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,…
Category: Posts
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!…
Working at church vs. going to church
One of the odd transitions we seminarians go through, especially when we hit our middler year, is that we transition from “going” to church to “working” at church. I have…
Seminary financing: the cold, hard facts
January. Epiphany. For Episcopal seminarians in their third year, it means taking the General Ordination Exams. For a lot of us, it means biting our nails until the financial aid…
“Why do you sit in front?”
I have had many recent experiences related to sitting in the front at church that have caused me to reflect upon why we do or do not sit in front…
Mile 13 of the marathon….
There comes a time in every seminarian’s life when she asks herself, “What the heck am I doing at this place, sitting on a hard chair in a cold library,…
Gospel on the Ground 