This important book by Danielle Treweek, a deacon in Anglican Diocese of Sydney, Australia, offers a foundational perspective for understanding singleness in the church. It deserves the attention it has already received in the evangelical parts of the oecumene; one hopes that it will receive attention everywhere.

The first step to understanding singleness today is to recognize the grip romanticism has upon marriage. The societal narrative is that marriage is where we are most fulfilled; it is where greatest happiness is to be found. Single people are defined negatively as unmarried, as not being something. (This view of marriage is of course ahistorical and it floats free of traditional commitments of children and indissolubility.) The Reformers contributed to this “romantic essentialization of marriage and family” (p. 29), leading to a Protestant “sentimental ideal” (p. 30) that Treweek documents from works by James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and others. The result is that single people are problematic to the contemporary church; they don’t conform to romantic, marital expectations.

Treweek diagnoses the attitude toward singleness of much contemporary Christianity: Singleness is deficient and aberrant, and single people are unfulfilled. In this part of her argument she struck me as unnecessarily harsh in her reading of Tim Keller and, in general, rather academically wooden. But she is spot-on when she notes the assumption that the sole, supreme form of relational fulfilment is to be found in marriage. Friendship is suspect not only in the world but in the church, because any close relationship is assumed to be sexual at some level.

Following this cultural and ecclesial history and contemporary diagnosis, Treweek prepares for her valuable work of reclamation. The Christian tradition has much positive to say about the value and character of singleness. She argues that in 1 Corinthians 7:7, Paul is not pointing to a special grace that allows some people to live without strong sexual drives. Rather, as Augustine will say, we have all (in Treweek’s words) “been given the will to obey divine commandments” (p. 66).

She turns to the magnificent work of Kyle Harper (From Shame to Sin, Harvard, 2013), who states that for Augustine “free will is an achieved state … rehabilitated by the mysterious power of divine grace. … The rise of the concept of free will and the sea change in the logic of sexual morality went hand in hand” (p. 67; from Harper, pp. 179–80, 118. Correction and emphasis mine). Singleness, with its embodiment of a Christian understanding of sexual restraint — Harper’s “sea change” — shows forth the continence and chastity that should be normative for all Christians. This is true whether it is a life state, a life calling, or a transitional state; all of us, of course, being single for at least part of our lives.

Treweek’s reclamation project proper begins with an extended study of virginity in Christian thought and practice from the early centuries forward. Some Christians held that sexual intercourse was a participation in the Fall: that marriage was a consolation that God allowed fallen humanity. Against them, Augustine held an “adamant prelapsarian position on marriage and sexuality,” a complex view that “marriage and sex [were] Edenic realities” while still holding “virginity [to be] eschatologically superior.” To hold that marriage was there in Eden before the Fall was, she said, “a seismic theological turning point” (p. 112). Indeed, Augustine’s thought perdures memorably in the Anglican marriage rite’s affirmation that marriage is “a solemn estate instituted by God in the time of man’s innocency” (That is, before the Fall).

Although the history is not monolithic regarding virginity, its importance throughout required an eschatological frame. Singleness qua virginity reminds us all of the final state of human beings in paradise. It instructs the church today; it is a prophetic sign. It is not properly understood as a sign of something lacking — for marriage (what singleness lacks) partakes of this world and not of the world to come. This role for singleness was significant in the church’s developing self-understanding. Influenced by Peter Brown, Treweek writes that “the so-called abnormality of the unmarried Christian life became the paradigm by which the believing community was uniquely and radically distinguished from the society around them” (p. 127). She quotes Brown drawing out the logic: “a society no longer held together by a sexual social contract was, in many ways a tabula rasa; it might regroup itself in a very different manner from that current in the surrounding world” (p. 127).

Treweek shows the contemporary discomfort with Matthew 22:23-33 (and parallels), as witnessed by the erasure of contemporary significance of the eschatological teaching that there is no marrying in the life to come. She does similar work with the latter part of 1 Corinthians 7. These two passages, historically, provided “a theologically thick and pastorally nourishing construct of the unmarried Christian life” (p. 162) and they need to be studied today, despite their implicit conflict with a romantic understanding of marriage.

