The Ninth Bishop of Texas: 2026

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

All Are Welcome At The Table

Listen to Bishop Doyle's sermon, “All Are Welcome At The Table” held at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Grandbury, TX.

Feast Day of Theodore of Tarsus and Celebration of Rev. Amanda Kotval

Listen to Bishop Doyle's sermon, “Feast Day of Theodore of Tarsus and Celebration of Rev. Amanda Kotval” held at All Saint's, Episcopal Church, Fort Worth, TX.

More at www.texasbishop.com

Check out this episode!

Monday, September 21, 2026

A Statement from the Diocese of Texas Bishops on the Shooting in North Austin

On Cain, Abel, and the Blood That Cries out

"What have you done?" God said, "For your brother's blood is speaking to me from the ground."

So, we know this passage from Genesis as the first murder committed between humans. But we don't often dwell on what happens next. God doesn't kill Cain. The Lord puts a mark on him. A sign. This is not shameful. This is protection. God will allow even those who take a life to be kept under his protection. The one who is killed and the one who kills are both protected by God. Both bodies are important to God.

God's Kingdom works in this way. It acknowledges blood crying from the ground and the person who spilled it.

This summer in Houston, father and an important member of our Houston community Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed.

This past Sunday, a Venezuelan man was shot in North Austin. Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, 28 years old. He was delivering something. An agent fired a gun at him. His blood has cried from the ground. He was wounded in the flesh of his body with the intention to take his life. But so is the man who shot him. His blood is also marked. These two people have been separated from the natural world they once inhabited.

We have seen this continue to happen since January 2025. There have been at least 22 people shot by agents working under DHS. At least 6 have died. Keith Porter Jr. was killed in Los Angeles. Renee Nicole Good was killed in Minneapolis; she was a U.S. citizen. Ruben Ray Martinez was killed in South Padre Island. Alex Pretti was shot 10 times in less than 5 seconds; he was an ICU nurse. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed in Houston. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was killed in Maine. Now Wilber Rafael Garces Perez has been shot in Austin.

Blood is crying from the ground, and we as a nation have turned a deaf ear.

What we believe about Incarnation

Why did God ask this question to Cain? There is only one answer in Christian Theology. Yes. We are each other’s keepers; this is very hard for most folks. Yet Scripture is clear on this one. Everyone is made in the image of God; and we are bound to protect human beings.

When you and I look at someone, you are looking at Jesus. There is no distinction between illegal aliens and removal targets. They are all made in the image of God; each is God’s personal concern. Through the Incarnation, God became flesh. We are to look at every human being and recognize them as such.

Taking a life has consequences

I am not sure, sociologically, what has happened to change the fact that killing someone does, in fact, create a moral injury in the human heart of the shooter; regardless of whether it is recognized now or later. Today we treat such people as heroes, deny that they have done something terrible, and deny our guilt in their action too (having elected, supported policy, and turned our face away). We see the repercussions of unanswered death and moral injury in the suicides and mental health of our combat vets. Whenever and wherever we kill someone (regardless of why), the ground cries out.

There are few words I can find that adequately describe what someone feels after taking a life. Even if that life was taken in self-defense. We know that sometimes we use deadly force to protect others from death. But that should never be celebrated. And, more importantly, what we know is that across 2025 and into 2026, roughly 65 to 73 percent of the people ICE has taken into custody or removed had no criminal conviction at all, and only about 5 to 8 percent had a conviction for a violent crime. Overwhelmingly, ICE agents are killing fathers, daughters, sons, and mothers who are not violent, have no record of being so, and are not criminals.

When someone says most of those being removed are criminals or illegal, the true statement underneath is that about a quarter of them have a conviction; most of those convictions are for things like driving to work without a license, and the great majority of the remainder have committed no crime at all, including the visa overstayers whose only offense is a status issue and is not criminal.

Regardless, the realities never remove the Christian Church’s requirement that when someone takes a life, they need to be held accountable for their actions, to repent, and go through the healing process that we currently don't allow for. We need to show mercy to those who have taken a life just as God showed mercy to Cain. Mercy, though, only comes after accountability to the facts and the clarity and honesty of repentance.

What Austin Needs

Mayor Kirk Watson is correct that we, as citizens of Texas and Austin, deserve to know what happened. We need the following from those in power.

All footage and information to be released to the public regarding this incident.

Texas Rangers and the FBI to work with Austin PD special investigations to scrutinize this incident.

ICE needs to stop sending armed officers to our neighborhoods.

I have called for immigration reform, accountability, and truth-telling with transparency, and I continue to do so. The ground cries out.

As in Houston, when this has happened in the Diocese of Texas, let our churches open their doors to anyone who wants to grieve this incident.

Prayer and Fasting

We must pray for those affected by this incident and call for repentance from both authorities and the officer. We as a Church need to gather around our altars and bring the one who bled and the one who took the life to God and present them to God in our prayers. We cannot allow them to fall outside of God’s grace.

We stand with those who are grieving for Wilber Rafael Garces Perez. You are not alone. Your grief is valid and justified.

We stand with those who have taken a life. There is blood on your hands, but there is blood on all of our hands because we allow this to happen day after day.

Let us remember the names of those who have lost their lives to immigration officers.

The Names (As of 9/21/2026):

1. Keith Porter Jr., 43, Los Angeles 12/31/2025

2. Renee Nicole Good, 37, Minneapolis 1/7/2026

3. Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, South Padre Island March 2025

4. Ryan Luis Mosqueda, 27, Texas 7/7/2025

5. Alex Pretti, 37, Minneapolis 1/24/2026

6. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, Houston 7/7/2026

7. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 26, Biddeford Maine 7/2026

At least 32 people have died while in ICE custody this past year, and 6 more in the first 5 days of 2026. The ground cries out.

Pray

Lord, we have failed to see you in those we have hurt. Please help us to see you in everyone we encounter. Help us to show mercy to those who have taken a life and help those who have lost loved ones to grieve. May we learn from these events and change the systems that have allowed this to happen. In Jesus ' name we pray. Amen.

C. Andrew Doyle, D.D.

IX Bishop of Texas

Jeff W. Fisher, D.D.

