National days of prayer in a period of crisis, 1966-74

Dipping one's toe tentatively into the new world of Open Peer Review, a draft paper of mine on archbishop Michael Ramsey is now available for comment and criticism at the History Working Papers Project. The idea is that HWPP can re-create the interchange of a seminar online, with readers commenting on the paper as a whole and on individual paragraphs, with an opportunity for the author to respond, and post revised versions for subsequent rounds of review. More on the HWPP project is available here.

The paper examines the petitions that were made to Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury, to call a national day of prayer. It considers the grounds upon which the petitions was made, and the Church’s official reactions to them. In doing so, it sheds light from an unaccustomed angle onto attitudes towards petitionary prayer among some of the British public, on understandings of the role of the archbishop as leader of the nation’s religious life, and of the recent providential history of the nation, particularly during the 1939-45 war.

St Paul's and OccupyLSX: towards a web archive

I thought it would be worth beginning to assemble some of the coverage of the OccupyLSX encounter with St Paul's. Once we got past the rather lame 'moneylenders and the Temple' comments, there has been some rather more trenchant and useful comment regarding the incident as an opportunity lost for the Church of England. This is necessarily just a snapshot, and I'd be more than happy to add to it if readers were to suggest.

• Observer editorial, Sunday 30th October and Andrew Rawnsley in the same issue
• Giles Fraser on his reasons for resigning as Canon Chancellor, in the Guardian, October 27.
• George Carey's intervention in the Telegraph, 27 Oct, and that of the local MP, the Conservative Mark Field.
• Peter Stanford on the Church's lost opportunity
• Reactions to the encounter between the Bishop and the Dean with the protesters on Sunday 29th, in the Telegraph , and video from the BBC of Chartres addressing the crowd.
• Graeme Knowles' statement on resigning as Dean, October 31st, along with the reaction of the Bishop of London and of the Chapter. It provoked a characteristically measured and lucid response from Damian Thompson in the Telegraph, and the first statement from Canterbury of the whole episode, which has been followed up with a fuller response to the broader issues on Nov 1st.