VTS launches canon law journal
Episcopal News Service. July 27, 2010 [072710-02]
ENS staff
Virginia Theological Seminary has launched the inaugural issue of an online canon law journal.
The Journal of Episcopal Church Canon Law is a refereed, or peer-reviewed, journal and will be published online in February and July. The publication is editorially independent and does not represent the opinions and ideas of anyone beyond its editor and other contributors, a VTS press release said.
The journal is edited by the Rev. Robert Prichard, Arthur Lee Kinsolving Professor of Christianity in America and instructor in liturgics at VTS. Prichard has been offering courses at VTS in canon law since the 1990s.
"Something like this is long overdue," Prichard said in the release. "The new Journal of Episcopal Church Canon Law provides an independent journal in which those who are interested in the particular tradition of canon law that we have in the Episcopal Church can exchange ideas and discuss matters of common interest."
It is hoped that the readership of the journal will include diocesan chancellors of the Episcopal Church, participants in diocesan conventions and the General Convention, canon lawyers and those who teach canon law to seminarians, according to the release. It is further hoped that specialists in canon law, known as canonists, and scholars from other parts of the Anglican Communion and from other religious traditions will find the journal of interest, the release said.
"The first issue has the three elements that I hope will be standard elements in future editions: discussions of the circumstances that gave rise to our current legal patterns, analysis of problems that need to be addressed in the future, and publication of classic material that is now difficult to locate," Prichard said in the release.
The first issue includes four articles, including "The Power to Appoint Committee Membership: An unlikely by-product of the Call to the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence of the Body of Christ" by Edgar G. Taylor, "Standing Commissions in the Twenty-First Century: A Case for Reform" by Alexander H. Webb II, "The Sixteenth-Century Background to the Current 'Oath' of Conformity of the Episcopal Church" by Jonathan Michael Gray and an article about nineteenth-century priest, historian and canonist Francis Lister Hawks' writings on the Episcopal Church's Constitution.