Life, The Universe, & Everything
Retreat with Dr. Derek Olsen
January 13, 2024
The post-Covid American context offers a host of ways to make meaning and form communities—what does the church offer now that the secular marketplace does not? Dr. Derek Olsen explores how classical Anglican spirituality speaks to our deepest desires and forms a framework for engaging life's biggest questions. What does this mean specifically for the church of Saint Mary the Virgin, an Anglo-Catholic parish in the heart of New York City, and for other faith communities like it at the crossroads of the modern world?
Derek Olsen is a biblical scholar and engaged layman in the Episcopal Church. He earned an M.Div. from Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, an S.T.M. from Trinity Lutheran Seminary, and served as pastoral vicar of a large Lutheran (ELCA) church in the Atlanta suburbs before beginning doctoral work (and being received into the Episcopal Church). He completed a Ph.D. in New Testament in 2011 from Emory University under the direction of Luke Timothy Johnson. His chief areas of interest are in the intersection between Scripture and liturgy, the history of biblical interpretation—particularly in the Church Fathers and the Early Medieval West—and liturgical spirituality. He has served on the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music. He is the author of Inwardly Digest: The Prayer Book as Guide to a Spiritual Life (Forward Movement, 2016). Derek shows us how the resources that are very close to home—as close as the Book of Common Prayer in the pew or on the bookshelf—can be used in the ongoing work of conversion and transformation.