In September, Cathedral College, a new seminary born out of a partnership between the Mercer School of Theology in the Diocese of Long Island and Codrington College in Barbados, will welcome at least seven seminarians at Cathedral Close in Garden City, New York.
Cathedral College will offer one-on-one mentorship, small-group tutorials, and shared sacramental life, as seminarians live in a community space where they can receive an “understanding of pastoral ministry as incarnational service within the Body of Christ,” an official document said.
Students will come from both Mercer and Codrington as they pursue a two-year accredited program that will lead to a Master of Arts in Theology and Spirituality. In partnership with the Center for Spiritual Imagination, seminarians will nurture the “foundational virtues for deepening their sacramental worldview and developing their rule of life,” which involves the practice of “Benedictine stability, Carmelite contemplation, and Franciscan simplicity.”
Residency terms allow those attending Cathedral College to encounter diverse expressions of Anglican faith, worship, and culture, as they spend time both at Cathedral Close and the Codrington College campus in Barbados.
“The ideal student really and truly is a person who understands the global nature of our existence and the global nature of the church,” said the Rev. Dr. Michael Clarke, principal of Codrington College. “And more especially is open to understand the uniqueness that each culture brings to the table.”
“During my episcopacy, I have shared my gratitude for the faith, wisdom, and vibrant leadership that Caribbean church leaders have offered in the Diocese of Long Island across generations,” said Bishop Lawrence Provenzano of Long Island in a statement.
“Cathedral College is not merely an academic venture; it is a living bridge across seas and centuries.”
Close to Long Island’s Heart, 2,000 Miles Away
The realization of Cathedral College, which has been years in the making, can be traced to reflection, history, and conversations among those who made it happen. Clarke and the Very Rev. Dr. Michael Sniffen, dean of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Long Island, will play leadership roles in the endeavor.
Both Clarke, from Barbados, and Sniffen spoke to TLC via Zoom on July 1.
“How can cathedrals serve as places of learning, the arts, and worship?” was the question Sniffen explored when he pursued his doctorate in theology at Drew University. He had been serving as dean of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Long Island for several years, and Mercer is also located on the premises of the Gothic structure built in 1885.
Sniffen explored his original question through the lens of Anglican history and wrote a dissertation offering a “fresh way to envision ritual performance and spiritual development in a Gothic setting”—one in which he re-envisioned the cathedral in Garden City, New York, as a vital center for spiritual imagination.
Two years after he received his doctorate, an opportunity for learning innovation came—inspired by a place close to the diocese’s heart, 2,000 miles away.
Codrington College opened as a grammar school with 17 pupils in 1745. It is the oldest Anglican theological college in the Western Hemisphere and is part of the Church of the Province of the West Indies, which comprises eight dioceses.
“The Diocese of Long Island has benefited from fine clergy who studied at Codrington over several generations,” Sniffen said. “And then the current subdean of the cathedral here, who is an alum of Codrington, set up an opportunity for me to go down.” Sniffen was trying to remember his date of travel, approximating it to around late 2021, when moving around was less constrained during the pandemic.
But what he can vividly remember was his fruitful conversation at Clarke’s home, right on his porch. It was their first meeting.
“We had really been considering a lot of very similar challenges and opportunities from two very different perspectives in the Anglican Communion,” said Sniffen, who became dean of the Mercer School of Theology alongside his role at the cathedral in 2022.
“From our end here at the college, one of the things that we have known for the longest time is that many of our alumni have gone north,” Clarke said. “And this is from the entire province of the West Indies. … As early as the ’60s, we were saying that clergy were leaving the Caribbean and being invited to take positions in [the United States]. And a lot of this had to do with the fact that there was a serious surge of immigration from the region around about that time.”
Anglicans leaving the West Indies for the north “brought the church with them and all the other paraphernalia that went along with having that sense of home,” only to discover that the dynamics of worship in their new setting “didn’t seem to be what they remember from home.”
This longing for home brought several students to Codrington, which is a convenient five-hour flight from Miami or New York. Clergy from Barbados sought advanced degrees in the mainland, with some staying to teach and serve in the States. “So you’ve got a strong West Indian presence, but there never was that other side of the equation—what was happening from the American side,” Clarke said, a gap that Cathedral College fills.
“What Mercer and Codrington College are seeking to do is that we are seeking to revisit some core issues, some core values, some core methodologies,” the Codrington principal said. “But the core is always: how do you take this individual, this ordinary person, and you help them to develop themselves as an individual, as a person—a person with wisdom and compassion? Because that’s essentially what we’re talking about: wisdom and compassion.”
Sniffen, who was baptized Roman Catholic and raised United Methodist, said that “one of the distinctive gifts that Anglicanism has to offer the world is a genuinely contextual and incarnational theology.”
He bills the partnership between Codrington and Mercer—which is interprovincial in nature from the view of global Anglicanism—as essential in what he describes as a post-colonial, post-parochial age the church and the world are coming into.
“And so I think what will be most exciting about this program is not yet known,” he said.
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
