A New Grace for Meals

By John Mason Lock Our family devotions include a practice that we’ve been using for almost a decade. In sharing it here, I do not mean to imply that it should be universal. Among its other qualities, surely... Read More...

A Peaceful Night and a Perfect End

By Eugene R. Schlesinger When I first discovered the Book of Common Prayer as a young evangelical Christian, I quickly determined that Compline was among its greatest treasures. In particular, the final anti... Read More...

Prayer Drives Congregational Growth

By John Deepak Sundara Kevin Martin’s recent article “Who Are We Missing?” highlights a valid sociological and theological commonality among some of the largest congregations in the Episcopal Church: they are theologically and liturgically conservative. Thi... Read More...

On Leaving Social Media

By Cole Hartin I did not expect that pastoral ministry would require me to spend so much time with a computer. I anticipated using Word to compose sermons. And I anticipated corresponding by email. But I did... Read More...

Fistfuls of Tears, Fistfuls of Joy

By Steve Rice When you do something over and over, it sometimes requires a bit of effort to mentally engage with what you are doing. My confessor once told me to focus on the verbs in the eucharistic prayer ... Read More...

What Does Prayer Do?

What is it, exactly, that prayer is meant to do? We can begin with the theologian Oliver Crisp, who writes that prayer is often considered a “solution to a problem — or, at least, as a means by which a person may find a solution to a problem.” In such a vie... Read More...

Love, Prayer, and Her Majesty the Queen

By Jonathan Turtle Like so many people I was deeply saddened by the recent death of the Queen but it didn’t quite hit me until I was in the pulpit on the morning of Sunday, September 11 and I reached the par... Read More...

The Searchlight of the Holy Spirit

By Marcia Hotchkiss One of the gifts of my spiritual direction training program a few years ago was exposure to the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. It introduced me to an imaginative and prayerful... Read More...