Mississippi, to pursue archival research at libraries in northern Virginia and at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, as part of her investigation into the role of the Social Gospel among southern white middle-class activists during the first half of the twentieth century.
• Graydon Dennison, PhD candidate at Temple University, to study the archives of Episcopal missionaries at the Episcopal Archives in Austin as part of his inquiry into how U.S. citizens treated not just the Canal Zone but the entirety of the Panamanian Republic as a colonial space during the period 1912–1936.·
• Daniel Emoru, PhD candidate at North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa, to fund completion of his doctoral thesis examining the impact of Anglican Christianity on the cultural beliefs and practices of the Iteso people of Western Kenya.
• Clayton Koppes, retired professor of history at Oberlin College, Ohio, to examine the archives of the National Episcopal AIDS Coalition, housed at the Episcopal Archives, Austin, as part of a book-length project on religious groups’ involvement in the AIDS crisis.
• The Living Church, for the purchase of a flatbed scanner and part of the stipend of a summer intern, in support of the publication’s continuing digitization project.
• Jessica Simmons, MA candidate at Oklahoma State University, to examine the Papers of Bishop William Hobart Hare, located at the Episcopal Archives, Austin, as part of her investigation into the relationship between the Episcopal Church and the Indigenous nations living in the Dakotas between 1875–1920.
• Heather White, assistant professor of Religion and Queer Studies at the University of Puget Sound, to study the archives of William Stringfellow, located at Cornell University, as part of a book-length project on the role of Episcopalians in early gay organizing in New York City, 1945–1980.

Additional details may be found at hsec.us/grants.

The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church is pleased to announce the Rev. Dr. Alan Hayes as recipient of the 2021 Nelson R. Burr Prize. Hayes is the Bishops Frederick and Heber Wilkinson Professor of the History of Christianity, Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. A priest in the Anglican Diocese of Niagara, Canada, he earned a B.A. from Pomona College, a B.D. and a Ph.D. from McGill University.

Dr. Hayes is honored for his article “The Elusive Goal: The Commitment to Indigenous Self-Determination in the Anglican Church of Canada, 1967-2020,” published in the September 2020 issue of Anglican and Episcopal History (Volume 89, No. 3), where he argues “…colonial assumptions and structures have proven tenacious, and that, although Indigenous self-determination is consistent with historical patterns of Christian mission and organization, the theological, constitutional, and financial obstacles to decolonization have defied solution.” Models which could better promote indigenous self-determination within the Anglican Church of Canada are explored.

The Burr prize honors the renowned scholar Nelson R. Burr, whose two-volume A Critical Bibliography of Religion in America (1961) and other works constitute landmarks in the field of religious historiography. A selection committee of the Historical Society determines an author of the most outstanding article in the Society's journal. The award also honors that which best exemplifies excellence and innovative scholarship in the field of Anglican and Episcopal history.

The Burr selection committee also decided two other articles that merit recognition for excellent and timely scholarship. Samuel J. Richards’ “Historical Revision in Church: Re-examining the ‘Saint’ Edward Colston,” published in the September 2020 issue, investigates the legacy of a philanthropist, enslaver, and High Anglican who lived from 1636 to 1721. David M. Goldberg’s “Drink Ye All of This: The Episcopal Church and the Temperance Movement,” published in the March 2020 issue examines the Episcopal Church’s approach to the temperance movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Each article is available as a PDF by clicking the title.

The summer 2021 issue of Anglican and Episcopal History (AEH) represents a wide range of Anglicanism. It includes peer-reviewed studies related to trans-Atlantic Anglo-Catholic networks and ways the Book of Common Prayer shaped Unitarianism. The summer issue also includes church reviews and book reviews.

This issue of AEH also marks the final one for Ed Bond as editor-in-chief. Bond, an expert in the history of colonial Virginia, is retiring after long-time service that began in 2007.

In Bond’s final issue, the lead study examines ways Anglo-Catholicism and Confederate sympathies in England influenced fundraising efforts for the University of the South, Sewanee, led by the then-Episcopal Bishop of Tennessee.

In this study, Sewanee church history professor Benjamin J. King calls for a closer examination of cotton manufacturing connections between England and the American South. He argues that “such research opens up a new field of enquiry in ecclesiastical and Confederate history by examining those lay and ordained Tractarians in Britain who were Confederate supporters.”

King’s study is titled “Church, Cotton, and Confederates: What Bishop Charles Todd Quintard’s Fundraising Trips to Great Britain Reveal About Some Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Catholics.” He shared an earlier version of this study with the Anglo-Catholic Historical Society.

