[Photo: Interim Dean Taylor blesses dogs on Church Street. We Episcopalians are crazy about celebrating every thing that gives life meaning. ]
I taught middle school for 40 years, beginning at St. Andrews Episcopal School. Early in my career, Education for Ministry (EfM) helped to shape my faith. Now I am a certified co-mentor for an EfM class at St. James', Marietta. See our EfM class's blog. How my faith gradually reshaped my teaching is something I realized only late in my career. See Gospel for Educators.
For this page, I organize a list of my blogposts around four sources for theology identified by Education for Ministry:
Christian tradition (sacred and theological texts)
Action (life experience as a source for theology)
Culture (fine arts, movies, fiction, and poetry as sources of theology)
Positions on socio-political issues (examined through a theological lens)
Leadership in the church
Apprehension of Truth is a Growing Thing (04/2015) quotes the Lambeth Conference of 1968 on why "comprehensiveness" of our church should not be confused with wishy-washiness. This would be news to conservative friends of mine. When disgruntled clergy convened in Jerusalem during the church's quadrennial gathering at Canterbury in 2008, I wondered if their so-called "conservative" view was indeed conservative: Tradition Isn't What It Used to Be. Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis (12/2006) makes a useful image for how many see doctrines as "bricks" -- pull one out, and the wall crumbles down. He suggests instead that faith is a trampoline, and doctrines are the springs that sustain us.
If anyone facing intractible self-righteous opposition on two sides ever found what Episcopalians call the via media, that would be Lincoln. I'm well-read in the life of our sixteenth president, but in Following Lincoln's Moral Compass (12/2012) I was struck by a line invented for Spielberg's film about him. There's an idolatry of "purity" that always leads to injustice says theologian Reinhold Niebuhr quoted in a discussion of Niebuhr's re-emergence (10/2007) in public discourse.
In a pluralistic society where others' beliefs jostle ours, how can we respond in a way that's both true to ourselves and just? Justice and Love: Christian Democracy (07/2015) finds answers in the approach of an evangelical group. While essays in the EfM book My Neighbor's Faith tell of finding respect across divides of identity and ideology, NPR models that every day. So what does faith add? I find some answers in NPR's Theology 04/2016). (This post was a big hit when shared on EfM's Facebook page.) I noted highlights and personal resonances in Living Into God's Dream: Dismantling Racism, edited by Catherine Meeks. Anglican Exceptionalism is in part a response to a book on multiculturalism by Fr. Erik Law. City on a Hill: A Vision for America (06/2018) is about a passage from Isaiah that played in my head during a bike ride through diverse neighborhoods of Atlanta on Refugee Day.
I got deeply into US history and the Episcopal church at the same time. Raised to be conservative, I scoffed at claims of systemic injustice in our country. That's changed:
- In What's Toxic, Sticky, and Spreads (06/2010), I conclude that capital-S Sin, like blame for the 2010 Gulf oil spill, covers all of us.
- Episcopal faith lies in the background to The White Privilege is Mine (12/2017), my acknowledgement of systemic benefits.
- When our governor declared a day of prayer during a drought, an inner dialogue changed my mind about What is ours (07/2010).
- On Labor Day, I reflect in Poetry and Pottery (09/2018) how the apocryphal writer Sirach speaks across 2000 years to my class of workers in words not to undervalue those who work with their hands.
Liturgy: Worship with Music
Is the Sabbath a time-out from real life? In Scripture Flipped (06/2018), I reflect on Fr. Daron Vroon's sermon to the effect that worship gives meaning to work.
Music composed for Anglican Episcopal liturgy drew me to the church. See Anglican Exceptionalism (12/2014). After decades of singing in church choirs, I tell how I appreciate the 1982 Hymnal in O Praise Hymn (01/2012). One Sunday, teachings and the lovely choral anthems transcended the dualities of right and wrong, spirit and body, as described in Beyond Right (02/2015).
I took awhile to understand what "liturgy" is and what it does. Why I'm Episcopalian, Part One: the Prayer Book (01/2015). The Power of Liturgy: I've Heard it all Before (01/2017) responds to Derek Olsen's book Inwardly Digest: The Prayer Book as Guide to a Spiritual Life, among other sources. I explain how I came to appreciate the liturgy as theatre -- in which we are all the actors. It's a musical (03/2013)! Introverted Episcopalians of the World Unite looks at the ways our corporate worship makes room for private devotion. Writing at The Tail End of the 12 Days of Christmas in January 2021, a tense time marked by political uncertainty, COVID, and preparations for my final semester of teaching, I tell how the liturgy blessed me -- and my dog.
