As I pondered the often-mentioned findings that many people today identify as unchurched spirituals or searchers, I realized I’d encountered an alternative: highly personal mixes of spirituality, faith, and Church that nourished the individual and contributed to community.

The following Reflections, then, constitute a form of spiritual travel literature. They present cases that enable us to explore the choices or circumstances of four “spiritual” people vis à vis the Christian faith and institutional Church, with wildly differing results. I hope to identify qualities of their inner life, perhaps the wellspring of their spirituality and what sustained it, and what faith and the Church contributed—or not. Most of all, I hope these examples suggest there are out-of-the-box options even with tensions or gaps.

I begin this afternoon with Philadelphia’s celebrated Black contralto Marian Anderson (1897-1993). Stay tuned! 

—Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator