Media Recs

Dear readers, I am very grateful for you, and I am doing my best to get my professional and vocational feet back under me after all our family has been through in the past six months. It is going pretty well, but there are a lot of moving parts to touch/investigate/coordinate and figure out where they fit in the new order.

All this to say, thanks for your patience and your continuing interest in this newsletter.

I'm going to come back to my reflections on Adapting Christian Formation and perhaps even continue the read-along I had started in the fall before things unravelled. In the meantime, let me pass along some links I think readers of this newsletter will appreciate.

AI Church Toolkit – I've written, spoken, and practiced some in the past year or so (and been reading and listening in the background a ton) about AI. One person in the Episcopal Church whose work on the topic I've been following and who has been listening and truly leading in a thoughtful way is Peter Levenstrong. He's the co-host this new podcast, which is worth your time.

Katie's Church Planting Journey – My seminary classmate and frequent running buddy Katie Nakamura Rengers was one of my friends on the churchwide staff who was laid off in the recent "realignment." I'm gutted by many of those layoffs, but getting rid of the church planting staff feels especially poorly aligned with the stated plan/values of where we're supposed to be heading as a denomination. (I appreciated Tim Baer's recent point on this: "Without [churchwide] support, the capacity for church planting 'is near zero in most dioceses.'") Anyway, Katie has a new newsletter, and her series on her own experience as a church planter is especially riveting. If you're looking for more, Sandy and I interviewed her in the second season of the Way of Love podcast.

Henry Jenkins on Pop & Play – Two of my favorite professors from Teachers College were involved in a recent episode of the Digital Futures Institute's excellent Pop & Play podcast. If you're at all interested in media, fandom, digital community, and related topics, you may know that it was a big "get" for them to interview Henry Jenkins, lead author of the most frequently cited whitepaper in my personal library for sure. (You'll realize it's slightly less of a get when you learn that Jenkins was Professor Ioana Literat's dissertation advisor.)

"What We're Losing" – Sociologist of risk management Ryan Hagen (a childhood pal of mine) has a great newsletter I've probably recommended here before. I found his peanut allergy illustration in this issue analyzing the current government purges especially helpful.

New Opportunities at Forward Movement – In case you haven't heard, Forward Movement just received a huge gift to fund discipleship resources for the Episcopal Church. There is significant hiring accompanying the project, and there are readers of this newsletter who might be good candidates.

Be well, friends. Much love and solidarity in difficult times from here in Far North Chicagoland.