Calendar

This is a community effort to feed people in need. Every weekday, the churches in Newark make lunch for anybody who is hungry.  St. Thomas's has  co-teamed with St. Nicholas to make lunch on the 3rd Monday of each month. The shifts are short, but the camaraderie is long:
10 AM - 11:45  Prepare lunch
11:45 - 1   Serve lunch
11:30 - 12:30  Cleanup
If you would like to help, contact Madeline Johnson  mad1240@comcast.net

2 Saints Readers is ready to begin a new discussion. This series, beginning next Tuesday 4/20, at 10am, will use Holy Envy: Finding God in the faith of others by Barbara Brown Taylor, to spark the discussion.
Please contact the office for your Zoom link on Tuesdays at 9:45am. ALL are Welcome to join in this dialogue.
In simple and sharp prose, Taylor (An Altar in the World), a former Episcopal priest who teaches religion at Piedmont College in Athens, Ga., explores how teaching an introductory religion course has influenced her own views on faith and Christianity. Told as a series of vignettes structured around her course tracing world religions—primarily Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism—through history, the book has an academic tone but also wonderfully imbues the mundane with meaning through descriptions of class field trips to mosques, temples, and shrines that incorporate student reports and anecdotes from class to illustrate the evolution of her students’ thinking and the changes brought by physically visiting sacred and holy places. Taylor tells her class that her real subject is “divine diversity”—the attempt to live peaceably and with convictions in a world where differing religions make wildly varying truth claims. Though the lessons and field trips touch on multiple faiths, Taylor’s meditations frequently morph into biblical exegesis as she applies the lessons of other religions to her own understanding of Christianity. For example, the openness of Buddhist monks prompts her to consider the similarities they share with Christian ascetics. For Taylor, religious strangers can be the best teachers, as they provide a new perspective on the human relationship with the divine, and, she reasons, a sophisticated theology of comparative religions should always be informed by on-the-ground research. Taylor’s fluid book, which includes a small, well-chosen bibliography, is a fine primer on interfaith studies.

meets in great hall