Bishop Suffragan

Kathryn M. Ryan

Bishop Suffragan

Brian R. Seage

Assisting Bishop

Declaración del obispo C. Andrew Doyle sobre el tiroteo ocurrido en el norte de Austin

Sobre Caín, Abel y la sangre que clama desde la tierra

«¿Qué has hecho? —dijo Dios—. La sangre de tu hermano clama a mí desde la tierra».

Conocemos este pasaje del Génesis como el relato del primer asesinato entre seres humanos. Sin embargo, pocas veces nos detenemos a considerar lo que sucede después. Dios no mata a Caín. El Señor pone una señal sobre él. Esa señal no es una marca de vergüenza, sino de protección. Dios permite que incluso quien ha quitado una vida permanezca bajo su protección. Tanto quien muere como quien mata están bajo el cuidado de Dios. Ambas vidas, ambos cuerpos, son importantes para Dios.

Así obra el Reino de Dios: escucha la sangre que clama desde la tierra y también reconoce a la persona que la derramó.

El domingo pasado, un hombre venezolano recibió un disparo en el norte de Austin. Su nombre es Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez y tiene 28 años. Wilber estaba cumpliendo con su trabajo, realizando una entrega, cuando un agente le disparó. Su sangre clama desde la tierra. Su cuerpo fue herido y su vida estuvo a punto de serle arrebatada. Pero nuestra mirada no puede detenerse solamente en Wilber. También debemos mirar al hombre que disparó. Él también ha quedado marcado por ese momento. No de la misma manera, no con la misma herida, pero sí marcado. Ambos han sido arrancados del mundo cotidiano que habitaban antes de aquel instante. Después de un hecho como este, ninguno puede simplemente regresar a la vida que tenía antes.

Hemos visto cómo esto continúa sucediendo desde enero de 2025. Al menos 22 personas han recibido disparos de agentes que trabajan bajo la autoridad del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional de los Estados Unidos (DHS), y al menos seis han muerto. Keith Porter Jr. murió en Los Ángeles. Renee Nicole Good, ciudadana estadounidense, murió en Minneapolis. Ruben Ray Martinez murió en South Padre Island. Alex Pretti, enfermero de cuidados intensivos, recibió diez disparos en menos de cinco segundos. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo murió en Houston. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero murió en Maine. Y ahora Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez ha recibido un disparo en Austin.

La sangre clama desde la tierra, y nosotros, como nación, hemos cerrado nuestros oídos.

Lo que creemos acerca de la Encarnación

¿Por qué interpela Dios a Caín acerca de su hermano? Desde la teología cristiana, solo hay una respuesta: sí, somos responsables los unos de los otros. Para muchas personas, esta es una verdad difícil de aceptar. Sin embargo, las Escrituras son claras: toda persona ha sido creada a imagen de Dios y, por lo tanto, estamos llamados a proteger la vida humana.

Cuando tú o yo miramos a otro ser humano, estamos llamados a reconocer en él el rostro de Jesús. Ante Dios, etiquetas como extranjeros ilegales u objetivos de deportación no establecen diferencias en la dignidad de las personas. Todos han sido creados a imagen de Dios y cada uno de ellos es objeto del cuidado personal de Dios. Por medio de la Encarnación, Dios se hizo carne. Por eso estamos llamados a mirar a cada ser humano y a reconocer en él esa dignidad.

Quitar una vida tiene consecuencias

No estoy seguro de qué ha sucedido en nuestra sociedad para que hayamos dejado de reconocer que matar a una persona produce una herida moral en el corazón de quien dispara, independientemente de que esa herida sea reconocida inmediatamente o mucho tiempo después.

Hoy tratamos como héroes a quienes quitan una vida en nombre de la autoridad. Negamos que hayan hecho algo terrible y también negamos nuestra propia responsabilidad en sus acciones: hemos elegido autoridades, hemos apoyado políticas y hemos apartado la mirada.

Podemos ver el peso que dejan las experiencias de violencia y las heridas morales en los graves problemas de salud mental que enfrentan muchos de nuestros veteranos de guerra, incluido el suicidio. Siempre que quitamos una vida, dondequiera que suceda e independientemente de las razones, la sangre clama desde la tierra.

Pocas palabras pueden describir adecuadamente lo que siente una persona después de quitarle la vida a alguien, incluso cuando lo ha hecho en defensa propia. Sabemos que algunas veces se emplea la fuerza letal para proteger a otras personas de la muerte. Pero eso nunca debería celebrarse.

Más aún, sabemos que, durante 2025 y lo que va de 2026, aproximadamente entre el 65 y el 73 por ciento de las personas detenidas o deportadas por ICE no tenían ninguna condena penal. Solamente entre el 5 y el 8 por ciento había sido condenado por un delito violento.

En su inmensa mayoría, las personas que están siendo asesinadas por agentes de ICE son padres, madres, hijas e hijos que no son violentos, no tienen antecedentes de violencia y no son criminales.

Cuando alguien afirma que la mayoría de las personas deportadas son criminales o están aquí ilegalmente, los datos muestran que aproximadamente una cuarta parte tiene alguna condena. Muchas de esas condenas corresponden a infracciones como conducir al trabajo sin licencia. La gran mayoría de las personas restantes no ha cometido delito alguno. Esto incluye a personas que permanecieron en el país después del vencimiento de sus visas, una infracción de carácter migratorio que, por sí sola, no constituye un delito penal.

Aun así, ninguna de estas realidades elimina la responsabilidad de la Iglesia cristiana de afirmar que, cuando una persona le quita la vida a otra, debe rendir cuentas por sus acciones, arrepentirse y atravesar un proceso de sanación que actualmente no le estamos permitiendo vivir.

Debemos mostrar misericordia a quienes han quitado una vida, así como Dios mostró misericordia a Caín. Pero la misericordia solamente puede llegar después de asumir responsabilidad por los hechos y de vivir un arrepentimiento claro, sincero y honesto.

Lo que Austin necesita

El alcalde Kirk Watson tiene razón: como ciudadanos de Texas y de Austin, merecemos saber lo que sucedió.

Necesitamos que quienes ejercen el poder hagan lo siguiente:Que se hagan públicas todas las grabaciones y toda la información relacionada con este incidente.

Que los Rangers de Texas y el FBI trabajen conjuntamente con la unidad de investigaciones especiales del Departamento de Policía de Austin para investigar rigurosamente este incidente.