Her theological retrieval chapter works with, again, Augustine, but also Aelfrik (a prolific English abbot at the turn of the first millennium), John Paul II, and Stanley Hauerwas. She clearly favors Aelfrik, although her presentations on the thought of the other three are fair and helpful; it is only her evaluations that I find strained at times. Worth particular note is her helpful articulation of John Paul’s framework of celibacy, part of his famous development of the theology of the body.

John Paul shows a number of ways that “the continent life ushers in the eschatological future.” First, the unmarried person has (in John Paul’s words) “an interior integration” that allows dedication to serve God’s kingdom “in all its dimensions.” Second, the virginal state “is a charismatic sign which announces that the teleological destiny of the body lies in glorification rather than the grave.” That is to say, “the unmarried life” does not merely “anticipate a new creation”; instead, it is (again John Paul’s words) “the beginning of the new creation … already at work for the total transformation of man” (p. 193. Emphasis original). For all the theologians she considers, although in different ways, singleness cannot be understood apart from eschatology.

All that I have written so far concerns the first three-fourths of her book. The final 25 percent, however, by itself would constitute a gem of a book. If this review has sparked a desire to read Treweek’s book, I suggest starting with chapter 9. Here the author shows with some subtlety the goal, theologically and ecclesiologically, of grasping the significance of singleness today: its distinction from marriage’s own eschatological orientation; the sociality of single people; the eschatological meaning of procreation; spiritual parenthood; relational sexuality; faithful friendship.

To take but one question: how, in the nitty-gritty of quotidian life, are celibate single people to understand sexual desire? Here Oliver O’Donovan arrives to be our dialogue partner. From an early essay on chastity to his mature reflections in Ethics and Theology, O’Donovan parses the differences of admiration and desire, deftly opening for us a place where admiration multiplies with the recognition of the good of creation while being distinct from desire as desire-for-myself.

Treweek has herself deftly opened in this book much of our humanity, a book which itself elicits admiration, thereby encouraging us to admire and desire the author of all good and beauty.

I am likely never to know. I mentioned it at dinner to a peregrina, a woman from New England. She was a reserved woman, the sort who largely sticks to herself; I had already learned she had moved back to her home state to take care of her aging parents. When I ventured that she was fortunate to be able to take off to walk the Camino, she said her mother had “passed” a year ago and her father is still in good health, so she has this “window” to take in things like the Camino. So my picture of her: quiet, reserved, pious daughter, self-sacrificing, lover of long walks. But when I mentioned this darned drone she, as we say, lit up. There are people, she says with dismay, who walk their whole lives as if they are characters in a film. They constantly record what’s happening to them. Someone may have been, someone may actually be walking the Camino now and taking a drone along to film the thing. I might be in someone else’s Camino film.

Such was her speculation. I hope didn’t say anything inappropriate for the camera!

When people say “the Camino” they usually mean the Camino Francés, a nearly 500-mile route from the Pyrenees westward across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela; but it can refer to any route from any place whose destination is the tomb of St. James. Millions of pilgrims walked there in the Middle Ages, and in recent decades it has seen a resurgence of popular interest, becoming for instance a “cultural itinerary” of the European Union. I am myself on the Camino as I write this, and I have a thought to share about what it means to take a pilgrimage walk in 2024. Although these reflections are born out of the Camino, they could apply to any modern walking pilgrimage.

To walk the Camino is not, it seems to me, a retreat or an escape from the world. Rather, it is an immersion in nature that is rare in our lives, an immersion that comes with a separation from the daily occupations and distractions that surround us, clinging so closely that they suppress contemplation of things bigger than the quotidian. But it is not an escape.

I looked at the landscape around me. If it were just 50 years ago, there would not be any jet streams across the sky. There would not be that blasted drone! There would not be the occasional cell tower stuck on the side of a centuries-old building. There would not be the huge windmills along the ridges of mountains. Go back 200 years and there would be no cars, no tractors, and no roads built to accommodate them. The pathways that cut through the landscape would be different. Go back 500 years and the stone buildings that today have no roofs would have been solid and inhabited. Go back 1,000 years and some of those buildings would be new, but only a few of them. Go back 2,000 years and there would be no churches, no news of Jesus having been proclaimed yet, no St. James to have traveled here with the gospel.

