The April 21 edition of The Living Church is available online to registered subscribers. In the cover story of this edition, Barbara Talcott discusses the steps she and her colleagues took in helping St. Mark’s School describe its identity:
There was a time not so long ago when the vast majority of students at my school (St. Mark’s in Southborough, Mass.) were church-attending Episcopalians. Thus there was really no need to explain, either to families or faculty, what it meant to be an Episcopal school. Those times are past. I now teach at a wonderful, vibrant school that is about 12 percent Episcopal in its families and far less than that in its faculty. (I will not venture a guess about how many of these self-identified Episcopalians regularly attend church.)
So it is no surprise that I, like so many of my fellow chaplains, was charged with explaining our Episcopal identity to people for whom that is an entirely foreign concept. But how do I, cradle Episcopalian, find my way into this? There are at least three layers of identity that distinguish us from other schools available to our families:
St. Mark’s differs from secular schools in that it is religious.
St. Mark’s differs from other religious schools in that it is Christian.
St. Mark’s differs from other Christian schools in that it is Episcopal.
News
- Raising Confirmands in the Way They Should Go
By G. Jeffrey MacDonald
Features
- Explaining Episcopal Identity
By Barbara Talcott - Faith in Learning: Muhlenberg and Catholic Education
By W.L. Prehn
Cultures
- Easter to Whitsun with Thomas Noyes-Lewis
By Richard J. Mammana
Books
- Heretics and Believers
Review by Calvin Lane - A House Divided
Review by Elisabeth Rain Kincaid - Why We Need Religion
Review by Bonnie Poon Zahl
Other Departments
- People & Places
- Sunday’s Readings