Que ICE deje de enviar agentes armados a nuestros vecindarios.

He pedido una reforma migratoria, rendición de cuentas y que se diga la verdad con plena transparencia. Hoy continúo haciendo ese llamado.

La sangre clama desde la tierra.

Así como hemos hecho en Houston cuando han ocurrido hechos semejantes dentro de la Diócesis de Texas, pido que nuestras iglesias abran sus puertas a todas las personas que necesiten reunirse para llorar y lamentar lo sucedido.

Oración y ayuno

Debemos orar por todas las personas afectadas por este incidente y hacer un llamado al arrepentimiento, tanto de las autoridades como del agente involucrado.

Como Iglesia, necesitamos reunirnos alrededor de nuestros altares y presentar ante Dios, en nuestras oraciones, tanto a quien derramó su sangre como a quien disparó. No podemos permitir que ninguno de ellos quede fuera de la gracia de Dios.

Acompañamos a Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a su familia y a todos aquellos que sufren a causa de lo ocurrido. Ustedes no están solos. Su dolor es real, válido y justificado.

También nos dirigimos a quienes le han quitado la vida a otra persona. Hay sangre en sus manos, pero también hay sangre en las manos de todos nosotros, porque permitimos que esto continúe sucediendo día tras día.

Recordemos los nombres de quienes han perdido la vida a manos de agentes de inmigración.

Estos son los nombres

Al 21 de septiembre de 2026:

Keith Porter Jr., 43 años, Los Ángeles — 31 de diciembre de 2025

Renee Nicole Good, 37 años, Minneapolis — 7 de enero de 2026

Ruben Ray Martinez, 23 años, South Padre Island — marzo de 2025

Ryan Luis Mosqueda, 27 años, Texas — 7 de julio de 2025

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

We are not a callous people. We cannot put off feelings of sadness because they make us uncomfortable, nor can we wrap ourselves in the blanket of anger because we feel pain. Instead, as Christians we must feel them, and feel them as Christ did from the vantage point of his cross; not from the vantage point of our own concerns.

Episcopal Anglicans often awake before dawn to say these words: “The dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

We sing Zechariah’s song while it is still dark outside because we believe the light coming over the horizon is not just the sun rising on another day, but God’s mercy rising to meet us, and because we believe that the first work of our day ought to be with feet turned toward peace.

Tuesday morning, that light rose on Canal Street in Houston’s Magnolia Park neighborhood at around seven o’clock. It rose on Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, riding to the homebuilding company that had employed him for most of the last thirty-five years. He was shot, dead at Ben Taub Hospital by sunrise. The dayspring visited him, and he received a mercy that ensured in a certain hope that he rose to his savior’s arms.

His sons are American citizens. Lorenzo brought them through college on the wages of his early mornings. Now they sit in grief. And because they are our brothers, we cannot say we have not been wounded: If one member suffers, all suffer together. Moreover, they are our brothers and our fathers; they share with us our humanity and God’s provision of dignity in all that this means.

I do not presume to speak conclusively on this matter. Judgments are for courts and officers of the government, charged as they are with finding the truth. I do join The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and all those concerned that this be reviewed and investigated. People in our country should not be shot for a civil immigration infraction. This is similar to being hunted, pursued, and shot for a misdemeanor. Particularly when Mr. Araujo had been attempting to receive legal status, and our U.S. Government had not kept their promise of due process. This does not make Araujo's situation unique; in fact, it is normal. What makes it unique is that he was killed for a minor civil infraction.

The government’s officers tell one story: that Mr. Salgado Araujo tried to evade arrest and turned his vehicle toward an agent, who shot him in self-defense. His family and neighbors tell another story: that this longtime employee, a man with no criminal record who has been working toward citizenship his entire life, was scared by the appearance of unmarked cars at dawn. Mr. Salgado Araujo’s son has filed a complaint and requests not only that justice be served but that we see all the evidence: the dash cam footage, the arrest reports, an accounting that shrinks from nothing.

But before this happens, before we sort out custody and commands, we must deal with scripture because that is our part. I wish to say what we have nearly forgotten how to say: this was a man. “The stranger that dwelleth with you.” Immigration status, legal definitions, and enforcement priorities, all of these may be true, but they are not the first words to be spoken about a person from our perspective. The first word said over Lorenzo was that he was made in God’s image.

Scripture will not allow us the convenience of dehumanizing an other human being; for any reason. The bible says, “The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The God who spoke that truth against the Egyptian custom binds our treatment of immigrants to the memory of our own history. Egypt, Babylon, Rome, and all governments are all powers. And, in scripture and for ages these words have addressed them. And, lest we forget running from the powers that wished to kill him the Lord rode into Egypt as a refugee, in his mother’s arms. When we look on this man on Canal Street we see one whom Christ would not be ashamed to call His brother.

Let us pray, then, as the Church has learned to pray when nothing else can be done:

O God, whose Son had no place to lay His head and was numbered with the transgressors: receive Lorenzo Salgado Araujo into the arms of Thy mercy, and let light perpetual shine upon him. Comfort his sons in their fatherlessness, and be Thou the Father of the fatherless. Bring every hidden thing to light, that justice be neither counterfeit nor delayed. And give us grace to behold in our brothers what we had trained ourselves to see as a case. Through Jesus Christ our peace, who is Himself the Dayspring from on high. Amen.

Notice what we have prayed for: we have asked the Dayspring to visit us. Not Lorenzo only, but us. And we have asked to be led into peace.

There is no abbreviated version of that, and there is no escaping it. If you want to care for human beings, that means we care for immigrants, and we welcome refugees to your parish. Sit with the grieving; accompany the fearful. We are forever invited to sit with this family and all families like it. You will tell the truth about what happened, demand the truth from officials, and reject sterile polemics about which side is tougher on crime.

As followers of Jesus, we bring our brothers’ death to the altar, where another Man’s dying was made into our life, and there you will receive that life again. We do not know yet how this went according to God’s will. But we do know how to walk into His presence.

It will remain dark on Canal Street, and weeping endures for the night. But we say the Benedictus in the dark so that we will remember to say it when the sun comes up. The dayspring from on high hath visited us, us, and Lorenzo and his sons. Let us go. Let our feet be guided into the way of peace.

