ad orientem

"You don’t look out at the audience much,” a member of my congregation told me once. I was baffled and asked him to repeat...

By Bryan Owen When I was newly ordained, my bishop appointed me to serve in a parish with an altar against the wall. I was...

Our regular, knee-jerk assertions that only the Creed matters do great damage to the unity of Christian witness and the integrity of Christian life.

In the the April 28, 1968, issue of The Living Church, Fr. Francis W. Read considered "experiments" with facing the people during the Eucharist.

I have followed Covenant’s dueling blog posts about the ad orientem debate, since we have the issue before us in the parish I am serving: St Luke's in Catskill, New York. In most refitted liturgical spaces, the message of iconoclasm and abandonment is unavoidable. Over the years I have come to find this visual message a poignant embarrassment.

In this offering, we return the whole of creation, including ourselves, to the Father.

The Eucharist is only a meal because it is first and most fundamentally a sacrifice.

I could not have imagined a day when celebrating the Eucharist facing “liturgical east” would be considered cutting edge, nouveau, très chic.