Grey Parrot Gallery has loaned a number of rare Books of Common Prayer to the historical exhibit which can be seen at St. Philip’s Cathedral. The following information is from the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta.
Historical First Editions of the Book of Common Prayer: Diverse in Faith, Unified in Worship?
In the wake of one of the more decisive and controversial General Conventions and Canterbury’s response to the Episcopal Church’s stance on equality, many are left asking what does it means to be Anglican? Since its formation by Henry VIII in the 16th century, the Church of England and her sister provinces have hardly grown without conflict. History has shown that we are a Church that values tradition, fights for progress, and lets former progress become tradition that prevents us from moving forward. As a Church that defines itself by being unified in liturgy, these struggles are illustrated best through the various editions and evolution of our Book of Common Prayer. The Cathedral Bookstore in partnership with the Order of Saint Anthony the Great and the Grey Parrot Gallery of Buckhead are thrilled to offer an exhibit of the primary editions of the Book of Common Prayer from Archbishop’s Laud’s Prayer Book of 1637 to the Prospectus of the 1979 Standard BCP. A collection such as this is exceptionally rare outside of our oldest seminary rare book collections. We hope you’ll take the opportunity now to see these examples of our sacred liturgy, read about how the Church has changed through the centuries and see the promise of where our evolving liturgy can take us into ministry of the 21st century.
This week President Barack Obama and his Administration unveiled a plan to revamp the United States’ regulatory framework for its struggling financial system. This sweeping plan, however, represents only the most recent salvo in the never ending struggle between markets, which can bring about fantastic or catastrophic results, and government’s attempts to temper them. While the debate concerning government’s proper role in the economy is nearly universal, it takes an interesting significance in the case of democracies, where politicians must make their case to an often skeptical or frightened public.
The most famous instance of this debate occurred during the last major upheaval, The Great Depression. While scholars debate the implications and effects of both the laissez-faire approach of the Herbert Hoover and the drastic and rapid reforms by Franklin Roosevelt, each man presented their case to the American people, and their arguments are prescient for our current crisis. The Grey Parrot has first editions of each President’s writings on the nature of markets and government’s role in them.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” With these and the 248 words that followed in his address at the Battlefield at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln gave a voice to the hopes of a nation which found itself in its gravest hour. Despite his statement that the world will not “long remember what we say here,” his words and deeds continue to echo to us through the decades and centuries since their immediate causes have long passed. February 12, 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth in southeastern Kentucky, then a slave state, and we mark this date not only to remember the great and terrible events of Lincoln’s time and times since, but to try to move forward with similar purpose and resolution.
Abraham Lincoln became the 16th President of the United States after a rapid rise from local and state to national politics. Even in the early years of his political career, his intelligence and eloquence elevated him above the specific issues he discussed. Lincoln was mostly self-taught, even as a child when his 18 months of formal education were supplemented by an insatiable reading habit. After he attained political office in the Illinois state legislature in 1834, he began to teach himself law, and became an accomplished lawyer behind his keen insight and profound closing arguments. These skills combined with Lincoln’s antipathy toward the practice of slavery would guarantee he not remain at the state level of politics.
After serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, Lincoln spent a time exclusively practicing law, but it was his speech in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 which recast him in the national spotlight. Lincoln, who strictly rejected any expansion of slavery, was appalled by the act which repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed potential future states to determine by popular sovereignty their slavery status. According to Lincoln,
[The Act has a] declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate it. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world — enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites — causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty — criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.
After Lincoln’s 1854 speech and series of slavery debates with Stephen Douglass in 1858 in an ultimately losing bid for office in the U.S. Senate, Abraham Lincoln emerged as the leader of the newly formed Republican Party. Lincoln was chosen as the party’s Presidential candidate in the 1860 election, ironically as the more moderate choice regarding slavery over William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase. Even as the “moderate” choice, however, Lincoln’s candidacy galvanized the southern states against him, and he did not win a single one of them. He still carried the election due to sharp regional divisions in the previously dominant Democratic Party.
Lincoln entered office as a War-time President, and innumerable works have been written describing his policies and execution of the American Civil War. The quality that pervaded his time in office up to his tragic assassination in 1864, however, is the same which carried him from Kentucky to the Office of the President: a political pragmatism and flexibility which never betrayed his moral resolve and belief in the sanctity of the United States and what it stood for even in the worst of times. In Lincoln’s second inaugural address, after four years of bloody conflict and only a month before his assassination, he acknowledged the evils committed and damage done to the country, but concluded that a way forward was both necessary and achievable. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” 200 years after Lincoln’s birth, even if his ideals remain incomplete, his words have become part of our national heritage and a worthy goal for our nation moving forward.
“When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent.” So began one of the greatest revolutions in the history of scientific thought. February 12, 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and for those fascinated by not only natural evolution but also the evolution of Darwin’s ideas, the Grey Parrot Gallery has a number of historical pieces which we would like to share.
