BIOGRAPHY

Phyllis Tickle is a best selling author and the founding editor of the religion department and former editor at Publishers Weekly.  She is a lector and lay Eucharistic minister  in the Episcopal church;  the mother of seven children (one of whom is deceased) and, with her retired physician-husband, Sam Tickle, makes her home on a small farm in rural Lucy, West Tennessee twenty miles north of Memphis.  She is the author of more than two dozen books and senior fellow of the Cathedral College of Washington National Cathedral.  Tickle worked for nearly two decades at St. Luke's Press, which was begun in the mid-1970s at the Memphis College of Art, where she was academic dean.  When this small publishing house faced extinction Tickle bought it, using money from her deceased father's estate. She took St. Luke's and other small imprints to a level of excellence that attracted the attention of Peachtree Publishers, which bought it in 1987, and which, two years later, was in turn bought out by the Wimmer Companies.

EDUCATION
Doctor of Humane Letters, Berkeley School of Divinity
at Yale University, New Haven, CT - 2004
M.A., Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina - 1961
B.A., East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee - 1955
Shorter College, Rome, Georgia - 1951 to 1954
 

Yale Divinity School Award

Books


(for descriptions, click on the book cover - not all are linked)

The Great Emergence	The Words of Jesus	This Is What I Pray Today - The Divine Hours™ Prayers for Children
The Night Offices - Prayers for the Hours from Sunset to Sunrise	Prayer Is A Place - America's Religous Landscape Observed	The Graces We Remember: Sacred Days of Ordinary Time
Greed	Wisdom in the Waiting: Spring’s Sacred Days	Eastertide - Prayers for Lent and Easter from The Divine Hours
Stitch and a Prayer: A Memoir of Faith Amidst War	What the Land Already Knows	Christmastide - Prayers for Advent Through Epiphany from The Divine Hours
The Shaping of A Life - A Spiritual Landscape	The Divine Hours: Prayers for Spring	The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime
The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime	God-Talk In America	A Reader's Companion to Crossing the Threshold of Hope
HomeWorks	Re-Discovering the Sacred: Spirituality in America	Confessing Conscience: Churched Women on Abortion
365 Meditations for Women	Wisdom in the Waiting

QUOTES

"Many people have observed a five hundred year cycle in western history - a period of upheaval followed by a period of settling down, then codification, and then upheaval again because we do not like to be codified. So, about every five hundred years the church feels compelled to have a giant rummage sale, and we're in one of those periods now."
"We are seeing the start of a post-Protestant and post-denominational era. Just as Protestantism took the hegemony from Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholicism from the East at the Great Schism, so the emerging church is now taking hegemony from Protestantism."
"The problem has been that since the Reformation belief for most of the people has gone north to the head. The emergents, supposedly, are saying it needs to go south to the heart. I don't think it needs to go south at all. I think it needs to meet somewhere in the strength of the life - mind, heart, spirit and strength. Belief needs to be incarnated.  The response for the emergents has been to incarnate their beliefs right in their own neighborhoods - and that's wonderful. They want to live where they worship, that's great. The problem is that the emerging church does not have enough organization within itself to get beyond the sound of its own voice. Each little cohort is very limited in its impact.  Right now we're beginning to see it organizing. It is institutionalizing. We're building the next model which in five hundred years will be thrown away. But nonetheless, the emerging church has got to find some way to reach out in a coherent and effective way beyond itself."
 - interview; The Future of the Emerging Church

"we are post-Enlightenment, living in a kind of neomedievalism.... The last time we believed in the mysterium--things we cannot see and what we cannot hear--was in the medieval times."

"Most Christians are really afraid of pietism, and the last thing I needed was the sense I was being pious. Religiosity gives me a stomachache.  "We all have flaws and faults, and all the discipline in the world isn't going to get rid of them. That's why we have spiritual disciplines. These things teach us." 
"You know I believe in the virgin birth because it's so incredibly beautiful. How could it be otherwise? As for the mechanism about how it happened, who cares? It's the beauty that persuades me."

- Reference Publications

Tickle says McLaren might be instrumental in bringing about a “new reformation” through the emerging church. The comments were made at the joint annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR), in which Tickle and McLaren were speakers.