In other words, the landscape is layered in time. What the Camino is, I believe, is not a shedding of the modern world but rather an experience of an older world, a more natural world, a slower world, rising up from the depths. That older world is always with us, but we generally don’t think we need it and accordingly pay it no heed. T.S. Eliot points to this in “Burnt Norton,” the first of Four Quartets: the presence of old worlds in our time, shadows that sometimes become visible, water in the dry pool, figures dancing. But the speaker in the poem (and here I think the speaker is likely expressing Eliot’s own view) says we have to leave, we can’t stay, that humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Well, on the Camino you can bear it. The Camino is a privileged place for the old to come and be present with the new. Do not think of it as escape. In fact, it is wrong for us to want to escape the drones, the cell phones, the cars, and all the rest. We cannot escape, but we can bring into the present more of the deep past. This is the way of true liberation. It is what all prayer is, and perhaps it is quintessentially what the Eucharist is. The Eucharist has at its heart the call to remember: “Do this in remembrance of me.” In the Eucharist, the most modern stuff is co-present with the deepest thing in reality, and it is so by means of our remembering.

In this walk across Spain on a road that feet have trod for a thousand years, on some days I am able to attend a Mass. It will be, of course, in a Catholic church, and it will be in Spanish, a language in which I remain shamefully clumsy. The experience is familiar and strange at the same time. The churches on the Camino are almost without exception older than my native country. They were doing this ancient “remembering” in Spain before anyone on the western side of the Atlantic had heard of Jesus. When you pray, when you participate in the Eucharist, all that comes to bear on you, on our local situation and everyone in it. Jesus, the deepest level of reality, is making himself known.

It may be that you need to quit social media. In fact, I think you should. It may mean you need to simplify your life severely. We all need to do better about handling distractions. But to pray, to have Jesus present because you are remembering him — this is not a retreat from the real world of 2024, the world with drones and airplanes and a chicken in every pot and a phone in every pocket. To remember in this way is to understand what all those things really mean.

That Christian teaching expects married couples, in normative circumstances, to have children, can come as a surprise. I have known young adults of very traditional or conservative dispositions — people who would eschew, for instance, premarital sex — utterly surprised to learn that whether they have children, once they are married, is not simply a matter of their own decision. When I tell them that if they marry with the intention of not having children their marriage would not be Christian marriage, the news stuns them.

To be honest, I could have been them when I married nearly half a century ago. I too was surprised when a seasoned Anglican priest — a moderate, kindly, widely respected guy — explained his premarital instruction to me. He said that if the couple were not intending to have children, and if all other things were equal (that is, if they were of an age to have children and had no medical or genetic reason to avoid having children), then he would not celebrate the wedding. Full stop. The proverbial feather would have knocked me over.

In fact, this tradition is clear in the Book of Common Prayer’s marriage rubrics. In the 1662 Book, there is a prayer for God to “assist” the couple “that they may both be fruitful in procreation of children” and “see their children christianly and virtuously brought up.” The rubric before the prayer, however, says that if the woman “is past childbearing” it shall be omitted.

The Episcopal Church’s 1979 prayer book allows the petition for children to be omitted — it has a vertical line beside it, the way our BCP generally indicates prayers that can be omitted. Following the lines of an optional prayer in the 1928 Book, the 1979 petition asks God to bestow upon the couple, “if it is your will,” the “gift and heritage of children.”

I have interpreted God’s will in this matter to be something that we discover by using our reason. If both parties carried, recessively, a dangerous gene, that (it has seemed to me) is the sort of thing that could be part of a prayerful and godly decision not to have children. This I would understand as an extension of the traditional recognition that one might avoid children simply by being beyond childbearing age.

It is also the case that sometimes children simply are not given, despite a couple’s openness. There is no Christian expectation, in such a case, that they will resort to special means — which are often invasive and difficult, not to mention expensive — in order to have children. There is no moral obligation to pursue the matter further, and indeed some methods are morally problematic. (Think, for instance, of the vast number of “excess” embryos in cold storage.) The teaching is: be open to children, but hold lightly your hopes and expectations.

But all this I have written about before, in various ways. What has recently impressed itself upon me is a further implication of the importance of children: openness to children connects a marriage to the larger society in significant ways of gift and obligation.

The petition (in both 1928 and 1979) refers to “the gift and heritage of children.” Heritage is significant: parents and children form a link in the trans-temporal biological and spiritual connection of human generations. (Note that to “generate” — to give birth and to father, the word includes both — is to produce “generations.”) To have a heritage is to be connected with realities that are beyond oneself and ultimately beyond one’s control. A couple that has a heritage of children is a couple that lives on after they have died, even as that couple itself bears and enfleshes the inheritance of generations before it. Children, that is to say, are the sacramental sign and rather physical reality of a couple being connected with life beyond themselves.

