Passing the Torch
--2024 Holy Synod--
It's time to gather with ECC communities across the nation, and our friends across the globe for 2024's Synod!
This year's Synod will be held at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, Colorado, but you can learn from esteemed speakers Rev. Ricky Manalo, CSP, PhD and Christopher Pramuk, PhD alongside the in-person attendees from the comfort of your own home! Contact us to get the viewing info.
Rev. Ricky Manalo, CSP, PhD
Rev. Ricky Manalo, CSP, PhD is a Paulist priest, a composer, theologian, and author. He will help us explore what it means to gather for liturgy in a world that now includes technological connections in his session, Onsite and Online: Catholic Worship and Technology in a 2.5 World. During the Covid epidemic’s highpoints, lockdowns drove the Christian Churches to quickly embrace a range of new technologies as they gathered for Sabbath worship. Although most of us initially faced hiccups and stutters, the presence of technology lingers in many of our ECC Communities. Many of us continue to use Livestream through Facebook, YouTube, or Vimeo; Zoom for hybrid worship; or post recordings of Sunday liturgy on our websites for later viewing. What does this mean for our present and future? How do we understand “full, conscious and active,” principles many of us have carried over into our ECC liturgical sensibilities? Is e-church church? We will hear from Fr. Ricky and engage questions together as we look at technology and new media, and it’s implications for our future as praying communities.
Christopher Pramuk, PhD
Christopher Pramuk, PhD is the author of seven books, including Hope Sings, So Beautiful: Graced Encounters Across the Color Line (2013), a sustained meditation on race relations in society and church, and two award-winning studies of Thomas Merton: At Play in Creation: Merton’s Awakening to the Feminine Divine (2015), and Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton (2009), recipient of the International Thomas Merton Society’s “Thomas Merton Award,” its highest honor. His book, The Artist Alive: Explorations in Music, Art, and Theology (2019) is the fruit of many years of using music, poetry, and the arts in the theology classroom. Chris’s most recent book, All My Eyes See: The Artistic Vocation of Fr. William Hart McNichols (2024), is a collaboration with artist and iconographer Fr. Bill McNichols.
You're invited to Mass!
Join us Sunday at 11am Central for an All-ECC Mass, featuring musicians from across the communion and guest homilist Deacon Besem Oben Etchi. Info on joining the livestream, as well as a PDF of the worship aid are available here.
Deacon Besem Oben Etchi, PhD
Deacon Besem Oben Etchi, PhD will be the homilist at the all-Communion Sunday Mass. Deacon Bes of Charis Community MN was ordained to the ECC diaconate on October 1, 2023. She is Cameroonian and resides in Kribi, Cameroon, where she and others are raising up Our Lady Advocate of Africa EC Community. She has a passion for reviving indigenous knowledge to retrieve the many options of revelation the Divine has gifted the human race and using this knowledge to engineer better educational systems for children. She runs a preschool and elementary school in Kribi when she is not teaching theology or preaching. She is a mother or two beautiful girls and keeps watch over her parents. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, a Master in Divinity and a PhD in Systematic Theology from Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA.
We look forward to sharing this impactful experience with you!
Want to join the virtual sessions?