The Rev. Dr. Calvin Lane is associate rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Dayton, Ohio, affiliate professor of Church History at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, and adjunct professor of History at Wright State University in Dayton. In a single weekday he will work with undergraduates, seminarians, teenagers and their parents, people about to give birth or on their deathbed, folks at points of transition and change. Dr. Lane was ordained deacon and priest in 2011 and previous to his current call in Dayton he was priest-in-charge of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Franklin, Louisiana.
In addition to degrees from UNC Chapel Hill and Nashotah House, he holds a PhD from the University of Iowa. Dr. Lane has held research fellowships in the U.S. and the U.K., including grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London. He is active in the Sixteenth Century Society Conference and the American Society of Church History Conference. Dr. Lane also serves as a member of the General Board of Examining Chaplains for the Episcopal Church (elected in 2018).
While he delights in teaching the full range of church history and directing master’s theses, Dr. Lane’s published writing focuses on the middle ages and the reformation-era. He is particularly concerned with the way tradition, history, and memory operate in the formation of religious identity, how we craft stories of the past to explain to ourselves and to others who we are (see publications below). His current project explores the reformation of the feast of Pentecost in the sixteenth century and new perceptions of both the Holy Spirit and the Church.
Dr. Lane is happily married to Dr. Denise Kettering-Lane, Associate Professor at Bethany Theological Seminary in Richmond, Indiana (just next door to Dayton on the campus of Earlham College). They have two children, Daniel and Elizabeth.
Books:
Spirituality and Reform: Christianity in the West, c1000-c18000 (Lanham, MD: Lexington / Fortress, 2018) is a broad, colorful introductory study of the relationship between reform movements and Christian spirituality from the Gregorian Reform in the high middle ages to the Pietists of the eighteenth century.
The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church: History, Conformity, and Religious Identity in Post-Reformation England (London: Routledge, 2013) examines the legitimating power of history and primitivism in post-reformation England and the reshaping of what it meant to be a faithful member of the Church of England.
Articles in Scholarly Journals:
• “John Milton’s Elegy for Lancelot Andrewes (1626) and the Dynamic Nature of Religious Identity in Early Stuart England,” Anglican & Episcopal History 85 (2016), pp. 468-491 • “The Evolution of Early Stuart Conformist Thought: The Liturgical Theology of John Donne,”
Reformation and Renaissance Review 7.2 / 7.3 (2005), 223-248. • “Before Hooker: The Material Context of Elizabethan Prayer Book Worship,” Anglican and Episcopal History 74 (2005), 320-356