A Change Will Do You Good

By Bryan Cones

When I first set out for seminary at the age of 19, my thousand-mile journey took me to sleepy Nodaway County, Missouri, where a Benedictine monastery welcomed about 80 men a year to prepare for priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church. Given the requirements for priesthood in the Roman Catholic world, we were a pretty uniform lot—most of us were even “college age,” though there were a few “late vocations,” that is, guys in their 30s.

Fast forward 19 years and here I am again, having traded rural Missouri for uber-urban Boston, and specifically the ivory towers of Cambridge here at the Episcopal Divinity School. There is a monastery close by—the Society of St. John the Evangelist—but that’s where the similarity ends. All I have to do is look at my classmates to see the difference: a woman who moved with her partner and children from Texas; another with one child just out of diapers and another only six months old. A woman from northern Virginia who is tired of being, in her words, a “unicorn”—“the” Black Episcopalian in her church. There are commuters from the suburbs, a distance learner from Vermont; some are married or partnered, others single. One man comes to EDS from Burma—he’s Baptist, by the way—another is an Anglican from Nigeria. And that’s in a class of 18.

Change is a watchword in churches these days—as in “change or die”—and my class represents the kind of change I hoped for when I first became an Episcopalian and then came to seminary. It’s a class that embodies the experiment in change the Episcopal Church has been pursuing over the past couple of decades, a church with more open doors and fewer boundaries, a church ready to take risks and maybe fail. It’s also a class that reflects some of the sticking points the experiment has uncovered: the challenge of rethinking our approach to human sexuality, the legacy of racism in a church that is still 90 percent white, the relationship between the Episcopal Church and its sibling churches in the Anglican Communion.

Pretty exciting stuff, and it feels like an exciting time to be exploring possibilities for serving in the church. But I think more change is coming—in me, in my classmates, in the church—and I feel confident that the EDS community is one that’s going support that kind of growth. I’m encouraged by a favorite of mine in the communion of saints, John Henry Newman, whose one journey had a good number of twists and turns. “In a higher world it is otherwise,” he wrote, “but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Not bad advice for a seminarian or the church as a whole.

Bryan Cones, a writer and editor from Chicago, is pursuing a certificate in Anglican studies at EDS.

Why 99 Brattle?

by Kwok Pui-lan

We start this new blog to share our ideas about how progressive Christianity can transform the world.

 

Every year we hear fabulous speeches and lectures at 99 Brattle Street. The faculty and students share new ideas about being a progressive Christian in the contemporary world. 

In 1998, the faculty initiated EDS Occasional Papers, and we published the works of Manning Marable, Valerie Batts, Denise Ackermann, Bishop Barbara Harris, Iza R Hussin and those of our faculty. The circulation was about 350, with a copy sent to each of the seminaries and theological schools in North America. The Papers were discontinued because of a lack of funding.

Then some of the faculty began blogging and publishing in online journals. I became a blogger accidentally. I was watching President Obama’s speech in Cairo on June 4, 2009 and I had something to say. I checked with a professional guild of religion scholars and was told that it had no forum for comments on current affairs. Since my response was time sensitive, I sent it to a religious website, and it was published three days later. To my amazement a staff member and a student at the School told me the morning after it was posted that they had read it. They said it came to their attention via RSS.

We are witnessing a shift in media and communication more dynamic than that following Johann Gutenberg’s printing press of 1450. Before Gutenberg, there were about 30 000 books in Europe, most of them Bibles and biblical commentaries. Many of us have seen those exquisitely handwritten and elaborately decorated medieval Bibles in European museums. Martin Luther would have died an unknown monk if his religious tracts and treatises had to be copied and were not popularized by the new printing press.

Today paper printing is being replaced by e-books and e-journals. “Still reading a book made out of paper? That’s so 2009,” says one commentator. Since Apple launched the iPad, an e-reader tablet, in April 2010, about 10 million units have been sold. With an estimated 3m Kindles and more than 1m Nooks sold, books on paper may become relics of the past, much like those handwritten Bibles. Barnes & Nobles recently reported that it sold more e-books than physical books on its Web site. On Christmas day alone, nearly 1m e-books were purchased.

Christian churches and theological seminaries need to learn to use the latest technology to communicate our message.

Through technology, EDSConnect provides resources for Christians in rural and small parishes and the School can offer a distributive learning option for students unable to study on campus at Cambridge.

We are publishing this blog to encourage constructive debate and careful thinking, and to reach out to those who form part of God’s greater community. We welcome your comments and we hope to hear what you are doing to advance God’s kingdom beyond 99 Brattle Street.

(Note - we welcome your blog and comments, for editorial guidelines please write to comms@eds.edu. When writing a blog limit your word count to between 500 to 700 words and do a spell and grammar check US English before sending. Blogs on this site are the personal opinions of authors and do not reflect, unless specifically noted the views of the institutions they work for, nor do they necessarily reflect the views of Episcopal Divinity School.)

* Kwok Pui-lan is William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School. She has written for Episcopal News Service and her blogs also appear in Religion Dispatches and Patheos.