World Premier of Owen Reid's St. Catharine's Service for Choral Evensong

October 21, 2020

Bio

Bishop Anthony Burton is the retired Bishop of Saskatchewan.

Featured Posts

Featured

January 14, 2021

Robert Crouse died ten years ago tonight.

January 14, 2021

The Rev. Dr. Robert Crouse, one of the most influential Canadian theologians of his generation, died ten years ago tonight in his rural childhood home on Crouse Road, Crousetown, Nova Scotia, where his family had lived for more than 200 years. He was 80.

He had left the house 70 years before to attend King’s Collegiate School in Windsor, Nova Scotia, where he would later be judged the most brilliant student in its 263-year history. Academic distinction followed, with degrees from King’s, Tübingen, Toronto, and Harvard; and teaching posts at the universities of Harvard, Toronto, Bishop’s (Lennoxville), and Dalhousie. He taught for 32 years at King’s College.

A world authority on Augustine and Dante, he was in great demand internationally as a lecturer. For many years he served as the first non-Roman Catholic visiting professor at the Augustinianum of the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. With James Doull he established a school of thought concerning the theological tradition of the ancient and medieval worlds that now has an international following.

January 14, 2021

May 31, 2020

Lament for a Nation: George Floyd and the Promise of Pentecost

May 31, 2020

“I can’t breathe.”

“Please, please, I can’t breathe. Please, man, please.” The white police officer was kneeling hard on his neck during his arrest Monday. George Floyd was black. He was handcuffed. He was at their mercy.

But there was no mercy.

May 31, 2020

January 1, 2020

The Last Emperor of China

January 1, 2020

The Forbidden City is not a city at all but a palace of the soul. It comprises a succession of enormous stark granite courtyards each surmounted by a terracotta hall behind which there are ever larger and higher courtyards and a still larger halls.

January 1, 2020

Happy New Year from Lord Tennyson (and me)

January 1, 2020

Happy New Year from Lord Tennyson (and me)

January 1, 2020

Consider the Oyster

January 1, 2020

It is a quirk of the human mind that some of the things we think are easy to know are hard to know and some of the things we think are hard to know are easy to know.

Consider the oyster. There is nothing quite like an oyster. If you like oysters (as I like oysters) there something wonderful about the taste, the ocean smell and slimely descent of an oyster down your gullet. An oyster calls out to you raw, it calls out to you breaded and fried, it says “eat me in a poboys sandwich with cole slaw.” An oyster is an excellent thing, a happy ornament to God’s creation. We would all be poorer if there were no bivalve molluscs in the world.

January 1, 2020

Chronological Snobbery

January 1, 2020

Why do people imagine that they know more than the generations that went before them? Because in an abstract sense it is true. The best modern libraries are more comprehensive than the best older ones and the content of books has never been more universally or easily accessed. Humanity allows its children to stand on its shoulders.

But libraries are not individuals and ‘humanity’ is nobody at all.

January 1, 2020