1. As the current edition of the Book of Common Prayer celebrates its 350th anniversary, James Wood at The New Yorker offers a fascinating reflection on the book’s literary and cultural significance. It’s not everyday you read the sentences in those pages like “The sinner is justified—redeemed from sin, made righteous—by faith alone in God, not by doing good works or by buying ecclesiastical favors”:
Cranmer had been a Cambridge scholar (he had held a lectureship in Biblical studies) and a diplomat, before being plucked by Henry VIII to be archbishop, and he almost certainly did not imagine that he was writing one…