Grace Notes: Journeying with the Primate, 1995–2004

A.J. Pell is editor of the Canadian Evangelical Review and an instructor
of Liturgy, Anglican Studies Program, Regent College, Vancouver.

For nine years and one month, during the second half of his tenure as
Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Archbishop Michael Peers wrote
a short column called “Grace Notes” for the Anglican Journal, the
official monthly newspaper of the church he led. The title was a play on
the traditional address to an Anglican archbishop, “Your Grace.”
This book collects all those articles into a single volume and
demonstrates both the problem and the historical value of such a work.

On the one hand, most of the columns have lost their immediacy because
they are no longer read in the times to which they were addressed. Also,
because of their brevity they are necessarily shallow. On the other
hand, they give a glimpse into what matters Peers was willing to address
in the church press. He writes of the residual problems from the Native
residential schools (e.g., October 1995 and October 2001). Yet he is
surprisingly reluctant to write about the blessing of same-sex unions,
the symptom of the deep division in Anglicanism that began to split the
church during his watch. In the end, this book demonstrates that
newspaper columns are seldom worth publishing in book form.