Your brother in Christ,

C. Andrew Doyle

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Sermón - Proper 8A (En español)

Listen to Bishop Doyle's sermon, " Serón - Proper 8A (En español)" held at Iglesia Episcopal Esperanza in Houston, TX.

More at www.texasbishop.com

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Monday, June 29, 2026

The Ordination of a Deacon

Listen to Bishop Doyle's sermon, "The Ordination of a Deacon" held at The Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Austin, TX.

Hey friends and followers,

This is a critical time to look from the future back to the present. The present is noisy, uncertain, and often overwhelming.

As the world has become more turbulent, the demand for Institute for the Future's foresight work has only grown. In response to this moment, we are excited to announce that our new book, Disciplines of Hope: Generating Faith in the Future for an Anxious Age, is now available for pre-order.

Amazon pre-orders have become one of the most important factors in a book's success, helping increase visibility, reach new readers, and amplify its impact. If our work has been meaningful to you, we would be grateful if you would pre-order a copy today.

Pre-order now

Disciplines of Hope: Generating Faith in the Future for an Anxious Age

Below is a taste of the new book, which explores deeply the themes coming out of our latest forecasts. In such a troubling time, positive futures will be so important.

To make better futures, we need new disciplines for hope in action that you perform, repeatedly, together—not hope or faith that you simply have or don’t have. This book shows you how to generate your own discipline of hope and grow your faith in the future.

Introduction: Hope Is Something You Must Generate—and Here’s How

Chapter 1: A New Compass for Seeding Hope

Chapter 2: The Future Terrain We Must Navigate

Chapter 3: Faith Traditions—Gifts and Harm

Chapter 4: Varieties of Faith and Hope—Keep the Gifts; Refuse the Harm

Chapter 5: A Surprising New Use for the Generative AI Medium

Chapter 6: Human Generativity Augmented by Generative AI

Chapter 7: The Wisdom of Leadership with Hope

Chapter 8: Personal Coping, Meaning, and Resilience

Conclusion: A Call for New Disciplines of Hope

Discussion Guide

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

Let Them Be One

Listen to Bishop Doyle's sermon, "Let Them Be One - Easter 7A" held at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, West Columbia, TX.

More at www.texasbishop.com

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Tuesday, June 2, 2026

To Go As Jesus

Listen to Bishop Doyle's sermon, "To Go As Jesus" held at St. John's Episcopal Church, Carthage, TX for Trinity Sunday.

5A - Easter

Listen to Bishop Doyle's sermon, "5A - Easter" held at Camp Allen, Nacogdoches, TX.

More at www.texasbishop.com

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James, Doc, Ely, Matthew

Listen to Bishop Doyle's sermon, "James, Doc, Ely, Matthew" held at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Bay, TX.

Resurrection Wounds

Listen to Bishop Doyle's Easter sermon, "Easter 2a - Resurrection Wounds" held at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Houston, TX.

More at www.texasbishop.com

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Wednesday, April 8, 2026

We Are Witnesses of These Things

Listen to Bishop Doyle's Easter sermon, "We are witnesses of these things" held at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Richmond, TX.

More at www.texasbishop.com

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Tuesday, April 7, 2026

Reclaiming Resurrection from the Dead - Easter

Introduction

Two days have brought us here. Maundy Thursday, we witnessed the last supper, then on Good Friday, we watched at the foot of the cross and learned that God’s most powerful act took the form of powerlessness. On Holy Saturday, Christ descending into the realm of the dead was nothing less than divine solidarity extended to its limits, the love of God embracing the place where God might be thought to be most absent. Holy Saturday insists that nothing has been missed. Now, Easter makes its claim upon us, and the claim is bodily.

Made in a garden. Made to locked doors. Made on a beach at daybreak around a charcoal fire. Made with breath to a face. Made with fingers plunging into wounds that did not heal after death.

It should not need saying. That the resurrection is bodily is for too much of contemporary Christianity either an embarrassing excess that must be explained away or an optional metaphor that the serious believer needn’t much bother themselves with. The accounts offered in lieu tend to fall into one of two groups. Spiritual-only: Jesus rose in that his cause lives, his memory persists, his Spirit abides, his influence echoes in the lives of those who loved him. Newer and dressed in the dignified language of science, it is the resurrection of consciousness: personal identity persisting as information or awareness beyond the death of the material body. Both arrive at something recognizable as Christ. Neither arrives at the Christ presented by the New Testament.

This essay is an argument for another way. The Anglican tradition at its best has kept it from the start. The risen Christ has a spiritual body, with definite form and feature. He is the same person who died on the cross. The wounds are still there. The transformation is real and the continuance is real and the two go together because the resurrection is the action of the Spirit upon the whole person.

The wounds revealed to Thomas provide the image we will use to explore this claim. Jesus' wounds. The ones Thomas wants to see and Jesus offers to show. The wounds are the image on which this whole doctrine swings. They will take center stage here and return at the end, transformed.

I. The Anglican Grammar of Resurrection

Anglican theology starts with the same instinct its made its decisions about the cross and evil. False choices rejected. The cross was not a divine child sacrifice or a sentimental moral example. Holy Saturday was not a liturgical pause or an undifferentiated burst of triumph. The resurrection is neither spiritual survival nor brute physical resuscitation. Anglican theology reads Scripture squarely. Prays the resurrection into existence in its liturgy. Celebrates and lives the resurrection through its sacramental life. Embodiment has never been in doubt. But neither is flesh and blood forced back into the categories of a pre-Easter body.

Michael Ramsey sets out the Anglican position, insofar as there is a unified Anglican position, most precisely in The Resurrection of Christ.1 Ramsey insists on the reality of the event. The reality of Jesus’s body. A body, note, that has been transformed, but not to the point where ordinary human experience and recognition are suspended. The disciples knew him. Recognition matters: He who appears is Jesus who was crucified. Mary recognizes the voice that calls her name. The disciples on the road to Emmaus know him in the breaking of bread. Thomas is invited to thrust his fingers into the holes. Spiritual-only interpreters frequently remark that these disciples didn’t know Jesus was risen until after the appearance. Not here. Here, the continuous, bodily identity of the risen Christ is the starting point.

