The Living Church Podcast

Support the show Register for conference: Preaching in a Post-Christian Age. Join us in the Holy Land in 2024 It is a delight to be with you in the first week of Pentecost. Many of you are artists, musicians, writers, lovers of beauty, literature, good poetry, a good pint or pipe. The combination of art, beauty, and Christian life is a fascinating and life-giving one, and one that's closely re...

Support the show Register for conference: Preaching in a Post-Christian Age. David Bentley Hart, that peppery, unyielding Eastern Orthodox theologian, has two brothers: one is a Church of England priest, another is an American Anglo-Catholic priest. Wouldn't you love to be at that Thanksgiving table? You may have heard it said that families are some of God's most radical ecumenical experim...

Support the show Register for conference: Preaching in a Post-Christian Age. If you're new to the podcast, welcome, we are glad you're here at the Living Church Podcast, the only one of its kind created for pastors, teachers, interested lay people in the Episcopal Church, Anglican Communion, and beyond to equip, encourage, and entertain you so that your calling in God's Church feels a...

Biblical scholar Amy Peeler's new book,  Women and the Gender of God , is a deep, scriptural exploration of the way gender and human embodiment color our relationship with God -- and if we take the Virgin birth seriously, then not only color that relationship, but in some ways substantiate it. Whether you're in a world that venerates the Virgin Mother or debates about complimentarian vs. e...

Become a special monthly podcast supporter!  Click here to support the show. Meditating on the Passion, on the Lord's suffering for us, we often recall times and places of other suffering -- in our own hearts, our lives, the lives of others. Several weeks ago, I was introduced to a woman who has seen what it's like for God to bear witness to himself in the life and sufferings of his people...

Become a special monthly podcast supporter!  Click here  and then click Support. Welcome to the final episode of Lent in 2023. We are going to hear from 7 guests about their take on some aspect of the words of Our Lord's prayer: forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. The forgiveness of debts -- especially as it applies to the lives of Christian leaders -- how do we make forgiveness a...

Become a special monthly podcast supporter! Click here  and then click Support. I was never very good at limbo. I remember repeated forced limbo games in school, on spirit days or athletics days, or the occasional picnic. The attempt to sincerely try to get as low as you could go, in front of everybody -- well, the chances of failure seemed too high for my pride. I was gangly, averse to physical e...

Welcome back podcast listeners. And welcome to Lent. Whether you're relatively new to Lent, old hat, or just really not that into it if you're honest -- totally cool. We've got a little something for everyone today -- to think about, enjoy, maybe even new to glean for your Lenten practice. My guest today is the Rev. Dr. Esau McCaulley, has just released a brief, readable, and very wise...

Donate to the Living Church . What's more important, unity or justice? Today we're travelling back in time with the Rev. Dr. Brandt Montgomery and the Rt. Rev. R. William Franklin to look at some influential figures from the Episcopal past -- John Henry Hobart and the founders of Saint James School in Maryland -- and how they influenced the shapes of political engagement of Anglicans in th...

Is it the Book of Acts where someone says, "Look, here is patch of flat dirt. What should prevent us from building a pickleball court?" So maybe not. But any of us who have been in Christian leadership for any length of time, if we have our eyes open to surprise, will experience God doing lots of things with the world and inviting us to participate, often in unpredictable ways. And when we...

Welcome back, dear podcast listeners. We are in our 93rd episode here at the top of Epiphanytide, and I hope you had a peaceful and happy Christmas. As Jesus' identity is revealed to the world, first to the Wise Men and later at the Jordan River, how can those who receive this gift be witnesses to his life and love, and not either lose a sense of who he is or who we are or what his presence do...

Make a holiday donation to TLC. Welcome, listeners, to our Christmas chat episode of the Living Church, our final episode of the year. Kick back with a hot cider and listen on. Fr. Mark Michael, our interim executive director and editor of the Living Church magazine asked if he could sit down with a good friend of TLC, the Rev. Dr. Russ Levenson, to talk about Russ's new and intriguing book. W...

Make a holiday donation to the Living Church. Today is a special day on the liturgical calendar. It is what the fathers and mothers of the Church knew as the "First Podcast of Advent." Welcome to this wonderful time of waiting. And we've got a treat for you almost as sweet as those baked goodies you're wondering whether or not to fast from because this is technically a penitential...

