Welcome to St. Mary's New Blog

Hello all who stop and sojourn here in the Blogspace of St. Mary's, the Episcopal Church at Penn! We hope you'll stay a while, share your thoughts and prayers with others, find space here to reflect and refresh, and help all who pass through these electronic portals as we all seek to know more fully and move closer to the powerful love of God that fills and motivates us. The other half of our "rule" is to share that love concretely with others. In the words of our baptismal covenant, here we hope to "seek and serve Christ."

For those of you who may have arrived here on our digital shore from points unknown, let me tell you more about our community. St Mary's is located right in the middle of the residential campus of the University of Pennsylvania. At St. Mary’s, people have gathered since 1817 to worship God, celebrate the new life of Christ, and invite others into the love and spirit of God. Over the coming months, we hope to add more to this page including snippets, sermons, and discussions from daily life here at the church. We also hope you'll help with that by adding your own stuff.

We are not afraid here of lively and even disputatious discussion. One such dialogue between our Rector and Episcopal Chaplain to Penn, the Rev. Jim Literal, whom most of us just call Jim, and a visitor to St. Mary's on a Sunday when Jim preached about our complicity as citizens often (and residents, always) in torturing our fellow human beings. As you can see, that sermon sparked something and led to a long, difficult, interesting discussion that has led, so far, to a kind of understanding between the correspondents.

We do ask you to keep it clean. Some of our readers may be small children or those unused to or unaccustomed to some of the vocabulary commonly used on campus these days. Be kind to one another. And be honest.

Your feedback and suggestions about the blog, as well as pictures to tag, poetry, random thoughts, art, reading recommendations, great teachers lists, and much more--all is invited. We'll flag it if it gets too crazy!

Also, keep in touch via our web page where more of everything is posted.

Peace.