I am rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Red Bank, a parish in the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey. Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was nurtured spiritually at St. John’s Cathedral and St. Mark’s on-the-Mesa. As an undergraduate at the University of Delaware, I majored in English with a minor in Jewish studies. While in college, I discerned a call to ministry in the context of a non-denominational campus Bible study and the Episcopal summer camp in Santa Fe. I attended Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania and wrote a master’s thesis on St. Augustine’s and Karl Barth’s theological aesthetics of music. In 2008, I was ordained a deacon and received a call to serve as curate at All Souls Episcopal Church in Oklahoma City where I was also ordained priest in 2009. In 2013, I was called to serve as priest-in-charge of Trinity Church.
I am passionately committed to traditional Anglican worship and liturgy, with a particular respect for the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the ways in which this tradition expresses our Catholic and Reformed heritage. I also believe in the power of primary texts to inspire and grip the imagination, in a way that secondary texts rarely can. My own studies are organized around this principle, as is my teaching at Trinity Church.
One of the refreshing parts of Calvin’s approach to Scripture is his existential realism — he has a thorough appreciation of the Pauline doctrine that all are sinners, and so he is not afraid to see the heroes of the Bible as alloyed with sin and weakness alongside their better qualities.
How do we encourage people to put themselves into the place of Job, so they see that God is really the one to whom they may need to complain and from whom they need to hear?
A commonplace among clergy is that seminary hardly prepares the pastor for all the difficulties and trials found in the crucible of parish life, but a good seminary education at least furnishes an ability to identify the hardships as they come.
In ‘The God We Worship,’ Nicholas Wolterstorff attempts to develop a theology of the liturgy based on what is implicit in its overall shape as employed by the Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and “high church” Protestants.