Evensong: People, Discoveries and Reflections on the Church in England

· Sold by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Ebook
336
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

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.

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 - st...

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About the author

Richard Morris (b. 1947) is an archaeologist and historian. He grew up in north Worcestershire and began his career working on excavations under York Minster. Among the themes in his writing are buildings and belief (Churches in the Landscape (1998); Evensong (2021)), place, identity and cultural memory (Time's Anvil (2013); Yorkshire (2018)), and aviation and its people. Dam Buster joins two earlier biographies - Guy Gibson (1994) and Cheshire: the Biography of Leonard Cheshire VC (2000) - which connect in the world of flight and the deeds of No. 617 Squadron RAF.

Richard Morris (b. 1947) is an archaeologist and historian. He grew up in north Worcestershire and began his career working on excavations under York Minster. Among the themes in his writing are buildings and belief (Churches in the Landscape (1998); Evensong (2021)), place, identity and cultural...

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