Mission: Resources and Conversation for Faith and Faith-Adjacent Learning
Hi, I'm Kyle Oliver. I'm a priest, teacher, digital producer, and media scholar. I'm so glad you've found A (Christian) Formation Playbook.
Since before I knew what the word meant, I have been a curator.
For my first four years of full-time ministry, it's basically what I was paid to do: sharing resources, offering trainings, and programming conferences for what was then called the Center for the Ministry of Teaching (now Lifelong Learning) at Virginia Theological Seminary. This was in the days when the "Web 2.0" internet was largely a force for social good, a chance to connect with people and communities you cared about and have a little fun in the process. You can read all about it in Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman's Networked: The New Social Operating System.
After I left VTS to study educational media, I soon started Creative Commons Prayer, a site where I created and curated media-based spirituality resources that were mostly free to re-use and remix. Among the contributions I'm proudest of during this project was the creation of Holy Eucharist teaching cards now available at Liturgy Illuminated and the crowdsourcing of a series of collaborative, spiritually meaningful playlists, one for each liturgical season.
Along the way, I also become a podcaster.
That's another way of saying I curated audio-based conversations for distinct audiences. It started with Easter People, a (sadly mostly lost) show to serve the Christian formation leader community in the Episcopal Church. (More about them in a second.) I then helped found the Media and Social Change Podcast, a place for my lab mates and I to tell stories about research that interested us, including our own.
A couple years later I was invited to serve as founding producer for The Way of Love with Bishop Michael Curry, a show about following Jesus through spiritual practices. It regularly made the Apple Podcasts charts for religion shows and had the backing of a whole denomination's institutional communications efforts. It forced me to up my game as an audio producer and storyteller.
By then I was hooked, and in the end my doctoral committee prevailed upon me to put in the (pretty massive) extra work to author my dissertation as a podcast. It's called Becoming Tapestry and available "wherever you get your podcasts," as we so often say. I've never been so proud about digging in my heals to insist that scholarship should (at least sometimes) be created in a way that is as accessible as possible to non-specialists.
I'm giving you this link-based CV in spirituality and media because in the process of making all this stuff I learned that I was doing it because it was my vocation. It has sometimes also been my job. It mostly isn't, currently, but it took me six months to figure out I needed to keep doing it anyway. (News flash, Oliver: That's what a vocation is.)
The "Networked" era of online media is basically over, and with it the way(s) many of us used to share resources, reflect on our lives and work, and organize professional collaboration. I miss it, so I'm retooling (a bit late) for this new era when creators try to wean themselves off the big platforms. You probably ended up here because you saw something I posted on Facebook or Threads or LinkedIn and I encouraged you to subscribe directly. I hope you will!
What will the content on this site all have in common? I'm still working on a proper distillation. It's all going to have some connection to what it means to convene learning and formation in the fast-changing religious and social climate in which we find ourselves here in North America. We'll figure it out as we go along. Thanks for coming on the ride.
