Episcopal Church of the Philippines and a second-year master of theological studies student, says her experience at CDSP and in the Graduate Theological Union has “opened a lot of doors and windows of new learning and different ways of looking at the church and how faith and spirituality affects peoples’ lives. “I experienced different kinds of Christianity I never thought existed,” she says. “This gave a new outlook of the word Christian.” Through her Theology of Interfaith Dialogue class at the Graduate Theological Union’s Jesuit School of Theology, she attended worship in a mosque for the first time. Other new experiences came simply by living among CDSP students and faculty. “Living within the CDSP community is an opportunity to experience other voices, or you could say other cultures of Anglicanism, which is an eye opener because it is so similar yet totally different with my version of Anglicanism,” Buslig said. It isn’t just students who benefit from CDSP’s longstanding relationships with other seminaries. Several CDSP faculty members have spent time at Cuddesdon during sabbaticals, most recently the Rev. Dr. Ruth Meyers, CDSP’s academic dean. “For me, on sabbatical, Cuddesdon provided a community of worship and theological reflection, both of which were anchors in my writing project,” she says. “I had access to a community of scholars with different perspectives on the Anglican Communion and on worship, and they helped me refine my thinking over the course of the term that I was there.” Meyers says the question and answer session during a presentation she made at Cuddesdon, “helped me to articulate the concept of ‘worshipful mission’ in a way I hadn’t up until then.” Canon Professor Mark Chapman, academic dean at Cuddesdon, says the longstanding exchange between CDSP and Cuddesdon, which dates to the 1970s, has made students “far more sensitive to the sometimes subtle and often complex differences between the two churches.” That, in turn, “has been of immense value in helping students engage with the wider set of issues of inter-provincial relationships in the Anglican Communion.” “All our students come back from their exchanges enriched by the experience and aware that many of the labels that are used to
label others can be very misleading,” he says. “Our experience in Cuddesdon of the visiting students from CDSP is that they are often surprised by the huge diversity of the worshipping life of the Church of England as well as the wide range of theological viewpoints among both students and staff. At the same time, they always appreciate the regular patterns of corporate prayer and the quietness and beauty of the rural setting. “They always help us to reflect on ourselves, especially on our sense that all Anglicans are much like the Church of England!”
“All our students come back from their exchanges enriched by the experience and aware that many of the labels that
Postcolonial Viewpoint
are used to label Students don’t have to cross an ocean to get a sense of the breadth and complexity of the Anglican Communion and the forces that have shaped it. They can simply take classes with Dr. Jennifer Snow, associate professor of practical theology, whose spring 2018 course in Global Anglicanism focused, in the words of the course catalog, on “postcoloniality and power, the establishment of ‘national churches’ as a colonial exercise … the effect of decolonization struggles on individual national churches … and the tensions and relationships between ‘global south’ and ‘global north’ Anglicanism around issues of cultural integrity and imperialism, sexuality, gender roles, and Biblical hermeneutics.” Snow says the course was intended in part as a survey of the history of the Anglican
others can be very misleading.” — Canon Professor M a r k C h a pm a n , C u dd e s d o n
“Having experienced the Anglican Church in Kenya and the Episcopal Church in the United States in the same year, it was humbling and enlightening to see how the faith is lived out across contexts and cultures …” — Laura McAdam
Communion and its member churches. “But it is also an opportunity to reflect deeply on how our communion has been constituted by mission, empire and colonialism,” she says. Part of her goal in reshaping the course was to place the story of the Episcopal Church into the broader context of churches that sprang from the Church of England Church Divinity School of the Pacific • Spring 2019 C R O S S I N G S
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