Anglican Studies Seminar
The Anglican Studies Seminar is a five-year research initiative focused on the “operative ecclesiologies” of Anglicans in various contexts worldwide. In Year 1, our discussion focused on the historical legacies shaping Anglican ecclesiologies in various contexts; in Year 2, papers investigated theological factors; in year Year 3, papers that surface missiological currents within Anglicanism, past and present, framed the discussion on the formation of Anglican identities and the ecclesiologies that arise alongside those identities.
The focus for Year 4 is on how ministerial and pastoral practices are shaped simultaneously by local contexts and contribute to the formation of Anglican identities. How is the mission of churches in the Anglican world interpreted by the contextual elements that inform the shape of Anglican identities in each place? How are local pastoral practices shaped by languages, cultures, and local contexts? These ways of "living ecclesiology" contirbute to a better understanding of the realities we are talking about when considering the form of Christianity we call “Anglican.” Papers that address “operative ecclesiologies” from the perspective of practical theologies, pastoral and spiritual care, and interdisciplinary approaches to ministerial and pastoral practice are invited for Year 4. Papers that emphasize decolonial and postcolonial dynamics at work in forming and maintaining “operative ecclesiologies,” particularly in understudied regions of the Anglican Communion, and the Anglican majority world, are especially welcome. Public scholarship that addresses Anglican ecclesiologies from the perspective of ministerial and pastoral practice is also welcome.
Please note that those whose proposals are accepted must commit to submitting their paper for pre-circulation through the AAR mobile app by Monday, October 13, 2025. Seminar members and others wishing to attend will have access to these papers, which will be briefly summarized at the meeting but will not be presented in their entirety by the authors. Instead, they will be discussed among the panelists, seminar members, and session attendees. Please note that, due to AAR/SBL policies pertaining to participation, those whose proposals are accepted must commit to attending the 2025 Annual Meeting in Boston.
The Anglican Studies Seminar holds that Anglican Studies requires a sustained study of the intersections of post– and de-colonialism, imperial legacies, and globalization with the ongoing evolution of Anglican identities in specific locations marked by their particular economic, social, cultural, and historical conditions. The Seminar pays detailed attention to context; its work disrupts extant assumptions about the Anglican tradition being a monolithic, monocultural entity. Accordingly, the Seminar focuses on the “operative ecclesiologies” of Anglicans at the local, national or provincial level. That is, we are interested in how the contextual realities of Anglicans in concrete locales shape the ways in which church is practiced by Anglicans, whether they answer to standard ecclesial and theological conceptualizations or not.
Seminar members are committed to a globalized study of Anglicanism, conceived broadly, and to investigating various operative ecclesiologies, locally and contextually. We foster interdisciplinary conversations that enable scholars to speak to multiple aspects of Anglicanism. The seminar’s findings will be of interest to scholars working in a range of disciplines. Moreover, close examination of the processes of decolonization that inform lived Anglicanisms will supply the wider field of religious studies with a set of thickly described case studies of post-colonial decolonization. It is the intention of the Steering Committee to publish research resulting from the Seminar and make it accessible to an interdisciplinary audience.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook, Claremont School… | skujawa-holbrook@cst.edu | - | View |