The Episcopal Church is the American branch of the Anglican Communion.
Finally severed from Rome under Henry VIII, the Anglican Church took shape theologically under Henry's three children:
Edward VI, a firm Protestant who reigned for six years, long enough to institute the first Book of Common Prayer, a decidedly Protestant document;
Mary I, a devout Catholic who reigned for five years, long enough to reinstate certain Catholic practices that Edward had proscribed; and finally
Pragmatic Elizabeth, who in her forty-year reign labored brilliantly to forge not only a society but an established church that was broad enough to include all but the most extreme Catholics and Protestants.
The result was--and is--a church of astonishing theological breadth. But it is not breadth in a lax, lazy, anything-goes sense.
The Anglican Church, when truest to its own theological traditions, views the mind not as a potential instrument of the Devil but as a gift of God.
And it takes seriously the idea of the community of faith as a context within which people from different backgrounds and with varying perspectives can openly share their experiences of God, can attend to one another in a spirit of love, and can thereby gain insights that may help every member of the community to move somewhat closer to God's truth.
Credits: Text from Stealing Jesus, by Bruce Bawer; used by (we hope) permission of the publisher. Pictures obtained from Google, using an advanced image search.
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