A Short Bibliographical Essay:

The following pieces will give interested readers a quick sketch of some of my theological thought.  My Theses on Anglicanism consists of 42 vignettes pertaining to various facets of Anglican history, theology, and identity.  Much of what I have written on Covenant comes back, in some way, to the ideas hammered out in this document.  Happily, it provoked a wonderfully stimulating conversation on women’s ordination that I hope to return to someday.  Some worked examples of these considerations may be found in my pieces “Remember, Remember”: What the Fifth of November Can Teach Us Today, and The Canon of Wisdom: An Introduction to Richard Hooker.  Some of my articles, however, are a bit more on the personal side, such as Marriage, Family, and Anglican Viability, which looks at the bitter but necessary question faced by a young person such as myself - namely, can I begin a family in my current church?  Related to this is my rather lengthy essay “Suffer not the Little Ones”: Why the Episcopal Church Needs Young People, which looks at the statistics concerning the drastic decline of young people in the church, before turning to some of the larger theological issues at hand.  Equally personal, but on a very different topic, is my brief essay Towards a Theology of the Armed Forces, which is dedicated to my brother, a Marine, and tries to craft a space for a theological consideration and appreciation of the military.

Several of my poems may also be read here at Covenant.  The first, entitled Iustitia Dei, is about the eschaton and links God’s judgment to the realities of human remembrance and forgetting.  The second poem, Genesis, is a meditation on Wisdom (re: Prov. 8), by way of lettuce.  I hope to publish some more poems on Covenant in the near future.  Lastly, I have published several book reviews, some of which are in an ongoing literature review of books about Global Anglicanism that readers may be interested in.

A Slightly Longer Personal Biography:

I was not raised Episcopalian, but come from a non-denominational, charismatic background.  When I was 16, my parents began attending a Reformed church, and I left that decisively not long after turning 21.  I spent a little over a year attending a “continuing” Anglican parish of the EMC (Episcopal Missionary Church), where I grew to have both an appreciation of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, and a sense that it was somewhat outdated and in need of revision.  I left that parish, however, and drifted for some months between various liturgical churches, but shortly before I finished my undergraduate degrees, I was invited by a friend to visit the Episcopal student center, affectionately known as “Chapel House”.  I did, and when I walked in the door of the chapel I felt, for the first time in my life, like I was home.  It is an experience that I had never had before and which I have never had since. Perhaps for this reason it is an experience that has profoundly shaped me; it is no exaggeration for me to write that it is an experience and a memory that I continue to carry and feel in my bones.

I was confirmed about a year and a half later - on May 22, 2005, to be exact (my confirmation certificate hangs on the wall of my room) - after reading a good bit of Rowan Williams, Michael Ramsey, William Reed Huntington, Lancelot Andrewes and the Greek Fathers.  Andrewes was the most moving of these authors; Ramsey, more than anyone else, gave me a sense of the Anglican ethos.  His closing words in From Gore to Temple: An Era in Anglican Theology made a tremendous impact on me before my confirmation: “...the theological coherence which a Gore or a Temple exhibited came, not from a quest for tidiness, but from a vigorous wrestling with truth for truth’s own sake” (170).  These words move me even now.  As intellectually compelling as I find such a view, at the end of the day my movement into Anglicanism was an event of the heart, which was then followed (and, thankfully, confirmed) by my head.  Put somewhat differently, my move into the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion was not just the result of study, but the result of an experience of charism.  My conversion to the Anglican way was the joint action of both Parakletos and Logos; the former inspired unexpectedly, and the latter enjoined communicable discourse on the matter.  (One without the other, or one set against the other, is less than orthodox in my opinion.)

My theological commitments are first and foremost to intellectual integrity, which I believe is bound up with deep historical study and humility.  Aiming for truth, in my estimation, tends to be more of a via media vis-à-vis contemporary conservative and liberal positions than is often appreciated.  At the very least, such integrity is neither subsumed to nor driven by the will; and, as integrity gives itself to discourse, it is open to dialogue, encouragement, and correction.  In other words, Wisdom speaks, and her voice sometimes echoes in our own - most often, I believe, when it is truth that is our goal.  There is something of the Logos in all of this, and I hope to sketch that out someday in a more systematic way.  A theology of converse - in the sense of communio - seems to me to be a project worth pursuing.

In the mean time, I am more interested in pursuing theological investigations of a historical nature, sounding out the past for what it might bequeath to the present, and for how it might interrupt the present as well.  Anglican history is far more interesting, I have found, than most people realize.  It is bound up with big ideas about God, nature, and political and ecclesial order; it finds its classical expressions more often in the words of poets and monarchs than those of systematic theologians (who are not to be discounted, however).  I think that this is a terribly engaging history, to be honest, not least because from the vantage point of the present, it is a history - and a trajectory of theological inquiry - that is rather unexpected.  It isn’t democratic, but monarchical; it is less theological toil and more poetic inspiration; it is humanist, and has a strong sense of the need for returning to the sources, just as it has an equally strong sense of the need to pursue such investigations critically.  And, as I learned from Hooker (and Heidegger), it is hermeneutically engaged.  Anglican theology is a critical negotiation between the past and the present, and done within a conciliar framework.  I am deeply committed to this, and I think that others should be, as well.

Lastly, I am a member of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius [http://www.sobornost.org].  I hope that as Anglicans move on into the next season of our communal life, such old ecumenical interests and commitments will be revived for both Western and Eastern catholic Christians.  I hope, too, that the old memories associated with those commitments will be reinscribed into the imaginations of all concerned.