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Preface

This book draws together research and writing from recent years as well as my own experience in the process of moral teaching on human sexuality in the Episcopal Church. It arose particularly in light of my participation in the Anglican Roman Catholic Theological Consultation in the U.S.A. (ARC-USA) on moral teaching and the church over the last seven years. This book has grown out of our work together sustained in prayer and friendship.

I am also thankful to complete the writing of this book while on sabbatical leave at the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at Saint John’s University and Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. The balance between my “hermitage” apartment looking out over a dazzling, winter-white lake and the hospitality and rhythm of Benedictine life and worship is what has made this sabbatical time for writing a time of discernment and growth in faith.

My appreciation of the challenges and opportunities to live more fully into the unity of Christian faith came through my own ecumenical education, beginning in my doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University in the early 1970s. My ecumenical development continued while I taught at Seabury Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. There each year for nineteen years, I taught at least one course with colleagues across the street at what was then named Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. I am especially appreciative to have taught with Dick Tholin, then professor of Christian ethics and society and the academic dean of GETS. More broadly, it is sufficient to say, the field of Christian ethics and moral theology is ecumenical; hence, I am thankful for the opportunities to work ecumenically in the field of ethics in a variety of professional settings.

For the last seventeen years I am grateful to have served as professor of Christian ethics at Virginia Theological Seminary, for colleagues and students, for the community of worship, and for the broader support to serve the church. For this work on ethics and the church, I especially want to thank two colleagues in ecumenism: Mitzi Budde, professor and head librarian at the Bishop Payne Library at VTS, and John W. Crossin, OSFS, executive director for ecumenical and interreligious affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

Finally, beginning some thirty years ago, my sensibilities and understandings of the church and its mission have been formed through my friendship, conversations, and work together with Philip Turner and Frank Sugeno. Now retired, Philip Turner was Episcopal missionary to Uganda, Episcopal seminary professor of Christian ethics and moral theology, and former President and Dean of Berkley Divinity School. The late Frank Sugeno became a Christian in the Anglican tradition while in a Japanese detention camp during World War II, taught church history at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest, and was a significant voice in missiology. For them I give great thanks.