Episcopal Bishop Sauls to preach at Interim Shared Eucharist with United Methodists

Sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of New York

 

[Episcopal Church Office of Public Affairs press release] Bishop Stacy Sauls, Chief Operating Officer of The Episcopal Church, will preach at an Interim Shared Eucharist with the United Methodist Church on March 3 at 5:30 pm at John Street United Methodist Church in New York City. United Methodist New York Annual Conference Resident Bishop Jane Allen Middleton will preside.
Sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of New York, the historic Eucharist between The Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church will follow The Episcopal Church-United Methodist Church Common Guidelines for Interim Eucharist Sharing.
“The growing unity between United Methodists and Episcopalians is a source of great joy for me as someone who was formed in the Methodist Church as a child,” commented Bishop Sauls. “I continue to value the depth of Methodist spirituality and appreciate the Methodist gift for piety in the best possible sense, and I am filled with hope at the missional opportunities we might pursue together.”
Nicholas Birns, chairman of the Diocese of New York Episcopal – Methodist Dialogue, noted that this service marks the second Interim Shared Eucharist. The first, he said, occurred at St. Paul’s Chapel, New York City, in May 2012. “At that time, the Episcopalians hosted, United Methodist Bishop Jeremiah Park co-presided, and the preacher was Bishop Robert Rimbo of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA),” Birns said.
March 3 is significant as it is the day The Episcopal Church celebrates the lives of John and Charles Wesley.
For the past ten years, the United Methodist Church and The Episcopal Church have been in discussion and discernment moving forward to “full communion” which involves a relationship between church organizations that mutually recognize sharing basic doctrines. This relationship involves: mutual recognition of members, joint celebration of Holy Communion/Eucharist, mutual recognition of ordained clergy, mutual recognition of the sacraments and a common commitment to mission. Both the United Methodist Church and The Episcopal Church share full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but not with each other. The Episcopal Church also shares full communion with the Moravian Church.
The John Street parish started as a prayer circle of Methodists who also attended formal services at Trinity Church, Wall Street.  After American independence, and the consequent formal break between Methodists and Episcopalians, these ties were severed.
Recently, an Interim Shared Eucharist between The Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church was celebrated at the Episcopal Church’s National Cathedral in Washington DC

Transnational Literature--CFP on the New Black and New Negro

CALL FOR PAPERS

The New Black and The New Negro: Generational Tensions between Blackness, Colorlessness, and Post-Black

Special Feature: Volume 8, no. 1, November 2015

Guest Editor: Kinitra D. Brooks, University of Texas, San Antonio

A class of colored people, the ‘New Negro’,  ... have arisen since the War, with education, refinement, and money. – Cleveland Gazette, 28 June 1895

There are constructive channels opening out into which the balked social feelings of the American Negro can flow freely…. One is the consciousness of acting as the advance-guard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization; the other, a sense of a mission of rehabilitating the race in world esteem from that loss of prestige for which the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible. 

– Alain Locke in The New Negro, 1925

The ‘new black’ doesn’t blame other races for our issues. The ‘new black’ dreams and realizes that it’s not a pigmentation; it’s a mentality. And it’s either going to work for you, or it’s going to work against you. And you’ve got to pick the side you’re gonna be on.  – Pharrell Williams, Oprah Prime (2014)

I'm tired of being labelled. I'm an American. I'm not an African American; I'm an American ... And that's a colorless person. – Raven Symone, Oprah Prime (2013)

The words of music producer Pharrell Williams and actress Raven Symone initiated what is now referred to as the ‘New Black’ or ‘Millennium Negro’ Movement. Critical race theorists have implied that these musings hearken back to another African American cultural movement of self-articulation, that of ‘The New Negro’. Transnational Literature is calling for scholarly papers and poems that critique and explore the themes and theories interrogating the possible connections between these two socio-political cultural projects. We welcome papers and creative works that include but certainly are not limited to the following topics:

* The New Black v. The New Negro

* Contemporary ahistorical manifestations of Blackness and questions of critical legitimacy

* Global Perspectives of The New Black

* Transnational Black Cosmopolitan Identity and Culture

* The New Black’s connections to The Talented Tenth

* The New Negro/Old Negro and The New Black/Old Black

* The Importance of Class

* Postcolonial/Neocolonial Blackness in the African Diaspora

* Problematising prescriptive racial identities 

Transnational Literature invites unpublished papers not currently under consideration by any other publisher. Article submissions should be 4000-6000 words in length and should include an abstract of approximately 150 words in addition to a brief author biography. 