Subscribe to The Living Word Plus -- 30% off with an annual subscription. Learn more about the Anglican Heritage Pilgrimage. Today's episode is bittersweet. When we were recording it, we were saying goodbye, now we have said goodbye to our executive director of 13 years, Dr. Christopher Wells -- the inimitable Christopher Wells -- and in today's episode, I sit down with him for a little he...

Subscribe to The Living Word Plus -- 30% off with an annual subscription. Learn more about the Anglican Heritage Pilgrimage.   Objection 1: It would seem that there cannot be a virtue about comedy. For Ambrose says: "Our Lord said: 'Woe to you who laugh.'" Wherefore I consider that all, and not only excessive, comedy should be avoided. I answer that: Just as man needs bodily rest f...

What is it, like, 4 weeks until the start of Advent? I am not the kind of person to turn a holiday or a holy season into a time of stress. Believe me. But for everyone pastoring a church, or even on the staff of a church, or even a seriously involved person at a church, will know there are times when things "ramp up" liturgically speaking. When the calendar gets busier. And those can be ti...

Register for " The Word of God Endures Forever " webinar. Our guest today is the Rev. Dr. Annette Brownlee, chaplain, director of field education and professor of pastoral theology at Wycliffe College, a theological school that forms many Anglicans and Christians of other traditions, in Toronto, Ontario. And she is someone who has had a profound influence in many lives of clergy and clery...

Where were you were when you first started feeling the stirrings of a call — to the faith, to a deeper more inquiring life, to a vocation to engineering, nursing, motherhood, or the ministry? Today we’re taking a look at what Jesus might mean when he says, "Come follow me.” Specifically, we’ll talk about how this might work with young adults fresh out of college and just beginning their career...

Join us in Oklahoma City for the Love's Redeeming Work Conference . Podcast listeners use discount code FRIEND25 for 25% off all tickets. Click here for tickets. -- What happened at the Lambeth Conference? This week we've got two bishops fresh from Lambeth, coming in to share what they saw and heard. We'll talk Resolution I.10, missing provinces, the ministry of the archbishop, practic...

Pentecost and ecumenism; magical realism and the environment; the Trump era and the rise of the religious right; Azusa street and the empowering of the poor; and a few Lord of the Rings  references for good measure. Today we have two very special guests, one of them a professor of mine from grad school, the other a new friend and colleague in the Anglican Church in Brazil. All of us have a Penteco...

Today we're speaking with someone who never thought she could be a leader until she discovered she was called to be a leadership expert, disrupting and healing patterns of Christian leadership. My guest has a refreshing and hard-won take on leadership that focuses on the way we use our physical selves in space in order to assert or share power. Where does power come from? Why do some people ju...

It's Lambeth Week! The Lambeth Conference is a gathering of bishops every ten years from across the Anglican Communion — though the schedule occasionally gets off track, such as during WWII and the Covid pandemic. They meet for prayer and reflection, fellowship and dialogue on church and world affairs. Why should you, O listener who may not be an Anglican bishop, or even an Anglican, care abou...

Under the Banner of Heaven is a true-crime series based on a book, about the murder of a young Mormon woman, Brenda Lafferty (Daisy Edgar Jones), and her young daughter and the subsequent investigation of that murder. The show's creator is an ex-Mormon, Dustin Lance Black. And he invents a character, a police detective, Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), who is also a Mormon. And Jeb's investigat...

Clergy and performing artists have a lot in common. How is liturgy like a concert? A staff meeting like a band rehearsal? All leaders, and all Christians, can learn so much from artists, good art, and artistic discipline about God's world, God's work, and life in Christ. Today I'm joined by the Rev. Jonathan Jameson, also known as Jon Jameson of the indie rock band Delta Spirit. We tal...

From Charles Darwin to sex robots to the Big Bang and the Gospel of John—we are going to take a journey today into the wild and woolly world of faith and science. Faith and science—how do we have these conversations?—evolution, artificial intelligence, Covid, When does life begin?, How should it end?—how do we have these conversations in ways that are charitable and as smart as possible and leave...