Anglican and Episcopal
Members Present
- Mitzi Budde, Virginia Theological Seminary
- Vincent Williams, Virginia Theological Seminary
- Susanah Hanson, Trinity School for Ministry
- T. Patrick Milas, New Brunswick Theological Seminary
- Alison Poage, Seminary of the Southwest
- Duane Carter, Seminary of the Southwest
- Marlon Paterson, Seminary of the Southwest
- Jude Morrissey, Yale Divinity School
- Will Coberly, Liberty University
I. Call to Order
Members of the Anglican and Episcopal Denominational Group met via Zoom on June 27 at 12 p.m. Eastern.
II. Group Leadership
Patrick Milas called for nominations for the role of convener. Milas was encouraged to continue serving as convener. He affirmed that he will continue.
III. 2024 Workshop Conference Report
Patrick Milas reported that the Anglican and Episcopal Denominational Group essentially kicked off the conference Thursday morning. We offered worship in the Anglican tradition, and we were joined by folks from several different faith backgrounds, but from our own Episcopal and Anglican group, Jude Morrissey helped to lead the service. It was well attended. It was the best attended of the morning worship services at the conference.
The Anglican and Episcopal Denomination Group was also represented in the panel, “Beyond Mere Denominationalism.” Alison Poage, Seminary of the Southwest, represented our group. The Anabaptist and Mennonite Denominational group was represented by Karl Stutzman. David Kreigh represented the Roman Catholic Denominational Group, and Robin McCall represented the Presbyterian and Reformed Denominational Group. To prepare for the panel presentation, Milas took a deep dive into the conference proceedings, going back to 1948, and looked at what was happening, what to make of these denominational groups, when did they get started, etc. What he discovered was that over the decades there was a really vibrant track record of contributing to devotions, sometimes called invocations or morning worship or Eucharists by our predecessors in this group. During the panel presentation, we heard about all kinds of resource-sharing that has gone on, including some that is currently afoot.
III. Round Robin Reports
Susanah Hanson, Trinity School for Ministry
Trinity School for Ministry has officially changed its name to Trinity Anglican Seminary. The official announcement for this name change can be read here: https://www.tsm.edu/news/trinity-anglican-seminary/. In brief, while the name has changed, Trinity’s mission remains the same: to train Christian leaders for mission. It is one of three seminaries recognized by the ACNA (https://anglicanchurch.net/seminaries/).
The Trinity Library experienced a large roof leak over the circulating collection on July 1, 2023. Thankfully it was caught quickly, and books were moved, with mitigation efforts beginning right away. In total, about 3,300 books were affected. Of that number, 450 books had to be discarded due to mold, warping, discoloration, or some combination of the three.
The Library roof was replaced in December 2023 (it is a flat roof that had been installed in 2001).
Not all of the damaged books are slated for replacement, but the Library has slowly started replacing some of the volumes.
July 1, 2024, marks Susanah’s 20th anniversary of working full-time for the Trinity Library. Of those years, she has been Director of the library for 17, since 2007.