The 1979 petition goes on to ask God to help the couple rear their children so that they know, love, and serve God. This is the deepest element of the heritage of children: to populate of the kingdom of God, to bring into being new saints for the worshipful, eternal life of paradise. But such a prayer does not look solely to the life that follows our earthly life. Children who know and serve and love God are people who also love and serve other people. The first and great commandment has a second that is like unto it! So Jesus taught, and so the epistle of St. James also underscores: to love God necessarily entails love of neighbor. Thus to have children and to rear them in the Lord is to make new and serious connections with one’s neighborhood and city and, in general, one’s society. The citizens of the kingdom of God, as Augustine said, are also the best citizens the earthly city could have.

So Christian families become positive additions to their neighborhoods and cities. Similarly, families have a claim upon the help of their neighbors and cities. Here is a special place for marriages that, for whatever reason, have not been given the gift and heritage of children. They can be special enclaves of support for the children of others. Here also is a special ministry to which single people are often called: to assist and become friends with children and their parents in their church or neighborhood or city.

I will speak personally here. My son and his wife and their children live in a different city from my own. A friend of mine moved to their city. This friend is a single woman. I introduced her to them on a particular visit, and she became for them a special friend for as long as she lived there: driving a granddaughter to dance lessons, for instance, and visiting their home for dinner, and inviting them over to her home from time to time, and so forth. She was a great gift to them, and they to her.

In a sense this is very ordinary. But it is also truly divine. And what we must see is: this is how marriages are connected to society, both as contributors and recipients. Children are integral to marriage because they connect marriages to society at large.

The church needs to point this out more than it does. I have some theological friends who describe nonmarital sexual relations as “private sexual relations.” Their point is that couples who are sexually intimate but not married — and who, thus, at least in contemporary upper-middle-class lives, are living without desire of children — have privatized their sexual relationships. These relationships are not in any significant way connected with society at large. They can get together and they can break up, and society neither cares nor notices.

But to have children — or to want to have children — means there is a marriage, or there is a desire for something that marriage has traditionally entailed. This is something public. It is something that makes a claim upon, and offers a contribution to, the world outside the private confines of the two people involved.

Children, thus, give us another way to see the public importance of marriage — another way to see why and how marriage is a good thing. And it is an especially good thing — indeed, a necessary thing — in the lonely society of late capitalism and extreme individualism in which so many people we know live today. We do not need to redefine marriage so that “private sexual relations” are re-described and blessed. This will not address the underlying loneliness. Rather, we need to offer people, who (alas, understandably) see “private sexual relations” as the best thing that is possible in their lonely world, a higher vision of public interconnectedness. We need to speak about the importance of children.

The late Bishop Paul Moore of New York liked to describe the Episcopal Church as “the Catholic Church with freedom.” In New York as in many places, the Roman Catholic was the big church against which we Episcopalians defined ourselves. The idea was that we were, at heart, truly a catholic church, and perhaps we were able, in some manner, to be more truly so than those we referred to as “the Romans.”

When I was a new priest, this came out in moral matters. Being from a state just north of Texas,[1] I knew that Episcopalians self-identified themselves over against Baptists. “We drink,” we would say. But in New York, where Baptists are rather thin on the ground, “We do birth control” was the identifier.

I came into the Episcopal Church during college, during the final years before the adoption of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The church’s proper name then was the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. That word Protestant stuck in many an Episcopal craw, and the standard narrative was that we were really catholic, a church that had a particular history in England going back to St. Alban, the first martyr. That is (we would emphasize), Anglicanism did not start at the Reformation, which was in truth a rather regrettable period of history; and the future lay in focusing on and more explicitly recovering our catholic heritage. Thus the movement to have Eucharist on every Sunday — a movement whose success is enshrined in our 1979 prayer book’s claim that the Holy Eucharist is to be the principal worship service on the Lord’s Day.

One year in seminary I was assigned to work at a parish near New York whose rector had been involved in the Anglo-Catholic movement all his life. He scratched his head over some of his previous comrades-in-arms’ refusing to use the 1979 prayer book. These were men who continued to use the Anglican Missal or other such. “We won” was his evaluation: the 1979 book contains all the essentials for which they had striven over many years.