David Ney then examines ways fondness for “the central role of common prayer” influences the Anglican faith. Ney uses Prosper of Aquitaine’s well-known dictum Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi to frame his analysis.

Using Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808) as a case study, Ney warns that, “The story of the genesis of the Unitarian Church invites clergy, liturgists, and worship leaders to consider whether what is corporately prayed (and sung) accords with what is said to be believed.” Lindsey, a Church of England priest, later founded the Unitarian church in England and introduced his own revised Book of Common Prayer in 1774.

Ney is a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada and associate professor of church history at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa.

AEH also includes three church reviews in its summer issue.

Church review editor J. Barrington Bates examines ongoing adaptations to worship during the covid pandemic. He examines ways Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago has used podcasts during “coronatide.” Other reviews examine a Triduum custom among Lutheran seminarians in Philadelphia and Gettysburg, Pa., and Sunday worship at St. Ursula’s Anglican Church in Bern, Switzerland, part of the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe.

Subscribers will also enjoy over 20 book reviews related to church history and the global Anglican Communion.

Examples include:

Bloy House seminarian Kathryn Nishibayashi’s review of Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion edited by former Episcopal Divinity School professor Kwok Pui-Lan. Nishibayahsi praises this collection of essays because it “…sheds light on this group of relatively unknown women” and helps move discussions of race in the United States beyond a predominately black/white binary.

Benjamin M. Guyer of the University of Tennessee at Martin reviews Peter Marshall’s Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation, calling it “a model of dispassionate reading and incisive analysis.”

Sr. Mary Winifred from the Episcopal Diocese of Easton reviews Archbishop Thabo Makgoba’s Faith and Courage: Praying with Mandela. A book she describes as being about “reconciliation and love” and “full of insight and understanding.”

Well-known author Christopher L. Webber reviews the republished paperback version of Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America by University of Pittsburgh professor Kirk Savage. Webber writes the book “…gives us so much to think about” and that it “leads us carefully through the history of the monument movement and helps us understand how carefully citizens and committees and sculptors worked to create monuments.”

The summer issue of AEH is available to members of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church and later available via JSTOR.org and other online services.

The Annual Meeting of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church will be held via Zoom on Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. The meeting will include reports on the activities of the Historical Society over the past year and elections. There will be time allowed for members to share thoughts and ideas for the good of the order.

The Rev. Dr. Robyn Neville, President, will chair the meeting. Additional reports will include the awarding of grants to recipients, the status of the Historical Society’s quarterly journal, Anglican and Episcopal History, the recipient of the Burr Prize for the best article in the journal, a financial report and a report on the African American Episcopal Historical Collection.

If you are a member of the Historical Society you may register by visiting hsec.us/annualmeeting or may contact Matthew Payne, Director of Operations, at administration@hsec.us or (920) 383-1910.

10 original contributions from presentations at the 2019 Tri-History Conference in Toronto have been published as a book. Trauma and Survival in the Contemporary Church: Historical Responses in the Anglican Tradition, edited by Jonathan Lofft and Thomas Power, adds a layer to the phenomenon of trauma reflecting experience within the context of the church, specifically the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Readers may explore of a variety of impacts and effects on individuals, groups and the institution of the Church caused by trauma. Chapters include:

• Samuel Hume Blake’s Pan-Anglican Exertions: Stopping the Expansion of Residential and Industrial Schools for Canada’s Indigenous Children, 1908 by William Acres
• Postwar Pacifism, Trauma, and The Canadian Churchman, 1919-1939 Gordon L. Heath
• ‘Behold the Deaconess and the Rector of St. George’s’: Sexual Harassment, Church Polity, and Middle Class Respectability in Early Twentieth Century Canadian Anglicanism by Norman Knowles
• Transmuting Trauma: The Emergence and Proliferation of War Honour Rolls in Anglican Churches by Glenn J Lockwood
• Anglican Orders after Apostolicae Curae by J. Luis Dizon
• Post-War Trauma: Church Growth and Contraction in Toronto by David Harrison
• The Church of Ireland: Trauma, Opportunity, Legacy by Thomas P. Power
• Southern Protestant Experiences during the Irish Revolution, 1919-1923: Reports from Church of Ireland Synods by Brian M. Walker
• Earthquake Trauma, Recovery and Resilience: The Story of Christchurch Cathedral, Aotearoa New Zealand by Victoria Matthews
• Recovery from an Evangelical and Pentecostal Cult W. by David Neelands

Learn more here

The spring 2021 issue of Anglican and Episcopal History (AEH) considers approaches by Anglican Communion clerics responding to racist policies in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and at the University of the South, Sewanee. These two research essays are complemented by 3 church reviews and 25 book reviews.

