Introducing the "Religious Life Podcast"

Interviews with theologians, clergy and lay folks building new Christian communities

Hello Readers,

Today I release my 5-minute introduction to the Religious Life Podcast. As such this post is two notes, and the script of the introduction for those who prefer to read rather than listen.

• You can listen to the introduction below or wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Google, or elsewhere. Please subscribe!

• I’ll be releasing episodes weekly on Sundays for the next twelve weeks. My first guest will be Paul Engler. Paul not only co-founded the Center for the Working Poor in Los Angeles, “an intentional community with core principles of Strategic Nonviolence, Voluntary Simplicity, Intentional Community, Hospitality, Community Building, and Spirituality and Faith in Action.” He also developed a curriculum and organization for mobilizing activists which trains hundreds of people across the globe each year.

Here is the text of the introductory podcast for those who prefer to read rather than listen:

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When I was 36 I heard a voice that I think was God’s. That September afternoon in 2016, I was sitting at a desk in my host family’s apartment in Cochabamba, Bolivia. I had just returned from attending a Catholic Mass at a nearby prison, led by a priest connected to the Spanish language institute where I was studying in preparation for the Protestant, Episcopal priesthood.

As I sat at my desk, I recalled what had moved me about visiting the Catholic Mass at the prison: walking in to the small chapel and seeing on the walls murals of Jesus ministering to Bolivian farmers; seeing a scattering of prisoners standing beneath the murals and praying the stations of the cross ; and seeing a life-size Jesus hanging on a cross, watching over us all from the altar.

I wasn’t aware just how deeply this had struck me until I found myself saying one of the most honest and least reverent prayers of my life. It contained a four-letter word that I’ll leave out this time around. “God please don’t make me Catholic,” I prayed. I was afraid that God wanted me to go somewhere I wasn’t willing to go. I wasn’t ready to leave the Episcopal Church. I wasn’t ready to have my plans for the priesthood be upended.

The voice that answered my prayer was both clearer and more mysterious than the voices in my head. “Duncan you’re called to religious life,” the voice said. When I heard the words, I got up from the desk and walked in circles around the room crying tears of relief. It felt like the weight of my fear had been lifted.

Then confusion descended. “What the heck is religious life?” I wondered.

When I got home to the States I reached out for help to understand the experience from a mentor and former Jesuit priest. I remember him saying over the phone, “Duncan, if you’re working on the margins, denominations don’t matter. Your call is about devotion, care for the land, and working with the poor. I don’t know any church that can contain your call; you may have to create it.”¹

His words rang true but I also felt overwhelmed and embarrassed - overwhelmed because he was not describing the path of parish priesthood that I and others had planned for me; embarrassed because I wondered, “Who am I to start something new?” So whatever truth I heard in his words, I tucked it away for a later day.

A “later day” has become seven years. I’m 43 now, an ordained Episcopal priest, a husband, and a dad. I’ve worked in three different parishes. I have loved the people and much of the work. At the same time, my mentor’s words have been weighing on me all along. Normally we think of sin as a “form of pride, an exaltation of self,” one theologian writes, but it can also be a '“refusal to claim the self God has given.”² Postponing a response to a call to religious life may have been practical and necessary seven years ago; waiting any longer feels like the sin of self-refusal. So, I launch this podcast as an act of self- acceptance. “Why not explore creating a Christian community around devotion, care for the land, and work with the poor?”

How do you explore creating a community? By talking to people who are similarly called, hearing about their successes and failures, and letting the Spirit who is present when two or more are gathered reveal the next step. This podcast aims to learn from theologians, clergy, and lay folks who are building new Christian communities. Historian Phyllis Tickle who wrote in her 2008 book The Great Emergence that every 500 years the church has a rummage sale when more vital forms of Christianity emerge, revitalized expressions of older forms develop, and the faith spreads to new places. We are now 500 years out from the Reformation, the church’s last rummage sale, and poised for new expressions of the faith to emerge. I will ask guests about their approach to the rummage sale. How do they talk about God and his Kingdom in an age of ecocide? What are the Christian practices that they’re keeping from the 500 year rummage sale? What are they letting go of?

Are you curious about these questions? Is something emerging in you? Help me to explore how to honor the voice that called me to religious life. Maybe the same voice is calling you. Listen in.

1. I wrote a piece about a smaller portion of this conversation here in 2021 where I explore the meanings of “religious life.”

2. Ann Ulanov, Receiving Woman, quoted in Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s Nov. 2022 article in The Christian Century, “Aurelia Dávila Pratt’s Paths to Healing”, https://www.christiancentury.org/review/books/aurelia-d-vila-pratt-s-paths-healing