Work Elsewhere, First Quarter 2025

A brief roundup

It’s hard to believe that we’re already a third of the way done with 2025! Alongside the twenty posts I made here in the last three months (12 lectionary reflections and 8 articles), I also have had some work published elsewhere that I wanted to share with you all.

As of just a few days ago, I have a piece out in Plough’s online edition about the prayer book Lenten collect, which you can read here. In this short meditation, I show that this collect invites us into a way of observing the season that is less about heroic effort to earn God’s favor than about surrendering to God’s work in the soul moving it to repentance. Incidentally, it’s based in part on a sermon I gave way back in 2021 as my senior sermon at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.

Back in February, I also had a piece published online in The Anglican Way, the journal of the the Prayer Book Society (USA). Entitled “The Bread Which We Break”, it is a reworking of a Substack piece of mine from last November — but certainly the better for the editorial attention! Incidentally, it has been interesting to see that in the Swiss Reformed Church here, the portions for communion do seem to be a little bit bigger. Perhaps a distant reflection of Bullinger’s thoughts on the topic?

I also have two recent podcast appearances I wanted to share with you all. I had the chance to join the Rev. Dennis Sanders for the second time on his Church and Main podcast, and a little while later I got to chat with the Rev. Martha Tatarnic on the Future Christian podcast. Both of these conversations had their origins in a piece I wrote last December on the current state of the Anglican Church of Canada. It was really refreshing to be able to talk together with both of these faithful and committed Christian ministers about mainline decline, evangelism, the church in the era of Trump, and what a healthier and more Jesus-centered future for the mainline looks like.

By the way, here on Draw Near With Faith, the two most popular pieces of the quarter were On Crucifying the Desires of the Flesh and On intake officers, episcopal authority, and false dichotomies. I’m really glad that these got some attention, as both of them were particularly important to me: the first about Christianity and the redirection of desire, and the second about clergy misconduct and disciplinary processes. If you haven’t read them, I’d certainly encourage you to do so.

That’s all for now. I’ll leave you, just for fun — and as a very modest token of thanks for your support of my work here and elsewhere — with a photo of me and a very sweet little Swiss cat in Kandersteg, a village in the Berner Oberland.

I’m not sure which of us is happier, to be honest.