What Roy Gets About Worship By Mark Michael On that sweltering morning last July when we held our first service of pandemic-season public worship at Saint Francis, Potomac, Roy was there. There was no vaccine, and lots we didn’t know y... Read More...
“Children, Keep Yourselves from Idols” Idolatry By Stephen E. Fowl Baylor University Press 2019. Pp. 180 $34.95. Review by Anthony Petrotta Professor Fowl's argument is clear and concise: idolatry is alive and well, just as it was in the day... Read More...
Being Distracted by the Right Things By Sam Keyes Three times now in an introductory course on sacraments and liturgy, I’ve asked students to reflect on a playlist of Church music that I assembled for them. To do such a thing at all challenges many of their assumptions, making an implicit clai... Read More...
This All Saints’ Day, Return to In-Person Worship By Charles Bennison At St. Luke’s, Atlanta, three decades ago, the 11 a.m. Sunday Eucharist had a largely-suburban television audience of 25,000, with 700 actually gathered at the church. Many of these in-pe... Read More...
The Trials of Returning to Worship By Shirley O’Shea It had been more than five months since I had entered a sanctuary when I returned to church. Before the coronavirus pandemic necessitated the suspension of worship services, I would drive 2... Read More...
No Singing By Charlie Clauss As many of us emerge from shelter-at-home orders, churches have begun planning for in-person congregational worship. This is welcome news! The gathering of God’s people for worship is a great good, a gift that the lack of which has sorely ... Read More...
Why Go Back to Church? By Francis H. Wade It is unlikely that Carl Sandberg intended in 1936 to describe the plight of the church in 2020 but his poem “Get Off This Estate” does just that. "Get off this estate." "What for?" "Be... Read More...
Five Suggestions for Reopening Your Church By Zac Koons It is a fascinating time to be planning worship. We have no pandemic playbook. We have been forced instead into improv mode, each of us walking backward into an uncertain future, trying to keep... Read More...