Mitzi Budde, Virginia Theological Seminary
The new presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church elected yesterday, Sean Rowe, is a VTS grad, so we’re very proud of the new presiding bishop and wish him well in his election. He’s a good guy. Mitzi knew him as a student some years ago. We’re fully underway with the summer doctoral program. Our Vice President for Academic Affairs, Melody Knowles, will be on Sabbatical for the next year, and so Ross Kane, the Director of our DMin program, will be the acting Academic Dean for the coming year. Most of you know that VTS affiliated with General Theological Seminary in New York, a year and a half ago, and you probably know that in May 2023, the Board closed Keller Library at GTS and transferred responsibility for all library services to Bishop Paine Library at Virginia Seminary, and so we now are the library of record for both our own programs, of course, but also the GTS ongoing Master of Divinity program, which has become now an online/hybrid program. Vincent, as our User Services Librarian, is doing a lot of work on that. The collections have been on site, with the library closed, so we did a study particularly on the very large, rare book collection. They had 30,000 volumes in their rare book collection - not all of which were truly rare, but still, it’s a very large rare book collection. So, after about six months of study, we made a proposal to move about 6,500 books from Keller Library’s rare book collection to our collection. They remain the property of General Seminary - we are providing professional curation, professional services, and making them accessible to scholars at an open library rather than having them just locked in a closed library. The rest of the collections remain on-site there for now. The things that we transferred were the early English theology collection as a whole, quite a number of early English print—early printed Bibles, and the Canon Robert Wright Book of Common Prayer Collection, which was his personal collection that he had willed to the Seminary. And so the Seminary’s own BCP Collection remains on site there in general, but we have transferred the Canon Robert Wright BCP Collection, which is a very fine collection, and there was an article actually in the Living Church about that collection being transferred here and now available for scholarly use for the 1st time, because it was a private collection. We also transferred 11 archival collections, but all of the institutional archives of GTS remain on site for now. We also partnered with the Living Church to digitize the entire background of that Episcopal Newspaper, and the Living Church coordinated and paid for it but we provided the background that they needed because we had a much older background than they had in their own offices. They’re planning to make that available on their website, so I haven’t looked lately to see if all of those issues are up yet, but they’re supposed to be searchable PDFs - so that will help. And then, on a personal note, I am retiring this summer after 33 years at Virginia Seminary, so I only have a couple more weeks, and then my husband and I will be moving to Hickory, North Carolina, and I’ll be trying a new adventure for the last third of my life. I’ve spent the middle third of my life here, and hopefully, I have a third more to go.
Vincent Williams, Virginia Theological Seminary
The GTS-VTS affiliations have definitely occupied a lot of our time and energy. We already had been serving a hybrid Doctor of Ministry program here. Adding an additional, decent-sized cohort of hybrid students has been something we’re trying to learn how to serve them best out of our library. I think that hit a lot of the main points. Having a library director retire will definitely bring some changes. We’re doing a couple of technical backend updates over the summer, Open Athens authentication service - we have been using Easy Proxy. I’m hoping to find a little bit of continuity there and future-proofing with Open Athens. I think Mitzi hit some of the main things. It’s kind of a continual cycle of getting ready for the next semester, serving the students, then getting ready for the next semester, serving the students.
Jude Morrissey, Yale Divinity School
Yale Divinity School is busy building the Living Village. Berkeley Divinity School is also in the midst of construction, while the Berkeley Center is being rebuilt, which will include new ways to use the physical space. Yale University Library is going through some big changes, including migrating from Voyager to Alma and wrestling with what to do with AI. Yale Divinity Library has similarly had some major changes, particularly with the addition of a new Director, Cliff Anderson. We have also had some really great progress on special projects, including digitizing glass lantern slides and beginning to keep our YDS theses in the institutional repository, Eli Scholar. In personal news, Jude Morrissey is now officially a nominee for postulancy.
Alison Poage, Seminary of the Southwest
On September 13, 2023, the library formerly known as the Library at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest (1957-2000) and the Booher Library (2000-2023) reopened after a full renovation as the Bishop Dena A. Harrison Library. The print collection has officially been named the Booher Collection. The Harrison Library and the Wright Learning and Information Center, the library at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, share an ILS. In January 2024 the libraries migrated from Ex Libris Voyager to Koha hosted by ByWater Solutions. In May 2024, Seminary of the Southwest announced that the Southwest Board of Trustees has unanimously elected and called Dr. Scott Bader-Saye to be the Ninth Dean and President of Seminary of the Southwest. Dr. Bader-Saye will begin in this role on July 1, 2024. Dr. Bader-Saye had most recently been the Academic Dean, so the seminary will announce a new Academic Dean later this year. Also in May, the Harrison Library hosted the staff of the Archives of the Episcopal Church for a tour of the Harrison Library and some refreshments. The two organizations shared a building at 606 Rathervue Place for over six decades so it was great to be back together! The Archives is now situated about two miles away from the Harrison Library.