And because it is continuous, the crucified Christ is still here. Jesus’s wounds are still here.

II. The Spiritual-Only Position and Its Failure

Jesus’s body was raised, but in a spiritual sense, it has an ancient precedent. Docetism claims that Jesus only seemed to be embodied, only seemed to suffer, and only seemed to die. The Church was quick to identify it as gospel-destructive and didn’t hesitate to label it a heresy. If Jesus did not physically die, then the cross is a theater. If the cross is the theater, there was no solidarity on Calvary. If there was no solidarity, there is nothing solid to be done with on Holy Saturday and Easter morning, which simply brings an empty triumph.

Spiritual-only takes a subtler form today. It allows that Jesus might well have suffered, but denies that the resurrection touches his body. Disciples see Jesus and hear his voice but do not touch him because the vision is identified as a grief vision, or as the slow dawn of realization that Jesus’s message lives on beyond him, or as the founding experience of the post-Easter church whose shared certainty that Jesus has been vindicated is itself the resurrection. Rudolf Bultmann’s fingerprints are all over much of this material2.and for similar reasons. The language of resurrection becomes mythological language for a spiritual reality that, if it exists at all, doesn’t require an empty tomb.

Anglicanism cannot say that. As with Docetism, the reasons are traditional and sentimental but run much deeper than that. They are theological and structural.

The spiritual-only resurrection undoes creation. Salvation is uncoupled from the body and, therefore, from creation. Jesus may rise as a spirit or a cause, but the body that died remains unredeemed flesh. Matter is left on the sermon editor's chopping block at the moment that the doctrine of creation most needs to embrace it. William Temple argued that Christianity is the most materialist religion of all the great traditions precisely because it has a doctrine of resurrection that insists the new creation takes bodies as seriously as the old one did.3 Anglicanism has no option but to agree.

It cannot make sense of the empty tomb. Anglican scholarship emphasizes the historicity of the tomb narratives. The earliest adversaries of the resurrection did not say “it wasn’t empty.” They offered another explanation for why it was.

The spiritual-only resurrection begins with the resurrection and works backward to spiritualize salvation. Finish the trajectory, and the redemption of the body doesn’t matter. Miracles can’t be trusted. What matters is minds. Minds that briefly inhabited bodies. Anglican sacramental teaching becomes a drag on a functional framework that has already decided that bodies don’t matter.

III. The Consciousness-Only Position and the Luminarchist Move

The second family of alternatives offers greater contemporary prestige. Its vocabulary is drawn from neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, which have become the regnant framework for speaking about persons in the modern West. On this view, personal identity is constituted by consciousness, memory, pattern, and information. The person is the pattern, and the pattern in principle need not depend on the specific substrate that originally instantiated it. Death dissolves the substrate; resurrection, on this reading, is the reconstitution of the pattern in a new form, or its continuation in some non-material medium, or its absorption into a universal field of consciousness from which individual identity may persist or emerge.

This position has the advantage of engaging seriously with the question of personal identity after death, and it takes consciousness as irreducible rather than dismissing the inner life of the person. It is, in this sense, more honest than a purely materialist eliminativism. For those engaged in the kind of science-spirituality, this family of ideas is the natural language of the contemporary resurrection discussion. Consciousness is held to survive; the person continues; something that might be called resurrection is affirmed.

The diagnosis must be made precisely here. This is the luminarchist move applied to the resurrection. Luminarchism, as my framework names it, is the theological error of collapsing transcendence into immanence by treating the creature's experience of something greater as an experience of the system's own depth rather than an encounter with what genuinely precedes and exceeds the system from without.4 In the resurrection context, the luminarchist move preserves the phenomenology of personal survival while evacuating its bodily content. The person continues, the consciousness persists, the information endures, and the body, the particular flesh-and-blood particularity of this human being, is shed as the irrelevant substrate.

I offer five diagnostic questions to press this directly. On the luminarchist resurrection, salvation is elevation into a higher informational or conscious state rather than the healing and restoration of persons in their embodied particularity. The body is treated as a temporary substrate for consciousness rather than the permanent dwelling of the Spirit. The risen Christ becomes a pattern reconstituted rather than a person bodily vindicated. And the church that celebrates this resurrection is no longer gathered around the broken and given body of the one who was raised; it is gathered around a communal experience of surviving consciousness. In the end, because cells do this naturally, there is no Jesus except for the human one who may have stumbled upon some of the spiritual realities of the cosmos thousands of years ago. That is not the Anglican belief.

Thomas Nagel's observation is relevant here. Neo-Darwinian biology, and by extension the philosophy of mind that grows from it, operates in the third-person register.5 Consciousness is irreducibly first-person. The consciousness-only resurrection attempts to honor that first-person reality by preserving it beyond death, and in doing so, it takes a step the strict materialist refuses. The Anglican tradition affirms that step. Persons are irreducible. Identity is real. The inner life matters to God. Where the tradition must press further is the question of what that inner life is inner to. The consciousness-only resurrection answers: inner to itself. The Anglican tradition answers: inner to a body that is itself the image of God and the dwelling of the Spirit, and therefore inner to a person whose bodily particularity is held by the God who made it.

Austin Farrer's grammar of double agency is illuminating here.6 God acts through creaturely causes without being identical to them. The resurrection is God's action upon the body of Jesus, transforming it without dissolving it. This is neither resuscitation, the mere reanimation of a corpse, nor dematerialization. It is the Spirit's action upon matter, glorifying the particular body of this particular person. The agent is God; the patient is the whole person, body and soul together. To strip the resurrection down to the survival of consciousness is to remove the patient, leaving only the agent acting upon nothing that was ever materially real.

IV. The Classical Position: Spiritual Body with Individual Form

Paul's letter to the Corinthians provides the most sustained New Testament treatment of what the resurrection body is and is not.7 His controlling image is the seed and the plant: what is sown is transformed into what is raised. There is genuine continuity; it is the same seed that becomes the plant, and genuine transformation; the plant exceeds the seed in ways the seed itself could not anticipate. The spiritual body (soma pneumatikon) is the body as fully animated by and expressive of the Spirit, the body as God always intended the body to be.

