Authors

Courtney Cowart

Courtney Cowart

Director of Congregational Learning

Recent entries:

April 04, 2011

Stumbling Into the Digital Reformation

Our “Theo-Epicurean” social experiment began with a few simple acts. My brother Simon created a Facebook group page. We took a picture of the homemade chicken pot pie we had just made, used it for the masthead, and uploaded all our food related photos from our cell phones. Voila! The Episcopal Foodie Network was born. Within days over 500 foodies of faith had joined and were posting like mad.

Elizabeth Drescher, a professor at Santa Clara University whose field is“contemporary spirituality at the intersection of new digital social media and ancient Christian wisdom,” an early contributor to EfN and “lurker” as she describes herself, named what had happened: we had inadvertently stumbled right into the heart of what she calls the “digital Reformation.”

What is that? Here’s how Drescher describes it, “The digital Reformation is a renewal of the church inspired by new practices shaped by the participatory, co-creative, collaborative, and distributed culture of digital social media.” With it comes...

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August 13, 2010

Harbingers of the Age of the Spirit

Reflecting on The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox

“Where do you find yourself is this story?” is a frequent question posed to twenty-first century Christians grappling with sacred texts in mid-week and Sunday morning Bible studies across denominations.  Less frequent are church study groups that ask the same question of a contemporary text like Harvey Cox’s The Future of Faith, a provocative depiction of what Christianity could be becoming right now.  

As I read Cox’s latest book I found myself persuaded that indeed Christianity could be making, as Cox proposes, “its most momentous transformation since its transition in the fourth century CE” from “a tiny Jewish sect into the religious ideology of the Roman Empire” (p.2).  The most convincing part of Cox’s thesis is his two-part case that...

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