Please consult the submission guide – fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/submissions.html

Please submit all finished works and queries to tnlthenewblack2015@gmail.com by May 10, 2015.

Transnational Literature is a freely accessible, fully refereed international e-journal published twice a year by the Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia.

Dr Gillian Dooley

Honorary Senior Research Fellow, English
Special Collections Librarian
Editor, Transnational Literature

Editor, Writers in Conversation

Central Library
Flinders University
GPO Box 2100
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Leatrice Fountain 1924-2015

     Leatrice Gilbert Fountain was one of several major American readers brought to the work of Anthony Powell by his obituary in The New York Times. It took a certain sort of curiosity, though, for someone who had never before heard of the series to pick it up, read all twelve volumes, and become a devoted Powell fan. When Leatrice began this new readerly adventure, she was 76, the same age as Powell himself when he began to compose his Journals, and, like Powell, Leatrice used her final years to read widely, appreciate droll stories and applaud admirable values.

     Leatrice was the daughter of John Gilbert, the silent-movie actor whose career never recovered after the turn to the talkies, and Leatrice Joy, a prominent actress of that era. Her parents divorced early, and Leatrice’s childhood saw her shuttling between parents and schools, but learning a lot about life early. Leatrice lived in Ireland after 1945, and was unhappily married, but then returned to the US, marrying John Fountain, who she described as “the nicest and smartest man there ever was.” In the 1980s, Leatrice wrote a biography of her father, Dark Star, wand was frequently in demand as a speaker among aficionados of the silent-movie era. But her scholarship ranged widely: she took courses at Cambridge on medieval history and had a rigorous knowledge of the era that stretched from Alfred the Great to Richard II.

      When I could not go to the 2001 Eton conference,, Leatrice totally unexpectedly called me up and inviteding me to a meeting at her house, where I gave the paper I failed to give at Eton. Also invited was Tom Wallace, AP’s former American publisher. This was the genesis of the Northeast chapter of the Anthony Powell Ssociety, of which Leatrice was the godmother and presiding spirit, the jovial cynosure of our company at the beloved Silvermine Tavern.

       Leatrice, also like AP, was a great lover of cats and a sage observer of people and their quirks. She applied this wittily to the characters in Dance, showing especial insight into Stringham, Many of her gems were written down in a notebook, which, she lost at one of our gatherings. But her wise perceptions about Powell’s world will remain alive among the many friends who shared them with her.

Powell Course at New York Society Library

I am teaching a course this spring on the first 6 novels of A Dance To The Music of Time. It will be held at the New York Society Library, 11:00 AM to 12:30 AM on the following dates: March 19, April 16, May 14, and June 4.

It is $50 for all four sessions, $15 for one session.

You also must be a member of the library, which costs $270 for a full year, $200 for a half year. I have been a member for some years and find it more than pays of itself in terms of books you would have otherwise bought being able to borrow, and good availability unlike the public library system. Also I have made very many good friends through my membership.

See below for the course description

• Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music of Time is one of the longest and most absorbing novels in the Englishlanguage—with twelve books, hundreds of characters, and an astonishing broad coverage of British and world culture from 1914 to 1971. We will read the first six books of the series, taking the story from Eton in the 1920s  up to the beginning of World War II, and meeting such unforgettable personages as enigmatic, aristocratic Stringham, the hearty businessman Templer, the promiscuous bohemian Gypsy Jones, and the saga’s two major characters—our astute, sophisticated narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, and his nemesis, the obtuse, ambitious Kenneth Widmerpool. We will immerse ourselves in the social history of England in the 20th century; life, love and loss in these changing times; the tragedy of two world wars; and a philosophical perspective that embraces both the merriment and melancholy of the human condition. Reference books by Hilary Spurling and Mr. Birns will help make sense of Powell’s tragicomic epic increasingly valued as one of the great masterpieces of world literature

My mother's supplementary remarks on Shulamith Firestone

I have a short piece on Shulamith Firestone in the current FEMSPEC.

