Washington National Cathedral

The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith

The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, host

As we start the new Forum season, Cathedral Dean Sam Lloyd welcomed popular author and Episcopal priest the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, was also featured as guest preacher at the 11:15 am Holy Eucharist as part of the Cathedral’s Celebration of American Preaching series. The esteemed writer explored the ways that we encounter God in the everyday, drawing from her forthcoming book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

Cathedral Dean Samuel T. Lloyd III invites the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor to converse about nourishing the soul with dialogue and worship.

Ten years ago, Taylor left ministry in Episcopal parish settings and devoted herself to more teaching, writing, and farming. She wrote Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith to describe that transition.

The book’s title led some people to believe she had left behind far more than parochial ministry. “Do you think you have put yourself in the category of being more spiritual than religious?” queries Lloyd. “That seems to be the dichotomy we hear about all the time: I’m spiritual but not religious.”

“Everybody who says that—ask them what they mean by those words, because those words are containers with things in them we know not of,” Taylor replies. “I claim both.”

“Religion is my trampoline,” she quips. Spirituality, then, is the time she spends in the air. She values both. “I think it’s way too much pressure to make a church the chief place of God’s meeting people,” she expands. “I think the world is the place of God’s meeting people, and churches are places to celebrate that.” Taylor’s latest book, An Altar in the World, explores this point of view.

Taylor speaks briefly about the current state of Christianity. To survive and thrive, she believes that a religion needs three components: the institutional, the intellectual, and the mystical (or direct) way to God.

She fears what she considers too much intellectualization of Christianity today. The worth of the human body is too often ignored in Christianity, despite its ancient and potential spiritual power. The body is God’s “very best way of getting to us,” Taylor says. “To be in the flesh, to be made flesh, to be human, seems to be God’s best strategy for getting to people: for bringing people together, for astonishing people, for breaking people, for…taking people to the deep places.” Biblical practices, such as washing feet and eating together, exemplify God’s profound use of the flesh.

Barbara Brown Taylor is a popular author, an Episcopal priest, and the Harry R. Butman Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College in northeast Georgia. The author of eleven books, including When God is Silent and the award-winning memoir Leaving Church, Taylor is a frequent lecturer and preacher at seminaries and churches around the country. Her newest book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, will be published in February 2009.

About The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor is a popular author, an Episcopal priest, and the Harry R. Butman Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College in northeast Georgia. The author of eleven books, including When God is Silent and the award-winning memoir Leaving Church, Taylor is a frequent lecturer and preacher at seminaries and churches around the country. Her newest book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, will be published in February 2009.

More about the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

In Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, Georgia Author of the Year Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of her decision to leave full time parish ministry after fifteen years, trading her church for a college classroom and her Sunday vestments for plain clothes covered in chalk dust.

“When it is my turn to talk, I generally skip the points and get right to the plot,” she wrote recently. “Narrative is not a choice I make when it comes time to tell the truth; it is the way that truth comes to me—not in crisp propositions but in messy tales of encounters between people and people, between people and creation, between people and the Divine.”

An Episcopal priest since 1984, Taylor now teaches religion at Piedmont College in rural northeast Georgia, where she holds the Harry R. Butman Chair in Religion and Philosophy. She also serves as adjunct professor of Christian spirituality at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Before becoming a full time teacher, Taylor spent fifteen years in parish ministry, first at All Saints Church in Atlanta and then at Grace-Calvary Church in Clarkesville, Georgia. In recent years, she has lectured on preaching at Yale, Princeton and Duke Universities, and has preached at churches across the country. A columnist for The Christian Century and sometime commentator on Georgia Public Broadcasting, she is the author of eleven books, including When God is Silent and Home By Another Way. Leaving Church, her first memoir, received the 2006 award for Best General Interest Book from the Association of Theological Booksellers and a Georgia Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writers Association in the category of creative nonfiction.

The eldest of three daughters, Taylor was born in Lafayette, Indiana, while her father completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Purdue. Over the next several years, the family lived in Kansas, Ohio and Alabama before settling in Atlanta in 1965. Taylor attended public high school, graduated from Emory University in 1973, and Yale Divinity School in 1976. Baptized in the Catholic church as an infant, she spent time with the Baptists, the Methodists and the Presbyterians before being confirmed in the Episcopal Church during her senior year in seminary, the same year that the General Convention of the church voted to admit women to priesthood.

Winding her way toward ordination, Taylor worked as a camp counselor, a cocktail waitress, and a secretary at Candler School of Theology. She also wrote short stories, saving up all her vacation time to spend in residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. While her writing went nowhere, she was invited to preach her first sermon at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta in 1978. When people asked for copies afterwards, she realized that she had sold her first story. After several more years of training, including a year as a hospital chaplain, Taylor was ordained deacon in 1983 and priest in 1984, on the feast of Dame Julian of Norwich.

As the Sewanee Theological Review has noted, Taylor “possesses a gift that is in short supply these days: the gift of conveying a living sense of the transcendent, the holy, and the grace-full in and through the stuff of our lives.”