The Collect is a distinctive feature of our Anglican heritage. Where Prayer Meets Poetry describes how our EfM group collects all the threads of our class discussion into a prayer that - being our creation - has great potential to change us.
What I've absorbed as an Episcopalian is beautifully expressed by theologian Mark McIntosh in his book The Mysteries of Faith. Reading with my students in the Education for Ministry program, I've related his chapters to my experience in these reflections:
- (01/09/2019)It's not the Moral, but the Story (chapters 1 and 2).
- (01/26/2019)It's not what Episcopalians believe, but how (ch 4)
- (01/30/2019)Jesus Saves - but how? (ch. 6)
- (02/12/2019) Drama in Cosmos (ch 7.)
Working with groups in EfM, I've created interactive worship liturgies based on The Lord's Prayer (03/2019), The Apostle's Creed (02/2019), the poetry of Linda Pastan (11/2014), the poetry of Mary Oliver (10/29/2021) and selections from pieces by John Updike (05/2013). For my own use, I composed a prayer service for those times when I wake up around 2am and can't go back to sleep, Can't Sleep? Pray This (06/2021). It works!
The Liturgical Calendar. Singing through the seasons of the Church year, I've grown to appreciate the long-term designs of our liturgy.
- Advent. Written for an Advent devotional booklet, The Church was Made for Waiting (11/2011) is my concise appreciation for our Episcopal Church's place in our lives and in our time. (I'm really proud of this one!)
Decades before that, I got a crash course in "Advent" and "Liturgy" when a Lutheran friend hosted our Bible study group in her dorm room for Advent prayers each evening during exam week. Over the next ten years, that first experience of liturgy went into my words and music for Four Candles a cantata for soloists and chorus. In my scenario, three isolated and weary adults try to capture the whole season of Advent alone in one night. See the words for Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four
- Christmas. Carols and Lessons (12/2019) reflects on messages in three Christmas services in 20 hours with the same preacher, Fr. Roger Allen. Then, there's Christmas liturgy in a time of pandemic, with a coda about my dog in Tail End of the 12 Days of Christmas (01/2021).
- Epiphany. (I'll have to work on this one.)
- Lent. For a devotional booklet, I wrote It's Lent: Bon Appetit! (04/2014) It tells how hunger draws us to the church and how church fills us.
- Holy Week and Easter. As a young teacher, my first Holy Week was eye-opening, made more meaningful by Joe and Linda, a married couple in the church, remembered in An Especially Good Friday (03/2016). Easter Vigil after a Painful Holy Week tells how the marathon vigil became my favorite service of the year during a particularly rough time.
- Ascension Day.Up to Us (05/2017) and an earlier piece Jesus Ascended, then What? (06/2014) lifted my consciousness of Ascension Day and the season of "ordinary time" that follows. Ascension Day and The Visitation of Mary, celebrated back to back, pose a Medieval Challenge to the Modern Mindset (06/2019), as in, forget about rugged individualism when it comes to sin and faith.
- Ordinary Time. I reflected on the church's season known as Ordinary Time (11/2019) just as it was slipping away from me.
Scripture and Theology
For reflections on specific passages of scripture, see Theology before Breakfast, with links to my digests of scriptural reflections in Forward Day by Day going back several years, my own Forward-style reflections on scriptural passages, and my responses to striking sermons at St. James, Marietta GA.
Archbishop 101 (06/2016) is my overview of Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
I/ve heard people say they're "spiritual" but they don't like "organized religion." Richard Rolheiser's The Holy Longing addresses this common claim. Re-reading it ten years later, I wrote Spirituality Needs Community (09/2012). A sermon by our rector Fr. Roger Allen gave me occasion to write Give me that Organized Religion (08/2017).
In midlife, spirituality looks different. I respond to Rolheiser's sequel Sacred Fire in Beyond Growing Up (06/2014). I reviewed a book by his friend Richard Rohr on the same topic Falling Upward (07/2014).
Barbara Taylor Brown in her book Holy Envy works through ways that other faiths can strengthen one's own. See Evangelism of the Rose (06/2023).