My mother remembered some details l about her encounter with Firestone which lends a variant perspective to what I was able to say. Herewith her remarks:

The first time I met Shulamith Firestone, in the Xerox place, she was fussing about what she needed done to such an extent, that I was kept waiting longer than usual. As a result, I glanced at the work she was Xeroxing and realized that she was Shulamith Firestone. Shulamith Firestone had no idea who I was—I had bought one of her books many years ago in the seventies, and had read about her, so of course I knew who she was.   About a year later, I went to do my laundry at the laundromat across the street, and came across Shulamith again, who had evidently been in the laundromat some time before I arrived.  I was sitting on the bench in front of her, waiting for my my laundry to finish in the dryer.  She was standing in front of me. She evidently had found something on the bulletin board that interested her, and wanted to copy it down, but had no pencil.  She asked me if I had a pencil.  I did not.  She then proceeded to look in her entire backpack for a pencil, look in her wallet, look in her jacket, look in all the pockets of her jeans, look in her shirt pockets.  When she did not find a pencil in any of those places, she proceeded to search again in an increasingly anxious and apprehensive and agitated way, a way that was dead serious—in her backpack, in her wallet, in her jacket, in her jeans, in her shirt pockets.  She did this many, many, many times.  She was not kidding around. Backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack wallet, jacket, jeans shirt pockets, backpack wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets.  To the point that I felt like shouting, in utter desperation,  “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SHULAMITH GO HOME AND GET A  PENCIL!  But I did nothing.  Maybe I should have.  Backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack wallet, jacket, jeans shirt pockets, backpack wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets. 

       Although she had no pencil, she was pencil-thin, and possessed by an idee fixe about pencil she did not possess. Backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack, wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets, backpack wallet, jacket, jeans shirt pockets, backpack wallet, jacket, jeans, shirt pockets.  To her eternal credit, she was still obviously interested in something that struck her as important on the bulletin board; her need for a pencil was from her perspective dire.  This was true to the spirit of the Laundromat. Everyone was in a state of existential despair.   Nobody was really in their right mind, and I would include myself in that category. In that regard, Shulamith Firestone’s episode-with-the-pencil should be appreciated as part of the legend of what was once the East Village.  She was true to herself.  She may have been  in a tragic condition,  yes—but there was nothing about her that was a lie. 
--Margaret Boe Birns 

(Again my thanks to my mother for contributing her perspective) 

Wine and Grape Juice

Wine AND grape juice! Two chalices, two stations! A historic prayer book's time-honored rhythms heard again! And free pizza (and good pizza, as I will be in charge of buying it...)

These are but some of the delights which await you at the  interim Shared Eucharist on March 3 at 5:30 pm between the Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church under the TEC-UMC Common Guidelines for Interim Eucharist Sharing. These are exciting times for Anglican-Methodist cooperation worldwide, as recently in Ireland several Methodist consecrators joined in Canon Kenneth Kearon's consecration as Bishop of Limerick and Killaloe in the Church of Ireland. 
A team of clergy and laity from both denominations in the New York area has been attempting to walk along the same paths. and the service is the fruition of this. United Methodist New York Annual Conference Resident Bishop Jane Allen Middleton will preside, while Bishop Stacy F. Sauls, the Chief Operating Officer of the national Episcopal Church, will preach. Informal fellowship and free pizza will follow. The John Street parish started out as a prayer circle of Methodists who would also attend formal services at Trinity Church. After American independence, and the consequent formal break between Methodists and Episcopalians, these ties were severed; this service is a small step in reconnecting them. March 3 has been chosen as being the day the Episcopal Church celebrates the lives of John and Charles Wesley on the Calendar of Saints.

As per the requirements of the shared Eucharist agreement, both wine and grape juice will be available. The liturgy used will be that of the 1662 Prayer Book, the last prayer service the two churches had in common. I went to a church in Canberra last summer that used this service and I found it both humbling, and, to use a Methodist word, sanctifying. 

I have been working on this for a number of years and am thrilled to finally see it bear fruit. Working with me have been Bill Parnell, the Episcopal Diocese of New York's Archdeacon for Mission; Joe Campo, the chair of the Diocesan Commission on Ecumenical and Intereligious Relations, and Bob Walker, assistant to the UMC New York Annual Conference bishop. We will also have lots of support from General Theological Seminary whose Dean and President has been a strong back rod the event. 

Why is this important to me? 1)  it is something my crutch has asked me to do and entrusted me with the responsibility for, and I am honored and humbled by this trust 2) As someone whose ancestors came from virtually every religious background conceivable, there is a natural affinity on my part for religious traditions coning together 3) as a literature professor, and especially as someone who does scholarship and teaches courses in the long eighteenth and long nineteenth centuries, it often seems to me that we act as if there wasp n egret age of religious poetry in English-the seventeenth century, with Herbert, Milton, Vaughan, Crashaw, Edward Taylor, and so on -and another--the nineteenth century, with the later Wordsworth, Coleridge,  and Oxford Movement, followed by Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. We forgot the incredible body of Methodist hymnody and sermons that provides a catalyzing link between them and rebuts idea sod the rationalism and secularism of the long eighteenth century.4) Because an ongoing unity of the Church brings us all closer to God. 

