Mortal Follies: Episcopalians And The Crisis of Mainline Christianity

(Encounter Books, hardcover, 208 pp.)

In this important new volume, Mr. Murchison - a nationally syndicated columnist and longtime commentator on Anglican/Episcopal affairs - offers a comprehensive and engaging explanation of what happened to transform The Episcopal Church (TEC) within a few decades from a leading U.S. household of faith once boasting over 3.6 million adherents to a some 2 million-member (and still-shrinking) denomination involved in "a mad dash to keep up with...secular culture."

A historian with an extraordinary command of the English language, Murchison examines, in vivid, broad-brush style, the salient events, trends and currents of thought that combined to draw TEC into a pattern of focusing more on temporal than eternal concerns, and of tailoring its theological and doctrinal stands to a surrounding culture increasingly relaxed about historic norms and truths. It was (as Murchison sees it) a shift fueled by the convulsive 1960s, from which TEC leaders emerged with an appetite for trendy "social justice" activism.

The some 40 years of liberal revisionism that followed have seen TEC reject (for example) historic holy order, the sanctity of life, the classic Anglican liturgy and practice of common prayer, and orthodox teaching on sexual morality. In the same period, as Mortal Follies notes, TEC itself has been reduced to a distorted "shadow" of the faithful and influential U.S. Christian body it had once been.

Murchison uses the TEC model as a frame of reference by which to assess, and offer a cautionary tale to, the rest of U.S. mainline Christianity. He also analyzes the prospects for restoring mainline bodies to their true calling.

"Using the Episcopal Church as a window onto the general decline of the Protestant mainline, William Murchison has given us a graceful and absorbing account of a great tragedy: the story of a grand and historically rooted church that sold its birthright for a pot of message," says Wilfred M. McClay, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. "For any reader who wishes to understand not only what the Episcopal Church has become, but also what it once was, and why that loss matters so greatly to us all, this is the book to read." The price cited for this book below is 15 percent off the regular retail price.

Same-Sex Affection, Holiness and Ordination

A Response to Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold

The Episcopal Church has presented to the whole Anglican world a book, To Set our Hope on Christ, in which it explains its commitment to the blessing of same-sex couples and ordaining of persons in these covenanted unions. This 64 page booklet by Dr Toon deals primarily with the theological methods used by the Presiding Bishop and his team of writers to justify these innovations. He shows that the methods used to study Scripture and develop doctrine in the Episcopal leadership are of such a kind as always to produce innovations, heresy and error! What he says has implications for much of what the General Convention has produced and will produce.

Episcopal Innovations 1960-2004:

Theological and Historical Reflection on the Current Crisis in ECUSA

A careful description of the major changes in worship, doctrine and discipline in the Episcopal Church from 1960 to 2004, and an analysis of the origins of the major innovations and of their inter-relatedness. Necessary reading to ascertain what "revisionism" really means.

Anglican Identity

Keeping the Global Family Together

Anglicans worldwide are in search of their identity. Who they really are and what they stand for has been called into question recently by events especially in North America. In two major studies, The Windsor Report and The Virginia Report, there has been a major effort to answer the question of identity.

Dr Toon shows how the question has arisen, what answers are on the table and what else needs to be said in order for Anglican identity to be clear! He suggests that Anglicans need to look at their birth certificate or their naturalization papers, to see from whence they came to find out who they are.