In “The Brightness of Dying: Arthur Shearly Cripps as Poet and Priest,” Deanna Briody investigates one missionary’s work among the Mashona people in Southern Rhodesia. She examines the English-born Cripps’ (1869-1952) prolific writing focused on Christology as “the central and driving force of his life” to conclude that his “theology of God as self-emptying sufferer… informed his poetic vision.” Briody considers Cripps’ hatred of racism as motivating his advocacy of territorial segregation in An Africa for Africans (1927). The irony of advocating racial segregation as a practical way to protect Mashona land from European encroachment adds complexity to historical debates.

Briody is graduate writing tutor at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa. She attends Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Pittsburgh.

The Rev. Brandt L. Montgomery, chaplain of St. James School near Hagerstown in the Diocese of Maryland, then considers the sixth Bishop of Alabama’s actions during the 1952-53 integration debate at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.

In “Charles Colcock Jones Carpenter and the Sewanee Integration Controversy,” Montgomery argues that the Sewanee debate “…was a turning point for Carpenter on the issue of race” which moved him “toward a gradualist integration philosophy” designed to combat fears of “social chaos.” A decade later, Bishop Carpenter (1899-1969) became lead signatory to the 1963 “Statement by Alabama Clergymen” that was rebuked by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his iconic “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Montgomery concludes that Carpenter’s gradualist approach put him on “the negative side of civil rights history.”

In addition to these two studies, church review editor J. Barrington Bates offers his third reflection on approaches to worship in Episcopal churches during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a detailed account of the Anglo-Catholic St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, part of the Diocese of Pennsylvania. A second church review invites readers to learn about a pre-pandemic Sunday Mass at Old St. Paul’s in Edinburgh, part of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and a final piece considers the three mainline Protestant chapels of Berry College, an institution founded by educational pioneer and Episcopalian Martha Berry (1865-1942), in Rome, Georgia.

These articles along with a wide range of book reviews related to current scholarship are available immediately to members of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church. Articles are later indexed on JSTOR.org and other online platforms.

The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church invites applications for grants to be made in 2021. Awards are made as one of the Society’s objectives: promotion of the preservation of the particular heritage of the Episcopal Church and its antecedents. To be considered, applications must be submitted by May 1st with awards announced in July. Recipients are expected to make an appropriate submission to the Society’s journal, Anglican and Episcopal History.

General Grants
Applications for a general grant may come from individuals as well as academic and ecclesiastical groups. Requests are received to support significant research, conferences, and publication relating to the history of the Episcopal Church as well as the Anglican church in the worldwide Anglican Communion. A typical request may include funding for travel to visit archives or other resources, dissertation research, or seed money or support for a larger project. Examples of past awards funded include support of documentary films, dissertation research, publication of books and articles, support for a history conference and other purposes. Awards funded are generally $500-$2,000, depending on the number of awards approved and amount of funds available.

Robert W. Prichard Prize next awarded in July 2022.
The Robert W. Prichard Prize recognizes the best Ph.D., Th.D., or D.Phil. dissertation which considers the history of the Episcopal Church (including 17th and 18th century British colonies that became the United States) as well as the Anglican church in the worldwide Anglican Communion. The prize is named to honor the Rev. Dr. Robert W. Prichard, a noted historian and author in the discipline who was a longtime member and President of the Historical Society Board. The application process opens February 1, 2022. Applicants may submit a dissertation for consideration successfully defended between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2021. It may be submitted by the author or on their behalf. The dissertation need not focus solely, or even principally, on the history of the Episcopal Church or Anglicanism. The selection committee welcomes dissertations which place that history in conjunction with other strands of church history, or even place it in dialogue with non-ecclesial themes of American history. The Episcopal or Anglican element of the work should be a constitutive, not peripheral, part of the dissertation. Submissions should be a full electronic version of the dissertation, complete with all scholarly apparatus. The recipient will receive a $2,000 prize and be a guest of the Historical Society at the HSEC Annual Meeting to receive the award.

For details including application instruction and information, visit hsec.us/grants.

The winter issue of Anglican and Episcopal History (AEH) is now in print. The latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church features studies and book reviews that examine the relationship between monarchy, revolution, Puritanism, and the Church of England.

