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 grew
up in the Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, MI, and attended
the Christian schools of that denomination through high-school. My
father and mother, however, were low church Episcopalian and Lutheran by
background, without a drop of Dutch blood between them, who furthermore
had courted at Church of the Advent in Boston and become anglophiles
over the course of years living in and around London. To complicate
matters, we joined a progressive CRC congregation in the late 1970s,
replete with weekly celebrations of Holy Communion and liturgical dance.
In turn, I fell away from the Church while being radicalized in a year
of community service in Boston after high-school, but subsequently made
my way back to the Episcopal Church at college in the teeth of an
intellectual conversion to the faith (Luther, Pascal, Dostoevsky,
Eliot), plus nudges—theological and spiritual—from my
ex-fundamentalist-but-still-evangelical Roman Catholic buddy. Somewhere
along the way my idea of being a community organizer morphed into a
possible vocation to study theology at the graduate level; and I
resolved the possible tension between the two at divinity school when I
realized that the ecclesiological turn of MacIntyre and Hauerwas could
be completed by the ecumenical movement in both its parts—Faith & Order,
Life & Work. The former urgency of Protestant ethics thus shifted for
me, Lindbeck-like, to a pressing need to understand St. Thomas on the
Trinity and the Eucharist; and a regular habit of prayer even helped me
to begin making sense of St. Paul!—thence the Old Testament, thence St.
Matthew’s gospel ... .
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