Daily Archives: June 16, 2006

NIN/Bauhaus Show

It was awesome. It was so cool to see Bauhaus live. For those unfamiliar, they are widely regarded as the fathers of the goth rock movement. Think the Psychedelic Furs, but louder and darker. The only problem with their set was that the lead was using moves that were–with good reason–banned a decade or so ago. Bela Lugosi may be dead but cheesy camp clearly isn’t. He spent much of his time prancing around with a stick. Bad. People older than their mid-forties just shouldn’t prance around a stage… Embrace your gravitas, man!

NIN was just amazing. Trent has cut his hair off which bummed us out a bit but the music was tremendous. Lots of old favorites. No encore, but they finished with ‘Head like a Hole’; no encore could possibly top that. My personal favorite moment was when they did ‘Dead Souls’–an old Joy Division tune. M reminded me that it was off The Crow soundtrack; I’d totally forgotten about that…

Sarum Anglicans?

In thinking about the various Anglo-Catholic tribes, one way to order them is to consider how they define Catholicism and particularly what set of documents, texts and liturgies they appeal to as final authorities. Is it Whole-Church-ness and thus an infusion of Orthodoxy? Or is it Roman-ness and if so, what council or councils are the best arbiter of this? So–you’ve got the Tridentine Anglo-Catholics who adhere to Trent and Counter-Reforation practice on one hand then the so-call Papalist Ango-Catholics who are willing to go along with Vatican II and current Roman use. M and I were having a discussion about this the other day. What we came down to is this: The Anglican heritage encompasses neither Trent nor Vatican II. In fact, being Anglican is pretty much a repudiation of Trent. That is, the sole decent argument for a Church of England apart from Rome that didn’t bring it all down to divorce is that the English use was different from the Roman use. Trent did introduce a novelty in trying to papally enforce one standardized liturgy.

If this is so, then why do we not look more to the uses of Sarum, Hereford, and York than to Trent? The obvious issue is continuous practice; these uses stopped being part of the lived liturgy of the people and now remain only as books. That’s fine for texts, but ceremonial is not captured as well even by descriptions. *Sigh* What’s a High Anglican to do…?