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The Fall 2016 issue features articles by Awet Issau Andemicael, Bryan Cones, Kit Carlson, Matthew S. C. Olver,
Rebecca Copeland, Eugene R. Schlesinger, and June Osborne.
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Annunciation
by Jeremiah Webster
Against the privilege of
tedium
(getting repairs done on
the truck,
waiting for the webpage
to load,
another meeting hosted
by Gorgias)
angels provide another
glimpse
of the first century God
I believe will return.
It is never how I expect,
Christ plays in ten
thousand places.
It is a mercy that knows
I do not belong in
Elysium,
am not ready for beauty
to define
the routine of days and
months and years.
It is the same mercy
that said,
"Do not be afraid,"
at the Annunciation.
Mary felt the body
of God
stir in her womb
and asked,
"Who can endure
such love?"
newsletter editor
Vicki K. Black
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Practicing Grace
Fall 2016 issue asks urgent questions of our time
 What sort of gracious space does the gospel open up within the world? How do Christians live and practice grace within this space? The articles in this issue of the ATR are all attuned to the urgency of these questions, asked in different forms:
- How do we relate to wealth and those in need?
- How can we live within a divided church?
- How do we hear the language of our tradition as we imagine the future of Christian worship?
- How might the fragility of our physical world affect the way we tell our story of the Incarnate God?
And finally, for those public and professional theological thinkers across churches and academies, what question cuts deeper into the Christian faith than this:
-
How is human life (solitary, economic, ecclesial, political, planetary life) shaped when it is transformed by the grace of God in Christ?
You will find a rich and varied array of responses to these questions as well as resources to help address them in the essays, poetry, and book reviews of the Fall 2016 issue. I invite you to read them all
.
Click here to explore the Fall 2016 Table of Contents.
--Anthony Baker,
Editor in Chief
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Speaking Our Faith Aloud
creating sacred conversations
among the post-boomer generations
 One of the two Practicing Theology essays in the Fall 2016 issue is "Equipping the Next Generations to Speak Their Faith Aloud" by the Reverend Kit Carlson, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Michigan. Carlson
describes the catechetical offering she has developed for generations of Christians disillusioned with the institutional structures of the Episcopal Church. Suggesting that "sacred conversations" can help post-Boomer Christians develop a faith that is "owned," rather than simply experiential, affiliative, or searching, Carlson writes:
"To invite post-Boomers into a pilgrim
'
s journey in the Episcopal Church is to invite them into a tradition where they can discover the scaffolding of tradition and scripture upon which to stand as they build their own faith, using their reason and experience to construct that personal credo they will insist upon, yet building it upon the teaching of two thousand years of Christianity."
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Making Worthy Citizens
the institutional character of cathedrals
 In the second Practicing Theology essay in this issue, June Osborne, dean of Salisbury Cathedral, offers the third installment in our series on Anglican cathedrals in her essay "Creating Citizens: The Institutional Character of Cathedrals." Osborne envisions a cathedral as a kind of theological intrusion into civic life. Further, this intrusive character of cathedrals makes them uniquely situated to address some of the anxieties of present generations. Cathedrals insist upon the strange yet wide path that God's mercy takes on its way to intersect our lives together on this planet. Osborne writes:
"The Anglican household is made up of many inspirational institutions. We underestimate both their exceptional and missional quality because we are nervous about expressions of human life that offer a collective view of God's redemptive grace. Yet our collective life has its own soteriology, and cathedrals constantly remind us how salvation works at all levels and not just in the heart and mind of the individual. It is their institutional quality that proclaims the scale of God's providential action reaching all. It opens our imagination to the way God shares our life within our own landscape and context and then transforms it. It is unafraid of a plural and untidy world and recognizes that God speaks in plural voices to people who live wholly within that untidiness."
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