Several features of Paul's account are theologically decisive. First, the resurrection body is individual. Paul does not describe the absorption of individual persons into a universal body or a collective consciousness. The same person who dies is the person who is raised. Second, the resurrection body is transformed. It is raised in glory, in power, in incorruption. The limitations and vulnerabilities of ordinary creaturely embodiment are overcome. Third, the resurrection body is the first fruits of a general resurrection: Christ's resurrection inaugurates the transformation of creation, the new creation in which all things will be made new. These three revelations must be balanced within any conception of the resurrection.

The Gospel resurrection narratives fill out Paul's account with specific detail, and the detail matters. The risen Jesus eats. He is touched. He walks, he speaks, he breathes on the disciples, he cooks breakfast. These are all bodily acts. At the same time, he appears in a locked room. He is recognized and then disappears at Emmaus. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for a gardener until he speaks her name. The body that does these things is the same body that died and is the same body now beyond death in a manner that exceeds ordinary creaturely limitation.

Rowan Williams, in his reading of the resurrection appearances, notes that the disciples recognize Jesus rather than deduce him.8 Recognition is a category that requires continuity of identity. One can only recognize what one has previously known. The disciples do not conclude from the evidence that this is Jesus; they know it is Jesus. The knowing precedes the reasoning. That kind of recognition belongs to a person, to an embodied person whose voice, face, gestures, and wounds are the basis on which recognition is possible.

The wounds are the center of the doctrine. They are, precisely, the marks of continuity. The risen Christ is the crucified one, raised. The wounds remain in the glorified body as the permanent testimony that this is the same person, that the cross was real, that the suffering was real, that the death was real, and that God's answer to all of that reality was transformation rather than replacement. The scars of Calvary are carried into the new creation. They are glorified.

This has profound implications for the Anglican theology of evil developed in my Holy Saturday essay. If the wounds remain in the risen body, then suffering leaves a permanent mark upon the person that even resurrection does not erase. God's answer to evil is the transformation of the particular person, wounds and all, into glory. The victims of history are raised as themselves. The traumatized are raised with their histories held and healed. The ones who suffered are the ones who are vindicated.

V. The Sacramental Confirmation

Anglican theology has always understood the Eucharist as the place where the resurrection is most fully encountered within ordinary creaturely time. The one who is crucified and risen makes himself known in the breaking of the bread. The Emmaus story makes this clear: the disciples do not recognize him in the conversation on the road. They recognize him in the fractio panis, in the moment when his hands break the bread, and he gives it to them.9

That eucharistic recognition confirms the bodily resurrection at the liturgical level. The Eucharist is a bodily action: hands are extended, bread is taken, broken, and given; the cup is shared; the body and blood of Christ are received through the material elements. If the resurrection were the survival of consciousness only, there would be no particular reason for this enactment. A meditation, a visualization, a communal remembering of Jesus's teaching would serve just as well. The reason the Church has gathered around this table, in this bodily way, is that the risen Lord who meets them here is the same Lord whose body was given and whose blood was poured out on Calvary, and who was raised in that same body on the third day.

The Prayer Book expresses this with characteristic restraint and precision. The eucharistic prayer does not speculate about the mechanics of Christ's presence. It draws the gathered assembly into the reality of the one sacrifice, made once for all, and prays that we who receive the body and blood of Christ may be filled with his grace and heavenly benediction.10 I name this Civitas Eucharisticus in my book Embodied Liturgy.

The grammar is participatory: we are drawn into Christ's death and resurrection through the material signs of bread and wine. The beauty of the action, the specificity of the elements, the embodied gathering in a common place — all of this is required because the resurrection it enacts is a bodily resurrection.

VI. Resurrection, Luminarchism, and the Fate of the Image-Bearer

The three positions surveyed in this essay correspond to three different anthropologies, and the anthropology at stake is nothing less than the doctrine of the image of God. The spiritual-only resurrection implicitly locates the image of God in the soul or spirit, with the body as instrument or container. The consciousness-only resurrection similarly locates the image of God in the pattern of consciousness, with matter as the disposable substrate. Both positions effectively answer the question of what the image-bearer is by saying: the inner life, the consciousness, the soul, and the body is a vehicle the image-bearer rides until death.

Anglican theology answers differently. The image of God is borne by the whole person. The body is the image of God. The body that was formed from the earth, animated by the breath of God, sustained by food and water and rest, vulnerable to pain and death, that body is the bearer of the divine image and therefore the object of divine redemption.

The luminarchist move in its resurrection form is the substitution of the pattern for the person, the consciousness for the creature. It preserves the phenomenology of personal survival while evacuating the creaturely particularity that is the actual object of God's love. God so loved the world, the kosmos, the material creation, the specific persons in their specific bodies, that he gave his only Son. The resurrection confirms that God's love extends to the body, that the material creature is held by God even through and beyond death, that the image-bearer is vindicated in the fullness of what they are.

This is the load-bearing wall that the consciousness-only resurrection removes. When the body is shed in the act of resurrection, the implicit theology of creation is that the body was always provisional, always the lesser part, always destined for dissolution. And if the body is destined for dissolution, the sacraments that convey grace through material signs are at best pragmatic accommodations to creaturely limitation rather than genuine vehicles of divine action. The Incarnation, the permanent assumption of matter by the Word of God, is undermined at its root. The Word that took on flesh is depicted as eventually releasing that flesh as an outgrown form — precisely the conclusion Chalcedon was framed to prevent.

VII. The Disabled God and the Permanent Wounds

In 1994 Nancy L. Eiesland published The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability, and the argument she makes is an illuminating confirmation of what I am offering.11 Eiesland reads the resurrection appearances in Luke with attention to a detail that traditional theology has tended to spiritualize away: the risen Christ who stands among the disciples still bears the wounds of crucifixion in his hands and his feet (Luke 24:39-40). These wounds are permanent features of the glorified body. They are shown, touched, and declared. Eiesland names this the "Disabled God," not as provocation but as precision. The risen Christ enters the new creation bearing the marks of impairment, and in doing so he shares permanently in the bodily experience of those who live with disability, pain, and the stigma of non-"normative" bodies.