In June, Duane Carter, Assistant Library Director, attended the Atla Conference in person in Long Beach. Access Services Librarian, Marlon Patterson, and Director, Alison Poage, attended the conference online. Alison was a panelist in the session called Beyond Mere Denominationalism in Atla: Exploring Ways to Enhance Professional Development and Resource Sharing in Theological Librarianship. In that session, Alison shared how librarians at Seminary of the Southwest, Virginia Theological Seminary, and the School of Theology—Sewanee have met to discuss the possibility of creating retention commitments for Episcopal diocesan journals. Work on that initiative will resume in the fall. The Harrison Library staff, led by Director Alison Poage, is working on digitizing seminary material such as the seminary newsletter, Ratherview, and Commencement bulletins. These digitized works have been helpful for assisting researchers with questions about the seminary’s past as the institution approaches its 75th anniversary.
Will Coberly, Liberty University
I’m somewhat new here, so I haven’t even put in a full year yet. But a lot of things are happening here at Liberty; it’s a pretty fascinating place to be. We have a brand-new president who was inaugurated back in August. The Jerry Falwell Library, where we celebrated 10 years in our new facility here, so that’s been really exciting - just to hit that milestone. I can talk a little bit more about the research, instruction side of things, which is my area. The research libraries, we’re kind of transitioning from teaching introductory, how to do basic research, and we’re going to be incorporating more research instruction into classes and working more as liaisons with professors. Along that same line, the research librarians here, we’re taking a more prominent role in research week. So I got to participate a few months back as a judge, in our yearly or Annual Research Week here with the students, and so the librarians were involved in going over some of the prospectus, some of the proposals, giving feedback before the students presented, so we’re kind of getting a little more integrated in with various programs and assisting students with the research. I actually am the special liaison between the Library and the Divinity School and the Divinity School has just announced that the school is now going to have a special seminary within it. So, it kind of seems like it’s all one entity. But they’re going to kind of rebrand, remarket, and focus more on a traditional seminary versus just broad Biblical studies. And with that will come some changes in the curriculum. And I’m already working with them on some different ideas of how to integrate research and how to network with the students. But yeah, it’s been a kind of fun experience. I do a lot of online consulting with the doctoral program, and the doctoral program students online, so we’re kind of really pushing the idea of meet with a librarian, or you know, every student working on a dissertation has to kind of connect with a librarian at some point, so it’s kind of an interesting emphasis that we’re working on with that.
T. Patrick Milas, New Brunswick Theological Seminary
We have a new Access Services and Reference Coordinator, Indira Douglas, who has really hit the ground running. And finally, after a couple of years of working to tap into Rutgers University’s work-study program, Indira has hired and trained Library Assistants as part of the Rutgers program, but serving New Brunswick Seminary, which is, by the way, surrounded on all sides by Rutgers University, but we are not embedded so to speak. We have reciprocal borrowing arrangements between our libraries, but we are independent. But, we are now a work-study site for Rutgers University, so Rutgers University is paying for our library assistants at the Seminary Library circulation desk, which is delightful. It’s great for the budget, it’s great for the cross-pollination between the university that surrounds us and the seminary—and Indira has been spearheading that. Christina Geuther has been collaborating with me and one of my predecessors, Renee House, on a book project on the history of the Sage Library. Next year will be our 150th anniversary, and we are in the midst of a capital campaign for that, with the hope that we’ll have the book done by next fall. It’s given me an opportunity to learn a whole lot about the library; when you start to work in a new library, you would inherit all sorts of tasks and opportunities, and sometimes there’s so much day-to-day that you miss some of the core, original strengths. Just yesterday, for example, we had an architecture professor who was doing a study on the use of concrete in American architecture asking for 19th-century architectural drawings, which led me to some beautiful watercolors from the library’s building period. The Reformed Church’s Archives in Manhattan burned, and Gardner Sage, the namesake for the library, was passionate about having a safer place