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Earlier this year, the Marian Consort, a vocal ensemble known for performing Renaissance music, released an album of Catholic sacred music by English composer William Byrd. The album, entitled Singing in Secret: The Clandestine Catholic Music of William Byrd, is one of the finest sacred music releases in recent memory. (more…)

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Part 2 of 2. Part 1 here.

Partings II – Watts and The Church Today: Real Presence or Real Estate?

Watts was quite successful in his attempt to express the religio perennis in the language of Christian theology; not just in my opinion today, but among his Episcopal peers at the time (one bishop even called it “the most important book on religion in this century”[1]), (more…)

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Part 1 of 2

Alan W. Watts
Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion
New York: Pantheon, 1947; reissued with a new Preface, 1971
Kindle, 2016

“For God is not niggardly in his self-revelation; he exposes himself right before our eyes.” — Alan Watts (more…)

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Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s 2009 lecture on Professor Maurice Cowling. Unfortunately, the sound quality of the source is absolutely terrible, and there are many unintelligible passages. Both V. S. and I have racked our brains over this transcript long enough. Now we are crowdsourcing it to people who have a better ear for Bowden’s accent and the background knowledge necessary to pull words that elude us out of the buzz. (more…)

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Alan Watts is one of my favorite writers. Born in Chislehurst, Kent, England, Watts was raised an Anglican, but became a Buddhist at age 15. In 1941, while Watts was living in New York City, his first wife Eleanor had a mystical vision of Jesus. This led him to return to Anglicanism.

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