Two detailed studies consider the role of Anglicanism in England’s seventeenth century revolutions.

First, John William Klein considers a rural case study of patronage during the Nonjuring Schism, a division in the Church of England created when some clerics refused to swear allegiance to monarchs William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In “Francis Cherry, Patronage, and the Shottesbrooke Nonjurors”, Klein offers a rural case study of patronage based on the relationship between Anglo-Irish scholar and theologian Henry Dodwell the Elder (1641-1711) and country squire Francis Cherry (1665-1713). Klein concludes that the countryside estate of Shottesbrooke Park in Berkshire, England, was “a model of rural patronage and community for Nonjurors” and argues that “patronage was essential to survival of the Nonjurors.” The small Nonjuring movement fizzled by the mid-1700s.

Kent M. Pettit then invites readers to consider ways King Charles II used the Great Fire of London in 1666 to strengthen the shaky monarchy. Pettit considers the debate between preservation and innovation in regards to the destruction of the medieval Old St. Paul’s Cathedral. He also invites parallels to present-day political and religious discussions in Paris regarding Notre Dame Cathedral. In “Saved as by Fire (and poets): Charles II, Restored Head of the Church”, Pettit argues that Charles II’s leadership and timely maneuvering increased the monarch’s power as the king offered a Christian vision of “grace and hope” in contrast to pessimistic Puritans’ emphasis on “guilt or sin”.

AEH also includes multiple book reviews related to revolution and the Church of England, Anglican studies, women’s studies, and more.

In the first book review related to revolution, Norman Jones of Utah State University considers The Puritans: A Transatlantic History by David D. Hall. Then, C. Scott Pryor of Campbell University School of Law reviews Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell: A Life; and Tanner J. Moore of Purdue University considers the expanded edition of Not Peace but a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Reformation by Stephen Baskerville.

Several helpful volumes related to Anglican studies are also included. Among them are: Reasonable Radical? Reading the Writings of Martyn Percy edited by Ian S. Markham and Joshua Daniel; Costly Communion: Ecumenical Initiative and Sacramental Strife in the Anglican Communion edited by Mary Chapman and Jeremy Bonner; The Future of Orthodox Anglicanism edited by Gerald McDermott; and Common Prayer: Reflections on Episcopal Worship by Joseph Pagano and Amy E. Richter.

Book reviews related to women’s studies include Joan R. Gundersen on Ordinary Saints: Women, Work, and Faith in Newfoundland by Bonnie Morgan and Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook reviewing English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450-1550 by Barbara J. Harris and Feminist Interpretations of Mary Astell edited by Alice Sowaal and Penny A. Weiss.

In addition to these studies and book reviews, church review editor J. Barrington Bates takes readers to a worship service at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Springfield Center, New York, part of the Diocese of Albany.

These articles and other book reviews in the winter issue are available to members of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church and later available via JSTOR.org and other online services.

The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church announces election of the Rev. Dr. Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook to be the sixth Editor of Anglican and Episcopal History, its peer-reviewed journal. Her tenure will follow Dr. Ed Bond who has served as Editor since 2007. One purpose of the Historical Society is promotion of the preservation of the particular heritage of the Episcopal Church and its antecedents. Published quarterly since 1932, the journal aids this purpose and is a vehicle for publication throughout the Anglican Communion.

Kujawa-Holbrook is Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty of Claremont School of Theology. She holds degrees from Marquette University, Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard Divinity School, Episcopal Divinity School, Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, and earned a Ph.D. from Boston College. She is a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and serves as a professor of Anglican Studies at Bloy House. An author of thirteen books, numerous articles, training manuals, curricula, and reviews, she is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She worked for the Episcopal Church in education and ministries with young people. She has been Book Review Editor of Anglican and Episcopal History since 2010.

“My interest in this position is to play a role in defining the field and in setting the stage for the next generation of scholars, practitioners, and interested readers in Anglican and Episcopal History” Kujawa-Holbrook said. She noted that “after a generation in theological education, I am well aware that many of the supports that used to be in place for faculty, emerging scholars, and practitioners are no longer there.” Recognizing a shifting environment, she observes “it is a crucial time to work toward a sustainable future by cultivating research, writing, teaching, and practice in historical studies related to our unique branch of the Christian tradition. All that the journal and our historical organizations do is an investment in the field, integral to sharing the extraordinary richness and depth of our tradition.”

To ensure a smooth transition, Kujawa-Holbrook will work with retiring Editor Bond over the next two issues. Additional information about Anglican and Episcopal History may be found at hsec.us/aeh.