This landmark volume from an influential group of Anglican theologians explores baptism as the foundation for living out all forms of Christian vocation – in confirmation, marriage, ordination, and religious life. It offers theological and pastoral perspectives on the centrality and significance of baptism for a Church that has perhaps lost a sense of the radical commitment that baptism calls for. It explores the meaning of vows today as promise, covenant, oath, Rule and explores the difference between religious and secular vows. It considers the nature of the vows under which all Christians live, and the particular vows such as marriage and ordination embraced by some. Together, these perceptive reflections offer a theological and pastoral resource for activating every Christian's the sense of call and response whatever their mode of life.

The Vowed Life

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List of Contributors

Introduction: The Vowed Life – Its Demand and Promise

Part I: Re-Thinking Anglican Vows: The Integrity of Vows in the Christian Life

1. The Revival of the Religious Life in the Church of England: How Vows Became Newly Contentious in a Victorian Culture of Convention

2. ‘Name this child’: Speech, Identity and Life-long Commitment in Baptismal Vows

3. The Role of Confirmation in the Vowed Life: A Reassessment

4. Marriage: Vowing to Take Time

5. Clerical Vows: The ‘Wild Choice’ of Ordination

6. Religious Vows: ‘The Liberty to Bind’

Part II: Contemporary Anglican Reflections on the ‘Vowed Life’ of Religious Community

7. Religious Vows in the Church of England, Then and Now

8. Journeying into New Monasticism

9. ‘Some Peculiar Genius’: The ‘Intentional Communities’ of Little Gidding

10. Evangelical Monasticism: A Not-So-Strange Sympathy

11. Choosing to be Beholden

Two Poems

Afterword: The Vowed Life

A Note on the Littlemore Group and Its Conferences

This landmark volume from an influential group of Anglican theologians explores baptism as the foundation for living out all forms of Christian vocation – in confirmation, marriage, ordination, and religious life. It offers theological and pastoral perspectives on the centrality and significance of baptism for a Church that has perhaps lost a sense of the radical commitment that baptism calls for. It explores the meaning of vows today as promise, covenant, oath, Rule and explores the difference between religious and secular vows. It considers the nature of the vows under which all Christians live, and the particular vows such as marriage and ordination embraced by some. Together, these perceptive reflections offer a theological and pastoral resource for activating every Christian’s the sense of call and response whatever their mode of life.

• Sparkling theological reflection from a leading group of thinkers in the church today. • Focuses on a subject that is central to Christian life – by virtue of their baptism, all Christians live a vowed life. • Explores vows in all their forms – baptism, marriage, ordination, traditional religious life and new monasticism. • A resource for deepening the spiritual life of individuals and local church and parish communities.

The Vowed Life reflects on a paradox in the Church today: one that represents an important challenge to its mission and witness. Vows continue to be made sacramentally in the Church, yet there remains a great longing for a vowed life which would be truly transforming and life-giving. Vows are simultaneously alluring and unappealing: lay memberships of religious orders have escalated, yet very few traditional religious communities have attracted younger members due to their more demanding lifelong commitments. The Vowed Life explores why and how this has come to be, and how the Church urgently needs to respond to this paradoxical challenge. Returning to baptism as the anchor of all other Christian vows, a range of contributors consider whether the longing for forms of life that are profoundly life-changing is a displaced desire for something that should be intrinsic to Christian life. In a Church that prioritises pastoral sensitivity, they ask how those demands could be newly expressed for our culture. In seeking a coherent theology of vows in liturgical practice and sacramental context, they find that fresh attention to 'the vowed life' also has much to offer to the Church's continuing conversations about sex, gender and identity, and to a 'mixed ecology' approach to the life of the Church and its mission.

The Vowed Life reflects on a paradox in the Church today. Vows are simultaneously alluring and unappealing: lay memberships of religious orders have escalated, yet few traditional communities have attracted younger members. The Vowed Life explores why this has come to be, and how the Church urgently needs to respond to this paradoxical challenge.

"The Vowed Life" examines the renewal of vowed religious life in the church, featuring insights from Anglican theologians on its significance for community and faith.

\["For anyone invested in the growth of the Anglican Church","The Vowed Life explores the renewal of traditional religious life ","Here you'll find a range of insightful and experienced reflections"\]

This landmark volume from some of today's most influential Christians explores a phenomenon that is bubbling up in today's church: the renewal of vowed religious life

Vowed Life

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Vowed Life

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