I’m sure I’m not the only Episcopalian of a certain age who caught this spirit of the times. We said (and I believed) that the best of the Episcopal Church was its catholic heritage. Protestant elements in our heritage and in our worship were regrettable and should be minimized or ignored. We who were new clergy should seek to use incense whenever we could, to chant prayers often, and to do such other things as would accentuate the catholic side of Episcopal faith. True to this form, I got a thurible donated to the parish where I was a curate, and later a monstrance donated to the parish where I was a rector.

Another mentor urged me to join the Ecumenical Commission of the Diocese of New York. This was a serious, working commission, meeting five times a year; I was appointed to its committee on Lutheran-Episcopal dialogue, which involved another four meetings per annum. This mentor told me that priests with serious theological interests gravitated to ecumenism. He said closer relations with Lutherans would hold Episcopalians closer to orthodox Christian teaching, because that was strong and central in the Lutheran churches at that time in the United States. The same point was understood to be important in Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogues: that the closer our relations with them were, the closer we would be drawn to maintaining orthodox teaching in our church. Such ecumenical work was hoped to counter-balance tendencies in our church to pursue one social cause after another without regard for whatever theological ground might (or might not) be given for them. (Another memory: At a convention of the Diocese of New York, debating a resolution on same-sex relations, a leading lay person spoke from the floor: “When it comes to justice, I don’t want to talk theology.”)

I got involved in writing part of the official commentary on the Lutheran-Episcopal “Concordat of Agreement.” The commentary was published but the Concordat was rejected by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American. In revised form (and under the name “Called to Common Mission”) it was eventually approved. The result, however, was far from the orthodox grounding my mentor had hoped for.

Along the way I met a professor, a former Episcopalian, who said he used to think the Episcopal Church was the Catholic Church for English-speaking people. This rang true for my experience of the 1970s. I had discovered the Episcopal Church, which offered dignified worship that involved the body and its senses and that touched the mind with its thoughtful, elegant, and understated prayers. When my future wife and I would visit a Roman Catholic church, we found sloppy liturgy and, frankly, a sense of a post-war scenario: altars ripped off the walls, no overall integrity to the layout of worship, and language and music that was simplistic. In 1974, a young man looking around the American worship scene could well conclude that the Episcopal Church was indeed the Catholic Church for those of us who spoke English.

Need I point out this is no longer credible? Looking around today, the Roman Catholic Church is often beautiful. Roman Catholics have had decades to figure out how to reframe their worship spaces. They have at least subcultures that desire thoughtful music. And about a decade ago they recovered some dignified English for their prayers. I love visiting a friend’s Catholic church and professing of Jesus that he is “consubstantial” with the Father. And on the other hand, the average Episcopal congregation is small and getting smaller, riding on the exhaust fumes of the past. The Book of Common Prayer is seldom handled — seldom in the hand; instead, the liturgy is printed every week, at great cost in time and money and environmental damage. In both churches, of course, the gospel is still proclaimed and people do come to a living relationship with Lord Jesus; in both, the gospel is carried into the world with sacrificial good works. True to his character, the Lord continues to work in mysterious ways.

I will not give names. I will merely say that I am not surprised, whenever it happens, that another of my friends just cannot take it any longer. These friends want out. They have found that “the Catholic Church with freedom” is really just “Catholic lite,” and they would prefer the real thing.

I think it is true that the Episcopal Church has Catholic substance in it. But also I think I was wrong to put so much emphasis upon that. I no longer think Anglicanism is essentially an alternative version of Catholicism. Instead, it seems to me its own thing.

My first Covenant post included an effort to say what, positively, constitutes Anglicanism. It is not, in my opinion, the Eucharist, although that rite has always been essential to Anglicanism (along with baptism, it is understood as being necessary for salvation). Look instead to our rites of Morning and Evening Prayer. Here the genius or “charism” of Anglicanism is manifested in services that are uniquely “stereo” in our thinking, i.e., we read both Old and New Testaments, one lesson from each, morning and evening, day after day.[2]

These readings are not chosen to fit with each other or for other extrinsic purpose, but rather are the sequential proclamation of the Word of God, chapter after chapter, day after day. This could be called scriptural formatism: a belief that just by reading — hearing — the Word of God, we can be formed as Christian people. Of course, there is more to Morning and Evening Prayer than those two readings. We respond to the readings with canticles, especially the Benedictus in the morning and the Magnificat in the evening. We say the Apostles’ Creed (a practice also peculiar to daily Anglican worship). We say the Lord’s Prayer and other fixed and variable prayers. It all is preceded by confession and Psalms. This “package deal” is unlike anything else in Christendom. It is our special gift to the broader Church. When others discover it, they often find it attractive.