After reading Fighting with the Bible: How Scripture Divides Us, and How It Can Bring Us Together, by Donn Morgan, I reflect on the idea of dialogue among the books of the canon and Morgan's foregrounding of the Babylonian exile, an emphasis new to me (01/2018).
[Photo: St. James nave at night, photographed through the Narthex door.]
Theologians rely heavily on metaphor. One of my earliest blog posts responded to a preacher who said his faith in Easter was not "just" a metaphor, implying something shifty about my church: Easter Metaphor: Faith, Fact, and Myth (04/2006).
Theologian David Ford embraces metaphors as "intensifications" of an elusive intellectual concept salvation. See Angles on the Crucifixion (10/2018). Mark McIntosh writes about belief and metaphor in his book Mysteries of Faith. "Not the Moral but the Story" concerns chapters 1 and 2 (01/19/2019); "Jesus Saves - But How?" concerns chapter 6 (01/30/2019); "Theologian Mark McIntosh Sees Drama in the Cosmos" sums up the book (02/12/2019).
How Episcopalians Believe brings together creed, liturgy, art, and social justice in response to books and essays I read in 2018-19.
Believing and Beloving (02/2015) considers an excerpt from a book by Diana Butler Bass. She cites theologian Harvey Cox's history of how Christianity changed from living in Christ to beliefs about Christ.Her etymology of the words "belief," "creed," and "faith" are eye-opening for those of us who learned that John 3:16 was the whole story.
Exasperated by some theological readings, I wrote, "Interpretations of interpretations, metaphors to explain metaphors: theologians are sculptors in smoke (04/2014)!"
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Stephen Sondheim's musicals made a believer out of me. I explain elements of Episcopal theology in Broadway musicals with my article Sondheim's Religious Vision (11/2017).
Poetry.
I would argue that poetry is always a religious expression, regardless of what the poet may think of religion. Here are a few contemporary poets who make faith an explicit subject in their poems.
- Mary Karr's Sinners Welcome offers Discomfort and Joy (06/2020). Her epilogue tells us how hard it is to be a poet when faith has made you happy.
- Poet Marie Howe draws on her Roman Catholic upbringing in many poems about the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Jesus. Reading her poetry has helped me to appreciate the spiritual dimension of routine life. See Out of Ordinary Time (11/2019).
- Poet Christian Wiman writes a slender theological reflection with authority borne of learning, experience, and acuity; he brings out my best in my attempt to pull his strands together in Beyond Belief in My Bright Abyss. Episcopalian or not, his theology fits. Krista Tippett's interview with Wiman contained two great insights relating to the body and to "not having enough time."
- My blog page Poetry and Secular Psalms curates a list of posts about other poets who openly care about faith: Linda Pastan, John Updike, T. S. Eliot, and Mary Oliver. I find faith expressed in the poetry of Philip Larkin, despite his curmudgeonly atheism, and Derek Walcott, despite his ambivalence about the Church that colonized his native home, and in poems by Richard Blanco, of Catholic/Cuban background. Todd Boss and others I encountered in Poetry magazine gave me the feeling of reading "secular psalms".
Novels and Mystery Novels.
I absorbed more about a sacramental view of life through fiction than through any outright theology.
- The Book of Bebb (01/2010) is my favorite book! Rich, layered, funny, constantly surprising, its author Frederick Buechner writes like an Episcopalian, even though he's an ordained Presbyterian minister. After my father died, I had a new appreciation for Buechner's vision. See Conversations with the Dead (12/2011).
- Flannery O'Connor would have loved it (06/2016) is what I wrote after a pilgrimage to Flannery's home [where I photographed a peacock] and a second look at the movie Wise Blood made from her novel. Where's redemption in the twisted world of that story?
- Flannery recommended John Updike as the only "truly religious" writer of her time, so I took up his works. See my Updike page. Updike wrote explicitly (in all meanings of that word) about an Episcopalian theology professor in Roger's Version, and Updike's God Between the Lines (06/2013) was my deep dive into it.
- Overview of Graham Greene's novels: Saints in Spite of Themselves (12/2014). See posts focused on The Comedians (05/2016) and The Heart of the Matter (06/2010).
- Walker Percy gets a Third Take on The Second Coming (09/2007). I worked hard to appreciate this novel by a Catholic doctor, and got good results.
