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This page will be an archive of content from August 2007 to January 2012. Please visit Covenant’s thoroughly redesigned home at covenant.livingchurch.org and join the conversation.
Covenant, founded in August 2007 as a weblog community of “evangelical and catholic” Christians, begins a new life today. Covenant has attracted about 40 editorial contributors, including bishops, cathedral deans, priests, and theologians. Covenant will expand its family of contributors in the months ahead.
This page will be an archive of content from August 2007 to January 2012. Please visit Covenant’s thoroughly redesigned home at covenant.livingchurch.org and join the conversation.
I come from a family of Baptists in central Mississippi, whose devotion to Bible-reading and teaching formed me into a person for whom no existence is imaginable apart from the church. I graduated with an English degree from the University of Richmond and moved to Budapest, Hungary for two years to teach in a public school. I came to the Anglican Church by way of chaplaincies in the Diocese in Europe (Gibraltar), and I was confirmed into the Episcopal Church here in North Carolina, where I now attend Duke Divinity School. I tend to describe myself as a conservative Anglo-Catholic, though I recognize this to be a somewhat odd claim (to some observers at least) for someone who is by all accounts new to both Anglicanism and Catholicism in general. At the moment I am a postulant for holy orders in the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth. I will most likely spend a year at Nashotah House after I finish at Duke.
I am wary of overworking this self-description while I am in the formative context of seminary. I have much to learn. I hope that this blog will provide a further way of exploring the gifts and challenges of Anglicanism in the context of the larger catholic Church, and that in the process I may gain insight on my place within it.
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I don't know how to talk about myself without talking about my wife at the same time. I met my bride, Claudia, shortly after being inducted into the Navy as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD. We've been together for so long - we've been through so much together - that, in ways that only those who have been similarly blessed will understand, the word "I" is inextricably connected with the "we" that the Lord put together at the ecumenical Annapolis chapel so many years ago. Certainly we have our own identities, but the truth is that without her, I would not be me. The boundaries between us are not walls, but tender rivers of love through which the Spirit blesses our union with and through each other.
I share these mushy thoughts because my identity as "husband of Claudia" and father of our three children shapes the Word I hear when we read Scripture together. That location shapes how I hear in Scripture those stories that determine our communal understanding of Christian marriage, sexuality, and family, and it especially determines my understanding of the kind of family we as the household of God are called to be. In the midst of our Anglican struggles, my sense is that to walk away from this union that the Spirit created and continues to nurture would be to reject the gift and calling given by God.
The life of a naval officer is nomadic, and Claudia and I moved five times in our first five years of marriage, continuing the ecumenical approach to the Christian faith so common among military families. A fast attack nuclear submarine warfare officer during the Cold War, one of my oddest moments… Read full post >>
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My faith was nurtured in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Christian Reformed Church, a late-nineteenth-century immigrant importation from the Netherlands, and in the Christian schools of that denomination through high-school. Our family landed there almost accidentally, as my father and mother were respectively low-church Episcopalian and Lutheran by background—without a drop of Dutch blood between them—having moreover courted at a premier “Catholic� parish of the Episcopal Church and subsequently become anglophiles over the course of years living in England. It seemed natural, therefore, that we should, in the late 1970s, find a home in a progressive Christian Reformed congregation replete with weekly celebrations of Holy Communion and a liturgy haunted by the Book of Common Prayer. In turn, when I returned to church after a time away, I was unable to resist the seemingly familiar and surely beautiful cadences of prayer book and hymnody at the local Episcopal parish.
“Unable to resistâ€? seems the right phrase in light of attempts by friends to talk me down, as it were, from the ledge of Episcopalianism, surely half-jokingly but therefore half-seriously as well. From the left, one United Church of Christ confidante worried that Episcopalian aestheticism functioned as a thin veil for its half-hearted commitment to pursuing justice. From the right, Lutheran and Catholic companions conveyed their conviction that one’s church should first and foremost be capable of articulating precisely what it believes and why. In part through wrestling with these questions I began to imagine that studying and teaching theology could be a vocation, even as a fulfillment of my previous labors on behalf of social justice. For here was an urgent need that demanded a similar passion: building up the churches in love, the better to equip them to “bring good news… Read full post >>
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We have asked our featured authors, an evolving company that we expect will continue to grow, to write a few words of introduction of themselves. See the list of names at the bottom of this page, and click on the hyperlinks to learn more about us.
