“I’m not dead yet!” the Spirit responds.
For at least 6 six years, I have heard people say that the Church is dying. “The Church is going to hell in a handbasket,” one Episcopal priest in California…
Author: Janine Schenone
I am the rector (senior pastor) at Good Samaritan Episcopal Church in San Diego, California.
Weird things seminarians (and priests) do…
I would be remiss, dear reader, if I did not tell you about some of the weird behind-the-scenes things that seminarians do. This is not going to be an exposé…
Not the summer I had planned….
Avid readers of my blog know that, in the fall, I was planning to apply for grants to go to Peru and Ecuador on mission trips. Seminarians’ summers are filled…
Got God?
Getting to know God is a tricky business. Just when you think you’ve got God, you don’t. Normally, I would find this very frustrating. I want to understand things fully,…
A Terrible Beauty: Sermon on Good Friday, 2011
(This sermon was preached at the 7:30 p.m. Good Friday service at Trinity Episcopal Church in Hartford, CT. The congregation was seated in the round around a display of three…
Preaching on Good Friday: Confessions of a reformed teenager
It seems to be the most common assignment for seminarian interns: to preach on Good Friday. I don’t know if that’s because supervising priests are tired of doing it and…
The itinerancy of ministry
“Foxes have dens, and the birds in the sky have their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” So said Jesus during his years…
Now there are different gifts, but the same insanity
One true thing about seminary is that we are dragged in about 25 different directions every day. When I went to BTFO (Before the Fall Orientation–get it?) at Yale Divinity…
Seeking solid ground…
When I did my Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) course this past summer, the one required of all Episcopal seminarians, my fellow students and I talked about the condition of numbness…
Where have all the Bibles gone?
The other day, I said something in a class on the Book of Joshua about how central the Bible is to some people’s lives. “Why,” I said, “there are Bible…
Vocation or employment? The hybrid priest
One of the catch phrases I keep hearing in vocation discussions in seminary circles is “hybrid” or “bivocational” priests. I heard it from the priest who supervises my internship, from…
Of frogs and toads and fishes and loaves
Frogs and toads can be amazing. Once or twice a month, I volunteer at Loaves and Fishes, a food and clothes bank run out of the basement of St. Paul’s…
Preach it!
One of my favorite fellow seminarians at Yale, a Baptist minister, is a one-man Amen corner for some of our student preachers. An Amen corner consists of the people who…
Don’t know much about history…
One of the best things about an M.Div. degree is also one of the worst things about an M.Div. degree: there are so many different types of courses to take!…
Gospel on the Ground 