- Good Friday Read: The Morning Watch reflects on the novel by James Agee. In it, a sensitive twelve - year - old boy at an Episcopal school tries hard to feel what he's supposed to feel about the crucifixion; real life reaches deeper.
- Wendell Berry may not be Episcopalian, but from his novels a theology emerges that's both compatible with my beliefs and a challenge to broaden and deepen those beliefs -- like the river in his novel Jayber Crow. Read my reflection on that novel here (12/2009). See my page devoted to his Port William series.
- Canadian novelist Robertson Davies stuffed his comic novels full of Christianity, mythology, Jungian psychology, music, theatre, magic, science, and unforgettable characters. I internalized it all during the 1980s and 90s. See What's Bred in the Bone (03/2016). In Jung at Heart (07/2010) I respond to his novel The Manticore about psychotherapy that spreads out into a spiritual journey. It's second in his Deptford Trilogy; I cover the first novel of the trilogy in Magician at Work (04/2014). I was not enthusiastic re-reading book three World of Wonders (08/2010).
- Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers: Two classic mystery novelists were also faithful Christians in the Anglican Church. Bells Resonate in The Nine Tailors (01/2017) explores some religious dimensions to the crime novel by Sayers, who also wrote drama and essays on explicitly religious themes. About Christie, I had to apologize for thinking her work shallow. See Christ in Christie (10/2014).
- Ordinary Grace: More than Mystery (07/2019) reflects on a stand-alone novel with spiritual and moral dimensions by mystery writer William Kent Krueger.
Music. I laud the Episcopal hymnal in O Praise Hymn (10/2012). I tell how singing Ives's choral setting of Psalm 90 more than 40 years ago had a lasting impact on me in Prosper Our Handiwork: Young Charles Ives interprets a Psalm for All Ages (09/2019). Herbert Howells' setting of Psalm 42 colors my personal response in Psalm 42: What a Teacher Longs For at Mid-Year. With music by Benjamin Britten and words from Christopher Smart's poem Jubilate Agno, Rejoice in the Lamb (12/2016) has had a bigger influence on my beliefs than I'd thought before I looked back in this article. Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms brought me into church music, and 30 minutes of his messy Mass (11/2013)speak to faith in deep ways. See also my reflections on Bach in Baroque Passion (07/2018).
Opera The art and effort that opera pours into telling stories make the form inherently religious, I'd say, by conferring such dignity and power to their subjects.
Some operas do concern specifically religious themes that transcend the comedy or melodrama in the stories. Verdi's Falstaff (12/2013) was truly funny, yet I was in tears at the end -- joyful at old Verdi's musical expression of reconciliation. One of my best essays of all, Der Rosenkavalier Stops Time, responds to this comedy's serious theme -- we will grow old and die -- how can our lives be meaningful? I came to Massenet's Thais expecting a cynical mix of Victorian religiosity and sensuous titillation, one being used as a cover for the other, but instead I was moved by a thoughtful and earnest exploration of two conversions. Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally turned Sister Mary Prejean's book Dead Man Walking into a highly impactful opera that offers no easy answers on issues of guilt, punishment, and forgiveness. I was drawn to the so-called minimalist composers Philip Glass, John Adams & Steve Reich because their works -- many operas included -- often deal with spiritual themes.
See a list of operas appended to an article I wrote about the Santa Fe Opera House.
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Visual Arts An immersive experience of Van Gogh (06/2021) somehow overlooked his faith. Van Gogh's faith is part of a more general essay about how art takes us out of ourselves (06/2019). Christian imagery appears in some of the collages by Romare Bearden (01/2020), and there's joy in the technique even when the subjects are somber. The warm and heroic murals by Hale Woodruff lift the spirit without specifically religious imagery. I associate an exhibit of Vermeer (10/2006) with Christian novelist John Updike, who wrote that faithfully depicting God's creation is a form of praise. After an exhibit that connected impressionists (11/2007) to the big religious paintings of their forbears, I wrote, "it is the impressionists' work that speaks religion as I understand it." Faith starts with awe, or so I've read in some theologians' works, and awe is what I express with an essay and inspirational photos in Collage Education: Vik Muniz and Eric Carle (06/2016).
Experiences Outside the Church
A take-out dinner in the Child Cancer Ward with the family of my young student Christian Allenburger helped me to understand what my priest had been saying about a "sacramental view of life." See Life after deaths, continued (04/2007).