There is also, it seems to me, a particular Anglican reticence in speaking about God. I have called this “epistemic humility.” For instance, while affirming that the bread offered in the Eucharist becomes the Body of Christ, we do not define how that change occurs. We rule out transubstantiation, understood as a change of substance, but we do not foreclose the possibility of a variety of other ways of speaking of the change. We hold tightly to the Bible as being a coherent book, no part of which should be construed in a manner abhorrent to another part, and containing all things needed for salvation. But while giving us rather clear parameters, this hardly closes all questions; indeed, one might say the most characteristically Anglican conversations are precisely here. The Old and New Testaments are read daily in stereo. But we have no “program notes” to tell us how that stereo should be understood.

Indeed we need to say: we are Protestant. We do “protest” the truths of Christianity, “protest” in the positive sense of proclaiming them, affirming them, owning them — not least those truths that pertain to the comforting of a troubled soul. “Jesus has died for you” is not a manipulative sentence but a liberating one.

Even as to confess the Christian faith (as in the creeds) leads also to the confession of sin, so the protestation of Christian truth leads to a personal affirmation —a personal protestation — that is liberating. I need no longer be trapped by my past, limited by my accomplishments, concerned over whether my resumé is good enough. I need only — only! — recognize in me the sin of the world in my personal form. “Alas, my treason” we sing in Passiontide: “’Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; I crucified thee.” Salvation is not in “vain” repetition of prayers or “multiplication” of Masses or any other “works” of any character, but in the surrender of the heart to Jesus who intends to remake it a living heart, as prophesied by Jeremiah and Ezekiel, a heart that pumps in accordance with God’s own Spirit, a heart that will know from within itself (and thus delightedly live by) the law of God.

We Anglicans need not be embarrassed by being Protestant. Yes, we need to claim being Catholic, but without making that our sole or overarching identity. To my mind, today especially we need to recommit to daily Morning and Evening Prayer, with Old and New Testament readings heard in stereo and allowed to speak of themselves directly to the heart.

^[1]Texas is also known as Baja Oklahoma. It all depends on where one sees the opposition.

^[2]I am not one who longs for pre-1979 prayer books, yet it must be said that while the 1979 BCP makes Baptism and Eucharist central, it also has needlessly introduced confusions in Morning and Evening Prayer, especially in the lectionary. In practice, despite the rubric’s clear statement that when two readings are desired the first is always to be from the Old Testament (or the Apocrypha), in practice many places have just one reading, or two from the New Testament. This seems to have derived from the revision process, in which it was proposed at one point to have a single “daily office” that could serve for morning or evening or both, and in other ways. That proposal was rejected by General Convention, but the work in coming up with the current prayer book was rushed and the residue has left unfortunate confusion.

“Put the oil where the squeak is” can guide adult Christian education programs. What’s squeaking in 2023? In my view it is theological anthropology, the Christian understanding of human nature and destiny. That’s admittedly a broad area. It extends from the Christian metanarrative with its four significant moments (creation, fall, redemption, ultimate destiny) down to rather granular issues of such matters as gender or economics. Theological anthropology addresses the questions of who we are, where we have come from, where we are going, and how we should live now. And in all these questions, for our contemporaries today (both in and out of the pew), there is ignorance, confusion, and a desire to know better.

I am no expert on pedagogy, but I do have one particular competence, honed over many years of practice in churches large and small. That competence is in organizing and leading parish book discussion groups. When I was rector of a middle-sized church in the Hudson Valley, I had “The Rector’s Book Club.” Then later, in my post-rector life, I had opportunity to shape a Christian education program at Saint Thomas in New York and now in Dallas. I was convinced of the need to develop critical competence among lay people to identify cultural assumptions about being human and to consider what might be Christian alternatives. And so was born the seminar we have styled “Good Books and Good Talk.”

How can a book group develop theological anthropology? Start by leveraging the fact that most people prefer fiction to nonfiction. Fortuitously, an effective, accessible way to look at and ask questions about human beings is through good novels and short stories.