for our materials, so this library was built as a fireproof library, with its concrete foundations, columns, space between the stacks, such that fire, even if there was a small fire, it should be least likely to spread. There was no electricity originally and oil lamps hung at the ends of the stacks—all sorts of historical oddities. Having a denominational archive in the building, as well, brings its own joys. One, this year, was that the Collegiate Church of New York, America’s oldest corporation’s archives are here, and they include all kinds of records that you might expect. So, the RCA Archives was contacted by PBS about a baptismal record from the Van Cortland family, and we were on the edge of our seats until the story was featured on PBS’s “Finding Your Roots”. We were curious who is the descendant—who was going to be the celebrity descendant who was going to be featured on the show. Michael Douglas was one of the folks in the show, and we knew he was from New Brunswick, but it wasn’t him - it was Lena Dunham, who is a descendant of the Van Cortlands, whose records are in those archives. So that was a neat bit of notoriety—sometimes archival arrangement and processing can be behind the scenes, and often underappreciated, but it was nice to have that featured, and for Indira Douglas, who at the time was an archives assistant, to appear in the credits for that show. She has also digitized the Church Herald, a denominal publication. Related to that, let’s see what else is up. I enjoyed working with Alison Poage and others on the panel on Denominationalism. I continue to teach in our Doctor of Ministry program. We had a few more students finish their theses, which is always gratifying. So, it’s my personal connection to the Episcopal Church that led me to join this group back in 2018, and I continue to be active in the Episcopal Church. Our priest is planning a Sabbatical, so I’ve been working on a Sabbatical committee, and we’ve helped to draft a proposal for a Lilly Grant for that and are hopeful that that will be successful. I previously reported that we had record numbers of undergraduates in the building, that we were open to Rutgers undergraduates, and we were having several hundred a week. It was exciting to have our historic research library so active (I would like to say that they were taking theological books off the shelves, but they were mostly there for the free WiFi and the beautiful study space). We had several incidents, too many incidents, of untoward behavior, really inappropriate behavior that led me to places like the New Brunswick Police Department, Rutgers Police Department, and in concert with the Rutgers University Library Administration, we have unfortunately had to close to the undergraduate students. Our official policy was that we were open if this undergraduate student could demonstrate that they had a research need at the library, but after the pandemic, we sort of threw the doors open after having no one in the library for so long— particularly hospitable, perhaps overly. So, we’re now closed to the undergraduates, but with the ship tightened a bit, things have calmed down and we’re making progress on our special projects.
Worship Planning 2025
PATRICK MILAS: So, I would be delighted if anyone would like to help with the planning for a morning worship experience. I must say too, that as our panel presentation on denominationalism heads to the Proceedings, some of the discoveries we made are that worship was not always in the morning. There were conferences where it was in a plenary fashion, there’s been all sorts of things happening in history—sometimes they are at noon, sometimes Vespers, there’s been Eucharists. Folks have brought in local clergy to conference hotels, we’ve also sponsored worship at nearby cathedrals, and so there’s really a wide range of opportunities. I do think that Atla is in the pattern of having morning worship at 7 a.m. on conference days in the conference hotel.
JUDE MORRISSEY: Since I’m on the conference committee, I just want to say that that was something that we had discussed and considered very seriously shaking that up. So, morning worship is not necessarily something that we’re going to be sticking to, so if you had an idea about afternoon or evening, that would be quite acceptable.
PATRICK MILAS: Thank you so much for sharing that, Jude, that’s awesome. That’s very encouraging because I can say that when I was a 1st time attendee at an Atla Conference, I didn’t go to the morning worship. It was so early, and if I could absent myself from something it was that, but over the years I realized, how wholesome it is, and I’ve enjoyed attending in my tradition, and in others, I think it’s a really neat opportunity to see the diversity of religious traditions represented in Atla and to let the aesthetics and beauty of the Anglican tradition shine. Great, wow! Well, so then it’s really an open opportunity. Susanah wants to add since Atla Annual will be in Pennsylvania next year, right?
