Even the Devils Believe

Hi, my name is Chris. I am a priest in the Independent Catholic Christian Church, a jurisdiction in the Independent Catholic movement. We are a collection of Catholic churches around the world, independent of the Bishop of Rome but teaching Catholic doctrine and living by Catholic practices. We are descended from the Old Catholics of Europe, among other groups. I was ordained to the priesthood on July 22, 2006, by Bp. John Plummer. I am presently the chaplain of our jurisdiction's traditional liturgy apostolate, which serves traditionalists in the Independent Catholic world and beyond.

I grew up in Southern Illinois and went to the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a public magnet high school for students from across the state. From 2000 to 2004 I attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and spent three months studying at Kuban State University in Krasnodar, Russia, in the fall of 2001. I graduated from Knox with a BA in Russian and College Honors for a thesis in natural language processing. My wife and I now live in North Carolina, where she is a student of international law at Duke University.

I grew up a Protestant, in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and later the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but since college I have identified increasingly with high-church, sacramental perspectives on Christianity. After I graduated from Knox, I got involved in the independent sacramental movement through a Church of Antioch parish in Urbana, IL. Though my stance on some social issues is rather liberal and I identify with progressive movements like feminist theology, my attitudes about doctrine and practice are fairly traditional.

I hope that this blog can serve primarily as a forum for talking about spirituality, liturgy, and the life of the church. The culture war seems to have brought out the worst in both liberals and conservatives in the Christian church, so I hope to offer a different approach to the questions that divide the faith today.

Thank you for stopping by!