The Ancient Future Here and Now

The Ancient-Future Question

What is the world looking for today?

Something that reaches more than skin-deep. Something that touches upon the mystery of real life. Something that communicates transcendent reality. Some kind of sign or sacrament of something enduring.

The Ancient-Future Answer

The world is waiting to be shown Jesus Christ. But the world today phrases its questions differently than before. It searched out answers from a different angle than before. And the answers that modernity has given the world are proving themselves exhausted.

A Difficult Adventure

"We cherish the gift of historic faith and order not as walls of an enclosed fortress but as gifts of God which both witness to the past and serve the building of a future as yet unrealized. By thus combining the historical and futuristic notes in our understanding of the Church, we may be helped in our efforts to combine a loyalty to tradition with a sensitivity to contemporary movements.

"If this is a difficult adventure, it is not one which need endanger our souls. Rather might our souls be endangered if we were content either to rest in past tradition undisturbed or to share in contemporary enthusiasms without relation to the stream of Christian witness through the ages."

 

--Michael Ramsey
100^th Archbishop of Canterbury
and Professor of Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House,
Canterbury Pilgrim

And that's why the ancient tradition speaks so naturally to post-modern culture: because it speaks from something older than and deeper than modernity, something older and deeper even than antiquity. It speaks of what is eternal and everlasting, before which all human conventions, ancient and modern, are relativized.  Not a fad. Not a fashion. Not something invented contemporary culture-and not something cooked up in reaction to contemporary culture.

Beyond the rationalism of western modernism, and beyond the irrationalism it has bred in turn, Nashotah House bears a burning candle to the world today. It casts an ancient light on the questions that the world is asking today. And when tested against the questions the world is asking today, the ancient tradition proves itself more vital, more spirited and more searching than the modernity which has tried to succeed it.

The Ancient-Future Seminary

Preserving and communicating the fullness of the Apostolic witness to Jesus Christ, Nashotah House forms her students, inwardly and outwardly, to bear the Gospel and the Sacraments to the post-modern world. Living together according to a monastic rule, joining together every day to share in the liturgy, sitting together at the feet of the ancient Fathers-this is Nashotah House. This is the seminary that keeps the faith of classical Anglicanism-

• The ancient beauty of catholic worship,
• The ancient treasures of Benedictine spirituality,
•  The ancient medicine of the sacraments of Jesus Christ,
• The ancient wisdom of Patristic theology, and
• The ancient hope which comprehends the restless world.

Nashotah House: Ancient-Future since 1842

If you're preparing to make a journey of faith into ministry, consider making your pilgrimage at Nashotah House. No other seminary is so committed to saturating theological education with spiritual formation. No other seminary so firmly locates theology within doxology. No other community is better prepared to honestly grapple with the questions with which post-modern culture confronts the Church, because no other seminary is so steeped in the enduring truth of the one holy catholic and apostolic faith.

Nashotah Sanctae Theologiae Seminarii:

Proclaiming Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and forever.