Is there theology outside the Bible (07/2013) Experiences before I was 20 prepared me to appreciate Christopher Bryan's And God Spoke: The Authority of the Bible for the Church Today.
What I learned from my college roommate Andreas, a "cultural" Catholic from Italy, got me out of the tightly-packaged faith of my teen years and into a whole new sacramental world. See My Spiritual Encounter with French Asparagus.
Four funerals in four weeks caused me to formulate what I believe about Life After Deaths (04/2007).
On the tenth anniversary of my first blogpost, I worked through worry that my life seems to just cycle around the same old same-olds. I found solace in the idea of liturgy. See Ten Years of this Blog: Progress (04/2016).
Outside on Church Street, I wondered what passing Mariettans thought when our rector in flowing robes laid hands upon furry little heads for the Blessing of the Animals (10/2014)? Many times a dog in my life has intensified my sense of God in my life. See my page Loving Dogs.
At Starbucks, an employee demonstrated several qualities a ministry of "hospitality" outlined in books by theologians William Countryman and Timothy Sedgwick. See Priest or Barista? (04/2014). A personal mishap gave me occasion to be thankful for the hospitable care of Those Who Work or Watch This Night (01/2020).
At a time of transition for our parish church, I've posted about personal experiences with clergy and liturgy that give me reasons to hope for our future.
- The Rector Retires; The Clerk Reflects (12/2022) is a look back at Fr. Roger Allen's 11 years at St. James, Marietta, including links to all my reflections on sermons.
- Once the Rector leaves, it's understood that the Associate Rector will stay only until a new Rector is found, if that long, so I've already posted a retrospective on Fr. Daron Vroon, More Than Skin Deep: Fr. Daron Vroon's Sermons on Leprosy and Beyond (10/2022), including links to my reflections on many of his sermons.
- With both gentlemen, I attended the Diocesan Council, where I was impressed by the competence, civility, compassion, and humor of our church officials. See Lay Delegate Reflects on the 116th Council of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta (11/2022).
For a friend's research into church leadership, I wrote Gifts and Discernment (03/2021), a short memoir that ties together the pieces documented in more detail below.
Rector Karen Evans brought me into the Vestry. Her priority was to increase parishioners' commitment to the church.
My first idea was to draw parishioners into writing devotional booklets for Lent and Advent. They would write what St. James meant to them, influencing other parishioners who would read the booklets. See more at my page Theology before Breakfast.
Then I offered to help the Episcopal Church Women (ECW) to write their own Mystery Dinner Theatre fundraisers, to make scripts that would build community when parishioners laughed at our shared experiences. See Church and Theatre: Laughing Matter? and its follow-ups, Mystery Dinner Theatre for Episcopalians, What Slays in Vegas and Death in Stitches 
In the same vein, My Favorite Episcopal Things(03/2007) is my parody performed for our parish's "Bad Music for Good Causes."
As the rector had done for me, I made direct appeals to parishioners to consider leadership. Leadership in the Church (08/2009) and Summer at Church: Message from the Senior Warden (07/2009). Names and James was my homily about what or who sets the "character" of a church, speaking as chair of the committee searching for a new rector.
"Leadership" in the church frequently means supporting the budget by soliciting pledges and drawing more worshippers into the parish. Church Stewardship Campaign, circa 1600 compares "revolutionary" church fund-raising practices to what Anglican pioneer Richard Hooker wrote in 1600. Spoiler alert: Hooker said it all before. I dipped into that same material for a short stewardship pep talk The Creator Doesn't Need Our Money (11/2021). Money, Power, and Giving (12/2008) was a talk for the Sunday service, and Ask Not What Your Pledge to the Church Can Do For You (05/2015) went into the church's bulletin.
As Senior Warden, I did some research on building congregations. Thinking Outside of the Big Box (06/2009) hits highlights of Designing New Congregations by Laurene Beth Bowers about bringing millennials back to mainline churches. Around the same time, the simmering controversy of the gay bishop bubbled over again, and I found perspective in an article from Weavings magazine Calm Advice for Episcopalians in Opposition (03/2007).
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1 comment:
Thanks for this post, Scott. It was a virtual "yellow brick road" of your thoughts on the current state of the PECUSA. I enjoyed all of them!
George Lamplugh
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