This presses directly on the central argument of this essay. If the wounds are permanent in the glorified body, then the glorified body is the body of one who was impaired, pierced, broken, marked by trauma, and that impairment is carried forward into glory rather than erased by it. The transformation of the resurrection does not produce a body conformed to a cultural standard of physical wholeness or normativity. It produces a body in which the wounds of a particular history are permanently written, glorified, and shown. The Disabled God is the risen Christ, and the risen Christ is the Disabled God.

Eiesland's philosophical and literary sources illuminate this claim from several directions. She draws on liberation theolog, particularly Gustavo Gutierrez's preferential option for the poor, extended to those marginalized by bodily difference, and on feminist theology's insistence that the body as actually lived, rather than the body as idealized, is the site of theological encounter.12 She draws on the social model of disability developed by Michael Oliver and Vic Finkelstein, which reframes disability as a sociopolitical condition produced by the interaction between impairment and environments designed for normative bodies, rather than a medical deficiency to be cured or a spiritual burden to be borne.13 She draws implicitly on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, which insists that the body is the ground of all perception and experience rather than an instrument the self employs.14 Together, these sources allow Eiesland to argue that "wholeness" is a category of justice and social integration within the body of Christ rather than the absence of impairment, and that the church's tendency to equate healing with cure has misread both Scripture and its own sacramental life.

The implications for Episcopal liturgical practice are substantial, and the tradition has been moving, unevenly, toward receiving them. Eiesland's work calls for radical eucharistic inclusion: the table must be physically accessible, the eucharistic assembly must be ordered around the actual bodies present rather than idealized notions of what bodies should be able to do.15 The rites for healing in the Prayer Book tradition have been increasingly interpreted as ministries of wholeness rather than the expectation of cure. The laying on of hands, the anointing with oil, and the prayers for the sick are the church's solidarity with those who suffer rather than transactions for the removal of impairment. The Disabled God confirms this reorientation: solidarity is prior to cure, and the risen Christ does not present himself to the disciples as one whose wounds have been healed. He presents himself as one whose wounds have been glorified.

The church's reception of Eiesland's theology has been uneven, yet in some parts genuinely engaged. Disability studies in theology has grown substantially in the decades since The Disabled God appeared, producing a generation of scholars, Sharon Betcher, Amos Yong, Thomas Reynolds, and others, who have extended, critiqued, and deepened her work.16 Anglican and Episcopal communities have been among the more receptive, partly because the sacramental tradition already insists that bodies matter to God, and partly because the Eiesland reading of the resurrection appearances fits naturally within the framework this essay has been developing: the wounds are real, permanent, and revelatory.

VIII. The Guardrail: Eschatology

Eiesland’s insight should be received with a qualification that she herself does not consistently apply to her work, and Anglican theology is well-suited to providing. The risk at the precipice of disability theology (as with liberation theology more broadly) is that it becomes a realized eschatology: the resurrection is first and foremost an imperative for social change in this world, and the eschatological aspect (the risen body as the first fruits of the new creation; the promise of what will happen to all bodies at the general resurrection) gets subsumed by a social program of inclusion and accessibility. When that happens, grace gets smuggled out by ethics, and the resurrection gets reduced from what God does to the body of the crucified to what we decide to do with our neighbors who’ve been marginalized.

Anglican theology maintains the tension that a realized eschatology releases. The eucharistic community is the true foretaste of the kingdom, but true foretastes come with genuine obligations: those who gather around the table of the Disabled God are called to see that table accessible to all, that the gathered community visibly reflects the body of Christ in its full human diversity, that the ministry of healing is pursued without the implicit judgment that impairment is a problem God will fix before the person can be whole. Those are true obligations, and Eiesland rightly asserts them.

At the same time, the eucharistic community is a foretaste, not the thing itself. The risen Christ, whose wounds are permanent features of the glorified body, is the first fruits of the general resurrection, which is still future. The disabled body, the body in chronic pain, the body bearing marks of trauma, the body damned by society for failing to match some cultural ideal of wholeness, all of these bodies await the transformation that Jesus’ body underwent on Easter morning. Their particularity, their personal history, their wounds will not be dissolved by the new creation; they’ll be held by God and glorified.

This is the work of God in the eschaton, and no program of social inclusion (how faithful and necessary it may be!) replaces or constitutes it.

Our guardrail on disability theology is this: the resurrection initiates our inclusion, it does not get its justification from our inclusion. God raised up the Disabled God, wounded, particular, marked body of Jesus crucified, and therefore every wounded, particular, marked body on earth is declared to be held by God, loved by God, destined for glory in its full creaturely particularity. The social and liturgical obligations that reality precipitates are as real and urgent as they come. But they are the fruit of the resurrection. Received by grace. Enacted in the body of Christ that is made present in the church. Consequences of the resurrection, not the meaning of it. The meaning of the resurrection is still what God did to the body of Jesus on the third day, the first fruits of a creation where all things, bodies included, will be made new.

Within an eschatological Anglican grammar, Eiesland’s disability theology sheds light rather than destabilizes this essay’s argument. The permanent wounds of the Disabled God teach us that God will raise up every person in their particular bodily history. Our eucharistic obligations toward those with disabilities flow from and confirm that in the gathering assembly, we must embody that truth, a foretaste of what is to come. But the eschaton reminds us that the foretaste is not the feast itself; that even our most faithful embodied response to the risen Christ awaits the day when every wound will be glorified, every body vindicated, and the new creation displays what God always meant for bodies to look like.

IX. The Wounds Reclaimed

At the outset of this essay, the wounds of the risen Christ were proffered as the central image: the marks Thomas asks about and Jesus exhibits. Proof that the one standing in the upper room is the same one who hung on the tree. Over the course of the argument, those wounds have accumulated significance. Let me take a minute at the end to try and draw them back together again at a different weight than they began with.

The wounds began as proof of identity, evidence that the one raised was the same who died. They now bear the weight of the whole theological project. The wounds present on the glorified body say that the transformation God does not come at the expense of our particularity. Our particular selves, with our particular histories. The risen Christ declares that the body is the indispensable bearer of personal identity, such that even the glorified body does not give that up. It says that God’s response to evil, suffering, and human rebellion is vindication: the wounds will still be there, but they will be glorified wounds on the hands that now bless us.

