Why Phyllis Tickle Loves Our New Anglican Base Packages

Phyllis Tickle is one of the most interesting and important voices speaking to and for Christians today. A force in the Christian publishing world for nearly a quarter of a century, Phyllis has a lot to say about the trends of Christian belief and practice. Though she just celebrated her 80th birthday, Tickle’s analysis of new movements in Christianity continues to set the tone for current scholarship and reflection.

Tickle’s most recent work focuses on what she calls “Emergence Christianity.” Her two books on the subject—The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why and Emergence Christianity: What It Is, Where It Is Going, and Why It Matters—have quickly become seminal texts for anyone wanting to learn about this important movement.

Recently, I offered Phyllis Tickle, an Episcopalian, one of our Anglican base packages to review and endorse, if she felt so inclined. After using the package for a week or so, and asking me a number of questions to try to get at what we were doing and why, she had this to say:

Those of us who have already been using the Logos Bible packages and libraries for years are always going to be enthusiastic anytime Logos ventures into new territory or adds yet another base package. We are especially enthusiastic, of course, when that new addition plays directly into areas of our own particular interests, as is the case here; for as an Episcopalian, I fell into the Anglican base package like a child suddenly let loose in a carnival of impossible delights and unimagined wonders, not to mention of some totally fascinating and/or previously unsuspected esoterica.

An Anglican base package, like every other Logos package, is a tool, of course, not a carnival. It is designed as a tool and defined as one. Yet one of the major hallmarks of a good tool, one of the chief criteria for evaluating it, in fact, is to ask whether or not it delights, whether or not it sits comfortably in the hand, whether or not it gives both satisfaction to the eye and resolution to the tasks which it was created to address. This one does; and though it may not be properly represented as a carnival of delights (although I still contend it is that, too) the base package should most certainly be represented as a tool that can render the Anglican heart wiser in its affections and send the Anglican mind back to its daily work rejoicing.

The usefulness of the base packages for clergy,  academics, and licensed lay workers is almost too obvious to warrant comment (though it does bear saying that I cannot imagine anyone’s undertaking seminary training nowadays without having a base package duly tucked, quite literally, into his or her tool box.) Since I am neither professional clergy nor a practicing academic, however, and since, pray God, my days of graduate school are all well behind me, I can speak credibly only about the pleasure and the comfort and, perhaps, even the glory  of having, ready to hand at the click of a mouse, the primaries of Anglicanism . . . its great documents, its ecclesial proceedings and decisions, its political debates and theological arguments, etc. . . . as well as authoritative and respected commentaries on everything from our evolving theology over the centuries to our ever-evolving and shifting role in the political and secular life of the world.

A base package may not be for everyone . . . in fact, I doubt that it is . . . but for professionals and also for all of us who yearn toward more intimacy with who and what we are and more familiarity with the ways by which we and our theological forebears arrived at our own place in history, it is a benison of the first order.

See what so impressed Phyllis Tickle—get an Anglican base package today. 

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Written by
Benjamin Amundgaard

Benjamin is a product manager, marketer, communicator, teacher, leader. He is the Senior Director of Bible Study Products at Faithlife.

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Written by Benjamin Amundgaard
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