Each of the monthly meetings of “Good Books and Good Talk” is on a short novel or similar work: one whole book per seminar. Our 90-minute sessions begin with people introducing themselves and saying if they had ever read this book before. And then I ask a question. I do not give a lecture. I do not try to summarize the book. I do not say what I think is important about the book. My goal is to increase the ability of everyone there to see and ponder for themselves important human questions — and a lecture or anything else from me would short-circuit the process. So I ask a question.

What makes a good opening question? It needs to be open-ended. It should try to get at something implicit but not actually stated in the book. If a character gives up her life to care for a dying father-in-law — who is the father of her husband, who has left her for another woman — who (this father-in-law) is an obnoxious, scornful, ungrateful, verbally abusive man who despises her Christian beliefs and just wants her to kill him and end it all — well, any sort of question can get you deep pretty quickly. What does the text tell us about her motivations? Why did (or didn’t) she put him out of his misery? Will God send her to hell for doing what she did? Does she think God will? And so on. (These questions arose out of Christopher Beha’s first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder.)

Fiction is an amazingly easy way to get into these questions and to train a group of people to get their minds inside other people. It is an easy entrance into theological anthropology . But of course it won’t just happen.

Our monthly seminar currently meets about eight times a year. Anyone can come who is interested, but I say, “You have to be quiet unless you have read the book.” In my mind I have three to five questions, so that if the conversation bogs down, I have something new to interject. I choose my questions to draw us into the meaning of being human. (See my questions a couple of paragraphs above.) A good book, for my purposes, is one that is short enough (under 200 pages is ideal) and has situations, actions, or views that are worth probing. Is this true? Good? Christian?

The ground rules are simple. Listen to one another. Only one person speaks at a time. Most important of all, the text is our final authority on the text. I discourage reading Wikipedia or any other secondary source. If someone says, “I read online that Walker Percy wrote this book to …” or “The characters in this novel are people in the author’s own life,” I just say, “That might be true or it might be false, but it makes no difference.” Authors themselves can fail to understand what their own books are about! (I speak as an author who has been surprised many times by how other people see things in my books that I was not previously aware of and could not previously have said.) I don’t want a seminar where we learn what others (even the author) have said about the book. I want a seminar where we, as Christians, probe what the book would teach us and ask whether we think it is right.

The selection of books is important, but you don’t have to be perfect in your decisions, nor do the books need to be perfect. I am constantly looking for interesting fiction that clocks in around 200 pages. Doing a different book each time allows people to come to any session that interests them and obviates the problems of travel interruptions. (About half the participants come every month.) The authors need not be Christian, and the books need not themselves be “Christian” (in whatever sense). Here are the books we did in the last year:

  J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit

            Flannery O’Connor: Wise Blood

Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol, in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas

Walker Percy: The Moviegoer

Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange

James Matthew Wilson: The Strangeness of the Good

Dorothy L. Sayers: Whose Body?

Charles Williams: War in Heaven

Wilson’s book is poetry, and it includes his COVID diary, which prompted theological reflection on our recent past. Poetry can work as an occasional change, and one might have a seminar on a single poem. For the Wilson seminar, I had to limit our discussion to just a few poems — a whole book was too much. Yet people liked it.

People wondered about discussing A Clockwork Orange in church, but I explained we were not discussing the film. And although Burgess is, on balance, probably not an exponent of Christian theological anthropology (some might consider him an opponent), still he is vitally interested in what it is to be human. The novel is about a mechanistic view (a “clockwork”) of human fleshiness (juicy like an orange) — a view that doesn’t work out well, does it?

I have done seminars also on plays: T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral remains viable, as do many by Thornton Wilder, not only Our Town but The Skin of Our Teeth, which puts Adam, Eve, and Cain as a suburban New Jersey family during the coming Ice Age. Another novelist who is worth reading is Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize winner who is highly perceptive about being human today. We had a great seminar a few years ago on Never Let Me Go (on clones), and someday we will do Klara and the Sun (on robots who are AFs — artificial friends). His Remains of the Day also is beautiful and haunting.

In sum, a book seminar has the potential of speaking to a profound need in our congregations today. It is a low-risk enterprise, and it is fun. It is also, I find, a way for me to keep reading books that I otherwise would put aside. I hope this article encourages readers to give it a try.