Charles Darwin, a British aristocrat training to go into the church, accompanied the Beagle at the request of its captain, Robert Fitzroy, as his personal guest. As the opening of his opus, On the Origin of Species, would attest, this trip would be a critical shaping influence on the rest of his life and studies. Evolution through natural selection, what Darwin termed descent with modification, fundamentally reshaped the study of natural history, biology, and science as a whole. The ideas which would later be expressed fully in Origin of Species can be read in their nascent stages in Darwin’s Journal of Researches , more commonly known as The Voyage of the Beagle. This journal represents a large part of the primary material which Darwin would later revisit in forming his theories. First published in 1839, the second edition published in 1845 was revised to include ideas already newly developed around the ideas of evolution and natural selection. The Grey Parrot is proud to have a copy of the second edition here in the store for sale or simply interested parties to browse.
A common myth persists that Charles Darwin perceived the workings of natural selection directly in the forests of the Galapagos Islands and mainland South America. Darwin’s beliefs, however, underwent drastic changes in the years following his trip, and interacted with other changing ideas of the time. Darwin dedicated his Journal of Researches to Geologist Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology presented the concept of an ancient earth changing gradually over time. Social and economic thought, such as the ideas of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, also are also credited large roles in shaping the theory, style, and metaphors of natural selection and its foundations in competition. Malthus, whose principle work An Essay on the Principle of Population described the world of infinite demand and limited resources, set the stage for a natural world filled with competing species. The first American version of this important work, based on the third London edition (here to the left) can be seen in our gallery.
Although speculation regarding change over time and evolution had existed for decades and maybe centuries, Darwin’s conception of natural selection was contentious from the outset. Darwin’s greatest early defender was Thomas Henry Huxley, whose strong ideas and combative stands earned him the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Huxley’s historical legacy is punctuated by a legendary debate with Archbishop Samuel Wilberforce, in which Huxley supposedly told the doubting bishop “I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.” Although the events of the debate are of dubious veracity, this story exemplifies how controversial Darwin’s theory was when first presented. Today it remains controversial but also supremely influential in the world of science, even 200 years after Darwin’s birth.
This past month, readers lost a famous voice. Like many authors whose works become classics, John Updike wrote outside of what was considering customary. He disregarded what was considered appropriate. He turned our attention to what had been often overlooked.
Born on March 18, 1932 to aspiring author Linda Grace Hoyer Updike and high school math teacher Wesley Russell Updike, the young John was raised first in Shillington, Pennsylvania until his family moved to a farmhouse in Plowville, PA. The match was perfect, as the seclusion and rural setting fit well with John’s quiet and introverted nature.
His aspiration for writing came from this mother. He often recounted how, when he was sick, he was stuck at home with a fever and watched his mother at her desk. The bundles of papers that went away to publishers (and often came back) was a ritual that entranced him.
With the aid of a scholarship, he attended Harvard where he dabbled at editorial cartoons as well as writing. After graduation in 1954, he pursued his love a graphic arts and enrolled at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University. His move to Oxford was a fortuitous one. While in England, he was interviewed by E. B. White (author of the children’s classics Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web and his wife Katherine, both editors for The New Yorker. They encouraged him to pursue a writing career with the magazine.
Updike was no stranger to The New Yorker. His aunt had gotten his family a subscription when he was still young. In the same year as his graduation from Harvard, he sold a poem and short story to the magazine. So, taking the Whites’ advice, he moved back to the States and settled in Manhattan – a far cry from the quiet setting in which he grew up.
He remained as a salaried staff writer there for two years before deciding that he needed to move and devote his time to writing literature rather than just articles. It was an uncertain step for him and his wife and their two children, but one he was dedicated to if he was going to truly develop as a writer. His family moved to Massachusetts, a far more familiar setting for him.
His first major work to be published was The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures in 1958. It was a collection of poetry. His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published the same year. His original publisher, Harper and Brothers, tried to change the ending of the work. Dedicated to his craft, Updike left Harper and Brothers and had the work published through Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
With a positive reception of the work, he planned a more ambitious series starting with Rabbit Run. From the beginning, he knew the story would run through several books, but mostly likely no more than three. When Rabbit Run was published in 1960, Knopf, who had published his first novel without alteration, was concerned about the explicit descriptions of the novel’s protagonist Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s sexual escapades and decided to censor portions of the book. The book came out to great acclaim and the text was restored in full for the British edition and later American editions. In the end, the series would include four titles with Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990). The latter two earning him two Pulitzer Prizes for literature.
His works brought a new perspective to readers as he focused on the everyday mundane. Updike insisted that even in a typical small town middle class family there was a story. Not only that, but he had no problem writing about the sexual and adulterous secrets of small town America just as well. In a 1985 interview he explained simply, “Sex is ecstasy. Sex is transcendence!”
Throughout this life, he was the model of a disciplined writer. Every morning, six days a week, he would go to his office and write for several hours. His discipline certainly paid off. In addition to two Pulizters, he was award the National Book Award in 1963 for The Centaur and was the youngest person to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Through his acclaim as a writer, he served as cultural ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and through the ‘70s. In 1974, he joined his voice with authors John Cheever, Arthur Miller and Richard Wilbur to implore the Soviet Union to cease persecution and censorship of dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
His literary career would span over half a century. In addition to his Rabbit series, he works include Couples, Bech: A Book, The Witches of Eastwick, A Month of Sundays, Toward the End of Time, and numerous poems, short stories, articles and literary critiques.
His last book The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to his 1984 novel, was published in 2008. Following a battle with lung cancer, John Updike passed this January, 2009.