Lastly, the wounds declare this: if these wounds remain on the risen Christ, every wound suffered by every human body is secure in God's hands. Carried in the glorified body of the Son of God, who will one day come again to transform every wound into its glorious future. The resurrection isn’t the end of the story, but its beginning: the first fruits, the penultimate act of the new creation. What God did to Jesus’s body on Easter morning is the sign and promise of what God will do for all the bodies of those who belong to him by baptism into death and resurrection.

They will be bodily raised as themselves, history and wounds included. They will be glorified as the distinct image-bearers they were created to be. They will be eternally secure in the love of the God who made them.

Good Friday showed us that God will not refuse to enter into every mode of human powerlessness. Holy Saturday showed us that no silence is too great for God to inhabit. Easter morning shows us that there is no human death that will have the last word over the bodies that God loved into being. On the cross, God was crowned with the powerless rather than the powerful. In the silence of the grave, God raised up the body of the crucified rather than abandoning it. On Easter morning, God declares every wounded body to be a glorified body.

In each of these, God is acting with the same love, for the sake of the same creation, and in the body of the same Son.

It is the third day. He is risen.

*This essay is largely taken from several of my books and offered here in a new form.

Footnotes

1 Michael Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ: An Essay in Biblical Theology (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945). Ramsey's insistence that the resurrection is both genuinely bodily and genuinely transformed remains the most precise Anglican formulation of the position developed here.

2 Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology," in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1953). Bultmann's demythologizing program remains the intellectual ancestor of most spiritual-only resurrection positions in mainline Protestantism.

3 William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1934), 478. Temple's claim that Christianity is the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions is an affirmation of the theological significance of creation and embodiment.

4 This diagnostic category is developed across the apologetics series. For the full five-question instrument, see the FRAMEWORKS reference document.

5 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 35.

6 Austin Farrer, Faith and Speculation (London: A. and C. Black, 1967), 62-66. Farrer's account of double agency provides the grammar for understanding God's action in and through the creaturely without abolishing the creaturely.

7 1 Corinthians 15:35-49. Paul's seed-and-plant analogy is the most sustained scriptural account of transformation-in-continuity, and Anglican theology has consistently returned to it as the structural spine of resurrection doctrine.

8 Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), 43-47. Williams's phenomenological analysis of recognition in the resurrection appearances remains essential reading for any Anglican engagement with the topic.

9 Luke 24:30-31. The Emmaus account is the paradigmatic eucharistic recognition narrative in the Anglican tradition, and it has shaped both Prayer Book theology and Anglican homiletics on the resurrection since Cranmer.

10 The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 2007), 335-336.

11 Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 58-60, 70-75, 99-101, 114-116. Eiesland's reading of Luke 24 as the textual ground for the "Disabled God" is the single most important contribution in disability theology to the doctrine of the resurrection, and it arrives here as a confirmation of the bodily resurrection argument rather than a revision of it.

12 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973). Eiesland extends the preferential option from economic marginalization to the marginalization of non-normative bodies.

13 Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London: Macmillan, 1990). The social model distinguishes impairment (the bodily condition) from disability (the social and environmental barrier), relocating the problem from the individual body to the systems that exclude it.

14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962). Merleau-Ponty's account of the body as the ground of all perception rather than an instrument of the self provides the phenomenological basis for Eiesland's insistence that the body as actually lived is the site of theological encounter.

15 Eiesland, The Disabled God, 114-116. Her specific eucharistic recommendations include architectural accessibility, adaptation of liturgical gesture and posture, and the revision of healing rites to emphasize solidarity rather than cure.

16 Sharon Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007); Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007); Thomas E. Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008). Reynolds's development of "vulnerable communion" is particularly consonant with the Anglican sacramental tradition.

Bibliography

Betcher, Sharon. Spirit and the Politics of Disablement. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

Bultmann, Rudolf. "New Testament and Mythology." In Kerygma and Myth, edited by Hans Werner Bartsch, translated by Reginald H. Fuller. London: SPCK, 1953.

Doyle, C. Andrew. Embodied Liturgy: Virtual Reality and Liturgical Theology in Conversation. New York: Church Publishing, 2021.

Doyle, C. Andrew. Bedeviled and Beloved: An Anglican Naming of Evil, Responsibility, and Hope. Manuscript.

Eiesland, Nancy L. The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994.

Farrer, Austin. Faith and Speculation. London: A. and C. Black, 1967.

Gutierrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation. Translated by Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.

Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Oliver, Michael. The Politics of Disablement. London: Macmillan, 1990.

Ramsey, Michael. The Resurrection of Christ: An Essay in Biblical Theology. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945.

Reynolds, Thomas E. Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008.

Temple, William. Nature, Man and God. London: Macmillan, 1934.

The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church. New York: Church Publishing, 2007.

Williams, Rowan. Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982.

Yong, Amos. Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007.

Quotes

"Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process." Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer." Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Perfection, in a Christian sense, means becoming mature enough to give ourselves to others." Kathleen Norris
"Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can." John Wesley
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." G. K. Chesterton
"One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans." C. S. Lewis
"When we say, 'I love Jesus, but I hate the Church,' we end up losing not only the Church but Jesus too. The challenge is to forgive the Church. This challenge is especially great because the church seldom asks us for forgiveness." Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey
"Christians are hard to tolerate; I don't know how Jesus does it." Bono
"It's too easy to get caught in our little church subcultures, and the result is that the only younger people we might know are Christians who are already inside the church." Dan Kimball

Blog Autobiography

Husband, Father, Bishop, Author, Friend

As the son of an Episcopal priest, I grew up in churches around Houston. I have lived and worked for the Church in Austin, Temple, Houston and College Station. At Camp Allen, some of you were my counselors and some of you were my campers and now several of you serve as priests in the diocese. It was here among you, that I first heard a call to ministry. I pursued a degree in fine arts and then with the support of St. Paul's, Freeport and All Saints, Austin, I attended Virginia Theological Seminary and graduated in 1995. I was ordained at Christ Church, Temple. I have served the Diocese of Texas for more than thirty five years as a youth minister, camp counselor, priest, consultant, workshop leader, Canon to the Ordinary, and Coadjutor and Diocesan Bishop (2008).

JoAnne and I met at Camp Allen and were married in 1990. Our two beautiful girls, Caisa and Zoë, are the delight of our lives.

I am the author of Church, Unabashedly Episcopalian, Generous Community, Small Batch, and The Jesus Heist.