SUSANAH HANSON: Right, I mean, Pittsburgh is maybe a 30-minute drive from where I live—I’m at the Anglican Seminary, and there are a lot of Pittsburgh clergy that I know, so I’m sure that I can help with whatever—ensure that is, whatever shape we decide it takes I’m happy to help with that.
PATRICK MILAS: Excellent, Jude, is there a conference hotel identified?
JUDE MORRISSEY: The Omni William Penn.
SUSANAH HANSON: I need to check my map and see how far that is from the cathedral there in Pittsburgh, but it might not be that far from what I remember. So, anyway, stay tuned.
JUDE MORRISSEY: And it’s Michelle Spomer at PTS who is a great resource.
SUSANAH HANSON: Yes, I will let her know about our interests.
PATRICK MILAS: Excellent. Well, this is delightful to hear. I think I particularly enjoyed when we had morning worship at its normal time at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver. Just a short walk from the conference hotel, it was a light lift in terms of getting there, and it was neat to be able to experience a Canadian flavor of morning worship, which included a Eucharist and a homily, and folks from our Anglican and Episcopal Denominational Group helped with the planning and hosting of that event. Something along those lines or perhaps even greater. I’m thinking of distinctives, for the Anglican tradition, Evensong is a beautiful tradition. Evening prayer, Evenson perhaps.
SUSANAH HANSON: Compline maybe.
PATRICK MILAS: Compline yeah!
SUSANAH HANSON: It’s at the end of the evening and tends to be a very nice service— a short service but a nice wrap-up to the day.
PATRICK MILAS: A great way to end the day, yeah absolutely.
ALLISON POGUE: So a couple of things. I love Pittsburgh, I hate flying, but I love Pittsburgh, and kind of have some family roots in that area. It’s an early time to be thinking about this, but I’m thinking about possibly going next year, and I would be happy to help with the service. And I love singing, but that’s all I’m going to say. They recruited me onto the Seminary Choir, so there’s going to be some singing. I’m happy to participate if I’m there in person.
SUSANAH HANSON: We can do a duet, Allison.
ALLISON POGUE: We also have our choir director. I just want to say, great musician sitting right here, so see if we can get him to Pittsburgh.
PATRICK MILAS: Yeah, that’s great! This all sounds excellent. Are there other thoughts for next year’s conference worship, or otherwise? One of the things that came up—thank you, Natalie—that came up during the denominationalism session. Stephen Sweeney pointed out that he saw that no one from the Roman Catholic Denominational Group was presenting, and he said “let’s present”—and so he did, I think. At the next conference, he had a couple or maybe three sessions, as did several others. The pandemic was very isolating, and the number of sessions, the number of sessions and the participation level, really waned a bit, but it seems to be a good time to really ramp it up, and so allow me to say and encourage you all to present, whether it has anything to do with the Anglican and Episcopal Denominational Group or not. Consider sharing some of the great work that you’re doing through conference presentations or panels next year. What you’ve shared during your institutional reports is compelling—there’s a lot of great stuff going on at your libraries and I’d love to learn more about it in the conference setting. So, there’s my pep rally—I’ll be thinking about it, too. Feel free to use our Anglican and Episcopal list-serv as a go-to place for communication. If you’re not on that list, you can be. Will, are you on that list? I’ll plan to add you with your permission.
WILL COBERLY: Yeah, that’d be fine.
PATRICK MILAS: Very good. I would entertain a motion to adjourn. So, moved. We are adjourned.
Special thanks go to Ms. Shraeyah Rajeshwaran, Library Assistant, Gardner A. Sage Library, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, for transcribing the meeting recording to prepare the report for submission to the Atla Yearbook 2024.