We do this on account of our commitment to mutual accountability and transparency in the communion of the gospel of Jesus, and it is a feature of this commitment to mark our various identities as they are shaped by a complex assortment of factors, at once given (without our having chosen them) and consciously adopted (in the guise of rational, willing adulthood).
That all of us bear within ourselves a host of given markers suggests the inevitability and necessity of interpretation or hermeneutics. The word hermeneutic comes from Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods, who functioned as a kind of interpreter in Greek mythology. Accordingly, an hermeneutic can be understood as a method of reading and interpreting particularly, in the Christian context, reading and interpreting Scripture.
More to the present point, however, each of us effectively incarnate an hermeneutic within ourselves by virtue of a natural variety of perspectives or takes on all that is around us that we see and hear (and taste and touch and smell). 20th century science articulated this truth in terms of the formation of the human brain by a convergence of factors out of our control, including DNA, culture, gender, and other items of experience.
There is more, however. Consider the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, recorded in Acts 8. "Do you understand what you are reading?" asks Philip, to which the eunuch replies: "How can I, unless someone guides me?" In recognition of the truth… Read full post >>
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In order to comment, you must first register here. Enter your actual name, first and last (no pseudonyms), and email, and a password will be sent to you. Once you receive the password, follow the link in the email, type in your user name and password, and you will be taken to your profile. From there you can return and comment on any post, subject to the following:
At Covenant we embrace inter-personal verifiability as a criterion of authenticity. While we thus understand the appeal, and in some cases the perceived necessity, of anonymity, we do not see it as compatible with the peculiar nature of ecclesial discourse: in and after the Word incarnate.
To be an adult Christian is, in the Episcopal Church (as in most denominations), to have made a profession of faith, which amounts to a public “confirmation� to the gathered community that one accepts the faith of the Church. First, the candidate is presented by another member of the body, only to speak in turn for him or herself: “I do,� two times, and the congregation likewise in turn: “We will.� Then all together recite the Apostles’ Creed in a dialogue with the bishop, followed by more questions, answers, and prayers; till finally the bishop confirms the candidate, laying “hands upon each one� and saying: “Strengthen, O Lord, your servant N. with your heavenly grace.� Like God, therefore, who calls us by name (see Is 43.1), so too the bishop, as the apostolic icon of the community’s tangible, mutually recognizable, and therefore shared life.
In this perspective, it seems to us that blogging, if it is to have a place within Christian mission, will naturally follow the same rules of public identification outside the walls of… Read full post >> Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
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cov·e·nant (kuv'en ent), v., -nant·ed, -nant·ing. agree, assemble, summon, combine, be convenient or suitable, unite. [1250–1300; ME < AF, OF, n. use of prp. of covenir < L convenire to come together, agree; see CONVENE]
We are evangelical and catholic Anglicans, and fellow travelers from the wider household of God, assembled and summoned to a common labor in the ecumenical Church of Christ, not least through the present struggles and gifts of our communities.
We recognize that the Anglican Communion—the first instance of ecclesiality with which we, in this particular online assembly, wrestle for a blessing—is incomplete by itself, because we have seen with our eyes and touched with our hands the wounds of our Lord’s body: the countless factions and disputes that do not bring Him glory, leaving us all together far short of our call to “share,� as sisters and brothers visibly united, in the “partnership� of His offering (I Cor 10.14ff.).
In a sense it has ever been so. We recall St Paul’s outrage with the Corinthians, who “came together (synerchesthai) ...not for the better but for the worse,â€? a sobering point too-little reflected upon in our day by those, on all sides, who find the Church’s unity and orthodoxy uncomplicated—either simply given, or obviously taken away. Against both of these views, Paul insists that “there have to be factions (hairesis) among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuineâ€? (I Cor 11.17-19). And yet the Apostle does not on that account “commendâ€? the Corinthians for showing “contempt for the Church of God and humiliat[ing] those who have nothingâ€? (I Cor 11:22). Rather, Paul’s argument devolves to his prior exhortation to learn from the “exampleâ€? of “Israel,â€? “written down to instruct us,â€? “so… Read full post >> Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
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