Dr. Christopher Wells is executive director and publisher of the Living Church Foundation, overseeing all of its publishing and teaching initiatives, fundraising, and staff. Christopher completed doctoral studies in historical theology at the University of Notre Dame and served as a lay leader in the Diocese of Northern Indiana before coming to the Living Church in 2009. He earned a BA at St. Olaf College and MAR at Yale Divinity School.
He is affiliate professor of theology at the General Theological Seminary and Nashotah House Theological Seminary, where he teaches courses on Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and Anglican ecclesiology. He has published articles on Aquinas and ecclesiology in various journals, and since 2011 has served as theological consultant to the Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation in the U.S. (ARC-USA).
Christopher is a member of Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, and enjoys reading, running, gastronomy, Notre Dame football, and all the arts.
Adjudicating discipline and orthodoxy in the divided churches is profoundly complicated, especially for the “inferior” and “weaker” member-communities of the body.
Until our own end, Christ’s Passion remains the singular source of salvation and holiness — in the sacraments, and in our love of him by acts of penance, reparation, and solidarity.
The Body of Christ has a history that may be mapped, discussed, and studied; it continues to suffer various indignities and worse until the End; and the teachings of its churches undergo various changes.
The whole world is now witnessing major political shifts amid continued decline of confidence in institutions, massive migrations, and widening disparities of opportunity and resource between north and south and between the privileged few and the great majority in every nation.
Many have bridled at the primates’ challenge to the maverick Episcopal Church to be a team player. The primates’ attempt at discipline, it is objected, was both clumsy and authoritarian, pushing in the opposite direction of possibly prophetic witness.