I first encountered Anglicanism practically when I arrived in the US to study, and was soon in flight from bad preaching. In Protestant churches of whatever stripe, it was hard for me to find good preaching. And by ‘good preaching’, I don’t necessarily mean rhetorically polished preaching, though that’s wonderful, or intellectually challenging preaching, though that’s even better. I simply mean the kind of preaching that has the nerve to be unabashedly and joyfully Christian, rather than an ersatz version of something else, such as psychology or sociology, or some common-sense wisdom gleaned from ubiquitous self-help books. Equally unsatisfying, I’ve found many 'conservative’ churches that have retreated into fortresses built with the hard stone of rigid orthodoxy and lost Jesus Christ in the process. The Book of Common Prayer has been a great refuge for me. If the rector delivers a good sermon, I’m very happy. But if the sermon is disappointing, at least I have access to the genuine content of the Christian gospel expressed in the beautiful cadences of Renaissance prose.