So, guys, my heart is in this on all levels and I would really be thrilled if you could come. 

The John Street Church is in downtown Manhattan, south of City Hall, accessible from he Fulton St. stations on the A, C, 2, 3, 4, and 5 trains. 

David Slavitt's new novel, Walloomsac

   David Slavitt is the most wide-ranging man of letters of our time. Any of his careers—as novelist, poet, and critic—would be more than enough for one person to have as their life’s work. That he has fully established himself in all the above categories as well as being our era’s most skilled and curious translator is truly stunning. This may indeed by a great age of translation; but it is often translations of already-established classics: Don Quixote, Dante, Dostoevsky. While not neglecting the obvious masterworks—his Aeschylus, from which I have taught many times, is especially outstanding--Slavitt’s true merit ahas been translating obscure works from the medieval and early modern period, which have either not been rendered into English at all or have only received dry, scholarly translations Sometimes one feels as if the few in these writers resent any potential broadening of interest. In a particularly scabrous  review, Laurance Wieder presumably not (a relation of Carlos Wieder in Roberto Bolaño), writing for the ultraconservative journal First Things, says of Slavitt’s Prudentius translation  “The urbane surface of his introductory prose can’t hide the vacancy of his aesthetic pose.” Even if true, )which it is not), why not applaud the fact that this important fourth century Christian poet, a pivotal figure in the transformation of  the Roman world from classicism through  late antiquity to the medieval, has been translated? Why not hail Slavitt for not being intimidated by repeated assurances in literary history, that Prudentius is dry as dust and only for scholastics and that the true, well-rounded reader should be content with the list of Great Books given them by the likes of Mortimer Adler, never to rove into obscure crevices frequented by true scholars such as Gibbon and Huysmans and Curtius? He should be so hailed.

  The remarkable achievement,though, of Slavitt's work is that this erudition is organized and controlled by classicism in another sense-the sense of  the writer knowing his limits, of preferring concision to verbosity, of keeping their knowledge all under control. Slavitt, though far more wide-ranging than previous American classicists such as Rolfe Humphries or Dudley Fitts or Stark Young, has their willingness to harness their creativity (which one must have creativity in the first place to do). Postmodernism and magical realism have made it easy to be erudite and swath one;s knowledge in a mantle of allegedly transgressive form, but Slavitt takes the harder task of writing a wild, prodigious, extravagant work which still possesses a sense of self-possession—decorum and equipoise are not quite the right words-amidst all its intellectual richness. Of major writers, the one most comparable is Borges: not that Slavitt is on this level, nor has particular Borgesian idiosyncrasies, but the mixture of erudition and discipline is analogous. The much duscussed brogue genre of  "Menippean satire"--something that is a bit of a mixture of everything, and is self-ironizing--is also pertinent, 

   Walloomsac, Slavitt's latest work, may well be his bravest and most  idiosyncratic. It is subtitled a roman fleuve, a river-novel, and its course indeed delightfully eddies from subject to subject, from the curiosity that Sir John Harington, the acclaimed Elizabethan translator of Ariosto, also invented the water-closet, to the history of syphilis and the Wasserman test (I am a bit surprised that Slavitt does not mention Fracastoro, the great poet of syphilis), to the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, novelists whom Slavitt’s novel does not resemble in the least but who he respects for their ability to meld fact and fiction and their knowing sense of what they were trying to do as writers. Literary strains that Waloomsac does evoke more concertedly are the deeply felt opulence of the George Garrett of The Succession (Garrett was a good friend and literary sparring partner of Slavitt’s), the wry self-discernment of an Italo Svevo, the mania and inventiveness of Thomas Pynchon with far more serenity and control, and, given that the Walloomsac, and the other river mentioned, the Hoosic, are in the Taconic Hills just across the border from the Berkshires of Meivlle’s Pierre, and Walloomsac emulates that bitter attempt of the great American writer to be as misunderstood as possible. (The third section is called “Tomahanack,” which is a slight misspelling of a reservoir near Troy ,but is probably just  meant to be fictive and to burst the frame a bit). We learn about disease, the relations between men and woman, Shakespeare, disappointment, fonts and their origin, and the perils of misunderstanding. We are exasperated, dazzled, and confused, but always sure of our guide: our most underrated major American writer, and someone who combines learning with a sensibility truly—for once---conscientious.