Way of Love promo screenshot

Introducing ‘The Way of Love with Bishop Michael Curry’

Way of Love album art

At this point I’m almost not sure what to say to you about the great privilege of developing, co-producing, and editing The Way of Love with Bishop Michael Curry. It’s a very strange experience for something to be at least semi-secret for such a long time and then suddenly come on the scene with hundreds of Facebook shares and thousands of downloads.

I can certainly say that I’ve never worked on a media project this big before. And that that is both thrilling and terrifying.

More than a year ago, the Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers reached out to me about the possibility of a podcast featuring Bishop Curry. It’s a really natural fit—he’s just as compelling a conversationalist as a preacher, in my opinion. This would be a teaching podcast, a Christian formation podcast.

And then the Way of Love happened (the vision, not the show, obviously). And then the Royal Wedding Sermon happened. And then General Convention happened. I think that was the order.

So 2018 was a pretty busy and exciting year for The Episcopal Church. And all of this added both urgency and a clarity about how to approach the show.

Of course, 2018 was also a busy and exciting year for the Saylor-Olivers. I am monumentally grateful that things aligned such that I was hired to produce the show just as we were arriving in San Francisco. I can’t imagine how different the emotional dynamic of the move would have been if I hadn’t had this big, satisfying project to sink my teeth into. (Plus there’s the fact that SF is just stupid expensive.)

This video trailer and this audio one both do a pretty good job of capturing what the show is actually about. Our goal is to make more concrete and more accessible the various practices that make up the Way of Love:

  • Turn
  • Learn
  • Pray
  • Worship
  • Bless
  • Go
  • Rest

The Season 1 pilot, What is the Way of Love? went live on Sunday (Pentecost, of course). It will be followed on subsequent Tuesdays by one episode per week, focused on each of the seven Way of Love practices in turn. Season 2 is already in development.

For those of you who support my media making on Patreon, I want to be 100% transparent that I am being paid by The Episcopal Church on contract to produce this show. If you appreciate what The Way of Love has to offer, I hope you’ll make a gift to the 2019 Annual Appeal—I have.

That said, the track record of projects I have created through the support of many readers, subscribers, and especially patrons was part of why I got the call to make this show, and the flexibility I have during this season of dissertating and doing mostly contract work was also essential.

So however you support my work (which you do if you’re reading this)—thank you. I couldn’t have said yes to this adventure without you.

I hope to hear from some of you with feedback about the show. And I hope you’ll rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and/or share with a friend.

Onward!

Lauren & Veronica recording

Introducing Faith-Adjacent

(Inbox-friendly link to episode.)

This is the pilot episode of Faith-Adjacent, a podcast about my ongoing dissertation research at Teachers College, Columbia University. I prepared it both to launch the eventual series itself and to share at the Ethnography and Education Forum February 22-23 at the University of Pennsylvania. For more context, read the brief narrative at the end of these show notes.

You can see slides from a more traditional academic presentation of this research at prayr.cc/space-heard. The photo Lauren talks about is in slide 5.

Learn more about digital storytelling at storycenter.org. Learn more about me and subscribe to my Learning, Faith, & Media Newsletter at kyleoliver.net.

References and further reading:

Ackermann E. K. (2007) Experiences of artifacts: People’s appropriations / objects’ “affordances”. In: Glasersfeld E. (Ed.) Key works in radical constructivism* (pp. 249–259). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

Hess, M. E. (2012). Mirror neurons, the development of empathy, and digital story telling. Religious Education, 107, 401–414.

Lambert, J. (2012). Digital storytelling: Capturing lives, creating community*. New York, NY: Routledge.

* Full disclosure: Affiliate link.


As many of you know, I’m in the process of framing and proposing my dissertation.

I study with educational ethnographer Lalitha Vasudevan and am living into an ethnography practice based on a framework she and her colleagues call “research pedagogies.” Basically the idea is to take a participatory and multimodal stance to “embedded” research.

I hang out. I ask a lot of questions. I teach and facilitate media production. I care (always “about” and sometimes “for”) the people I meet.

Last summer I conducted a pilot study in a faith-adjacent setting, a sort of test drive for the approach I’m hoping to take. I wrote a really long paper about it and presented data and analysis at the Religious Education Association annual conference.

But even good academic papers can be excruciating, and they often require jumping through theoretical hoops that kind of systematically deter practitioners from reading them.

Moreover, my research is all about making meaning in the midst of making media. I spent the better part of a week transcribing hours of audio recordings from the pilot, plus I have the media my participants created themselves.

This seemed like a good opportunity to try something different.

So a couple weeks back, I presented at the Ethnography in Education Forum in Philadelphia a short pilot episode of a podcast I’m calling Faith-Adjacent. It’s a show about media, meaning, and what we used to call religious education (and currently call faith formation, and will probably be calling something else as church and society continue their inevitable march of change).

I’ve got at least some sense of where I’m heading with this, but I don’t want it to just be “the podcast version of my pilot study write-up” (and soon of the dissertation itself). So I welcome your feedback on this short piece of media, which is already pretty high on the list of things I’m proud to have made.

Please let me know what you think!