Church construction was one of the most challenging, and most political, tasks undertaken by medieval cities. Comparing examples from across Europe reveals profound differences, however, in both the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture; that is, how building projects were administered and how their administration shaped their socio-political significance. Although ranging across the continent, this article is centered on construction in two representative cities: Vienna and London. While the former had a small number of churches, all under the direct control of the mayor and council, the latter had over a hundred, each overseen by locally appointed officers. In Vienna, church construction was, thus, an important field of activity for the city government, which oversaw the work and celebrated its own leadership of the project; in London, it lay outside civic control and offered local opportunities for domination by wealthy families. This difference can be found across the continent, separating the large, old cities of England, northern France, Spain, and the Low Countries, which could have numerous churches, from smaller towns and cities both in these places and across the rest of central, northern, and southern Europe, which typically had a single, major parish church and only a few subordinate ones. This article considers the implications of these two contrasting models—centralized and decentralized, civic and parochial, high government and local politics—on how architectural production functioned as a field of political activity and how church building shaped local distributions and articulations of power in medieval Europe.

The Oxford Movement in the 1830s prompted some formidable theological scholarship which profoundly affected the lives and personalities of many Oxford-educated Church of England clergymen, not a few of whom combined deeply scholarly lives with successful parish ministries. This essay examines the lives of two such men, Canon T.F. Simmons, a parish priest in Yorkshire for some thirty years, and Bishop Mandell Creighton, much of whose scholarly writing was produced in a remote Northumberland parish before his return to Cambridge and London. By the end of the century such learned clergymen were becoming a rarity in the Church of England.

When asked by an expert in the law, ‘And who is my neighbour?’, Jesus answered with the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). This was a radically inclusive answer: your neighbour could be anyone. By contrast, a priest who asks an ecclesiastical lawyer ‘and who is my parishioner?’ may be given a far less clear or satisfying answer.

This article is a personal reflection on the twelve-year experience of being a parish without a resident priest. The article offers a socio-historical picture of St. Joseph's Parish, Bunhill Row, London EC1. It considers how some Church documents refer to ‘parish’, including the Code of Canon Law; the 1980 National Pastoral Congress; and Pope Francis’ vision of ‘parish’ in ‘The Joy of the Gospel’ and some other addresses. It concludes with some personal reflections.

This paper explores ways in which the identity of the secular priesthood in England and Wales has been shaped by its particular historical experience. Five themes are proposed: the creation of the concept of mission in the post‐Reformation world; the combination of isolation and independence that became characteristic of recusant priests; the emergence of new ways of relating to church structures that priests were forced to find; the distinctive fraternal identity that was nurtured in a variety of ways throughout the penal times and the period of the Catholic Revival; the revolutions in relationships with the laity. These themes are pursued through the nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐centuries when the meaning and experience of them changed as the emphasis shifted to buildings and organisations. The twentieth century experience of priesthood in a parish context created possibilities for expansion, which masked issues and problems already rising to the surface. Both the challenges and the opportunities of the recusant way of life became stifled. A fixed model of the church made change difficult to contemplate. The loss of an historically shaped sense of priestly identity is explored as part of the explanation for the contemporary loss of confidence and direction within a shrinking presbyterate.

This essay argues that modern society lacks a vision of the common good, which prevents education from having an adequate telos or goal. It calls for a restoration of the language of virtue and the ethical tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas. The Anglican parish and the church primary or elementary school are examined as sites where virtue ethics is still active: particularly in the intercessory work of parish prayer, and in the mimetic approach to learning employed with younger children. The article then addresses ways in which these institutions depend upon what C.S. Lewis called ‘deeper magic’ of a transcendent reality, and ways in which the school especially might develop further a pedagogy of the virtues using J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories as exemplars. Finally, it argues for a dimension of the beautiful in a recovery of an education in Christian virtue.

The rise of the global market economy has advanced forms of centrist, corporatist and statist rule that are insensitive to local indicators that this novel social order is ecologically, and socially, unsustainable. For many political theologians, and for secular political ecologists, the related crises of species extinction and climate change, combined with structural economic crisis, require a fundamental relocalization of the global economy and of the harvesting of natural resources. The contest between the political economy of global ‘free’ trade and a relocalized economy and polity bears analogies with debates around the relation between the local and the universal in Christian ecclesiology. In the eucharistic body politics of Saint Paul Christian communion is focused in the eucharistic gathering. However, centrist tendencies in ecclesiastical polity emerged in fourth-century accounts of the universal church. The subsequent doctrine of the primacy of Peter gave a powerful push to centrist over localist accounts of the esse of the Church in the West, and the contest between local and universal in Anglican and Catholic ecclesiologies continues to this day. Orthodox theologians Zizioulas and Afanassieff, describe and fill out the doctrinal implications of a primitive ecclesiology in which ‘the eucharist makes the church’.2 This recovery of a local eucharistic ecclesiology offers valuable resources for thinking about the nature of communion between Anglicans in a Communion increasingly riven by controversy, and for thinking about the nature of the parish in a Church of England prone in the last forty years to centrist and managerial conceptions of the Church, and to the denigration of the local parish church as the esse of the ministry and mission of the Church in England.

“Hispanic” is a term from the United States (USA) census bureau later adopted by the United States Catholic Council of Bishops (USCCB) that refers to USA residents who trace part of their ancestry to Spanish-speakers. Usually they also have ancestors from among either American indigenous communities or Africans imported as slaves, or both. For the purpose of this article, it presumes that whatever their level of acculturation to USA society, their preferred language of worship is still Spanish.

A new way of being Catholic is necessarily forged by those Hispanics. They are not assimilating into the USA church as did former immigrants from Europe, but they are also unable to simply reproduce the Catholicism of their twenty plus countries of origin.

New church structures must therefore address this novel phenomenon, especially in areas where those immigrants are recent or geographically dispersed.

Rather than only continuing the mostly futile attempt to integrate immigrants into existing parishes, local ordinaries should consider other options including parishes without boundaries or buildings. Such personal parishes constituted of a community of small communities are not only possible under current Church law and doctrine, but often best fulfills the intent of those same documents.