The Sacred Art of Reading cohort will be dedicated to collaboration in “the forbidding discipline of spiritual reading,” confident that such an undertaking cultivates the loving attentiveness, prophetic discernment, and childlike openness to surprise that characterize what St. Paul calls the faith that works by love. Such work is always needed, of course, for the church to fulfill its mission. But it is perhaps especially needed now, when dominant cultural and political forces incentivize and accelerate conflict, playing up the most extreme voices, pressuring us to attend only to what troubles or offends us, acclimatizing us to all kinds of violence, so that it becomes harder and harder to engage in good faith. Under such conditions, thinking deteriorates, and we find ourselves speaking up only to rebuke or refute those we feel are wrong.

Bearing these challenges in mind, the cohort is designed to cultivate an alternative awareness, one shaped by the slow, painstaking work of collaborative interpretation. And to that end, the heart of the program is the reading of the Christian Scriptures. The aim will be both philosophical and devotional, critical and celebratory, mystical, and pastoral. No one reading method will be stipulated, but students will be encouraged to find ways to honor the traditions of the communities in which they learned to argue, to muse, and to pray.

Besides Scripture, the cohort will engage a wide range of texts including poems, memoirs, essays, treatises, sermons, and stories old and new, familiar, and strange, sacred and “worldly,” in part and in whole, not so much in order to “plunder the Egyptians” as to bear glad witness to the wonder that God is never left without a witness because all truth, truly received, trues.

There are two week-long seminars per year, most meeting at WTS in Holland, Michigan. One or two monastic retreats are planned with the location TBD. Students must be able to participate fully in all the required seminars