We welcome special guest speaker, The Rev’d Canon Dr. Victor Austin, Canon Theologian-in-Residence, Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, to Saint Thomas on Sunday, July 8. He will preach at the 8am & 10 am services and speak at 11:30am in the Parish Hall (lunch will be served).
Love, Caring, Death, and God
Sometimes it happens that a person we love contracts a disease, which requires that we care in new and costly ways. And sometimes our beloved dies early. How can we understand such things particularly in terms of Christian faith?
In Loving Susan: Brain Disease, the Priest’s Wife, and the God Who Gives and Takes Away, Victor Lee Austin explores precisely these things as he came to experience them in his life. He will be preaching at the Sunday Eucharist on July 8, and then after the service will speak about his experience of our God who, although he does both give and take away, is still, he believes, deeply good.
Victor Lee Austin
Victor Austin is a priest scholar with experience in parish ministry as a rector in upstate New York and in the academic world teaching in various colleges and General Theological Seminary in New York. He is a graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., General Theological Seminary and earned a PhD in theology from Fordham University.
He became canon theologian-in-residence in the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas in September 2016. He held a similar post at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue before coming to Dallas. Austin’s theological focus is on Christian ethics. In this area he has written Up with Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings, which was short-listed for the Michael Ramsey Prize in 2013.
His recent writing is at the intersection of theology and everyday life. His memoir Losing Susan: Brain Disease, the Priest’s Wife, and the God Who Gives and Takes Away has received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly: Nonfiction Book Review. It tells of his 34-year marriage to Susan, who had brain cancer in the midst of their marriage that was successfully treated, but who then suffered mental decline for almost 20 years.
Less dramatic, but also exploring theater sections of theology and life as we live it, are two books of short meditations: Priest in New York City: Church, Street, and Theology, published by Saint Thomas Church, and A Priest’s Journal, published by Church Publishing. He has also written Christian Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed.