‘The Great Emergence’ refers to a monumental phenomenon in our world, and this book asks three questions about it. Or looked at the other way around, this book is about a monumental phenomenon considered from the perspective of three very basic questions: What is this thing? How did it come to be? Where is it going?” The Great Emergence

There is a tribe, I believe…a people dispersed around the globe, driven from the center of their beginning, but held to one another and to the dream of the center in their hearts by mutual miracle and affection and longing. They were, in the beginning, a pair in a garden that became a family that moved among humanity and that, in time, became a tribe. A tribe chosen of God and then, by a singular intervention, expanded to a membership of millions. Like any tribe, this one has its common heritage and shared stories and its symbolic rituals of bonding and mutual recognition. And as with any tribe, its members are citizens of nowhere and everywhere, because theirs is not a citizenship of geography, but one of communal blood, of allegiance to an ancestral promise, and of a familial spirit housed within them and functioning there.  The kingdom of God, I think, is that tribe…a tribe of migrants moving through from the beginning to the end that will never be because, outside of the restraints of time, endings can not be since there are no beginnings. The scenery of the Kingdom–the landscapes of the migratory moves–may change, but that is all that changes. The tribe is. It is beyond the concept of either “now” or “later,” for like endings and beginnings, now and later are artifices of time, not reality. Thus it is, Father, that we pray that Your kingdom come and Your will be done in this landscape as it is in the center. Amen.
Design, Ministry & Theology Pomomusings

I think also that there's in Middle America a sort of moving toward the covert in mainstream Christianity. Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral, talks about how genuine or authentic Christianity may be having to hunker down under the landscape and hide until things start to cool off and then burst out like Solidarity did in Poland. I find many, many devout and previously vocal leaders in their fifties, who are just not inclined to go forth and talk about their faith, though they witness quietly. They don't want to become fodder for a candidate's spiel.  WITTENBURG DOOR

“Emergent Christianity asks, ‘Can you show us the passion of the earliest Christians? Can you show us what was worth being burned at the stake for?’” she said. “It’s going back to the liturgy of the first and second centuries, and it’s yearning to go back to some of the grandeur that Catholicism has kept for us so beautifully.”
Some 35 percent of all Christians today are “emergent,” Ms. Tickle estimated. It’s a group that includes people who attend house or community churches, those who embrace neo-monasticism and those who yearn for a return “to those things which informed the beauty and strength of the Catholic Church.”  UMPortal

WEBSITES

Tickle's Blog

Phyllis Tickle
Editor, author and lecturer
Near Memphis, TN

From The Great Emergence:

"The Cable of Meaning"

Phyllis uses the metaphor of multi-layered cable to help us understand the ways in which religion is kept stable for many years, then changed because of cultural influences. Three strands in the centre, spirituality, corporeality and morality, are wrapped together by a mesh sleeve of common imagination, protected on the outside by the story of community. Every five hundred years, Tickle says, the outer layers are “pocked” enough for us to take out the interior braid to examine, change and repair.

(p.33)

The Great Reformation

Phyllis describes the Great Reformation as a process of rethinking sources of religious authority, provoked in part by the disintegration of European unity and the simultaneous appointment of three popes. The resulting chaos led to a new consensus in the Protestant movement, providing us with the concept of Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone). The requirement that all people be able to read the Scriptures for themselves (priesthood of all believers), led to a massive effort to build universal literacy. Phyllis points out that alongside the Protestant movement was the Counter Reformation, a renewal and re-ordering of the Roman Catholic community. It is helpful to have this analysis of the issues brought about by the Reformation, however the one chapter is not adequate to do justice to the philosophical currents of modernity that shaped this time.

Questions of Reformation

Phyllis suggests that advances in biology (evolutionary theory) and physics (forces rather than matter), pocked the Cable of Meaning in the late 19th century. She explores the roles of significant leaders in the development of what we now regard as the scientific community: Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. The development of psychology as a discipline, she says, led to a concepts of shared humanity that challenged the North American Christian doctrines of particularity and exclusivity. The emerging questions of this era are “What is human consciousness and / or the humanness of the human? and “What is the relation of all religions to one another?”
 

The Century of Emergence

Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, are described by Phyllis as the foundations for a the discipline of literary deconstruction that led to a pocking of the “Sola Scriptura” layer of the Meaning Cable. Albert Schweitzer’s book, The Search for the Historical Jesus, along with the Pentecostal movement, brought the concept of uncertainty into the religious realm, allowing for a growing sense of subjectivity. Social change was made more possible by increased mobility rupturing inter-generational conformity. Local churches, however, attempted to develop an environment of social control by linking codes of conduct with the construction of basketball courts, swimming pools and fellowship halls, attempting to become the centre of their members lives.

Phyllis slows down here to explore the move away from religion towards spirituality. She names significant factors in the United States: the generic sense of God in the Alcoholics Anonymous movement, the opening up to immigrants from Asia, and experimentation with drug-induced states of consciousness. The Protestant insistence of Sola Scriptura was not adequate for the rethinking needed on divorce, homosexuality, abortion and the role of women in the home and workplace.
 

The Gathering Center

Phyllis observes that the Christian community in the United States is experiencing a convergence, in which previously separate and distinct expressions of church, liturgical, social justice, renewal and conservative, are found together in many combinations. The departure of younger generations from the mainstream churches has led to a variety of expressions of church that refuse to buy into the inherited focus on “Sola Scriptura” or heirarchical authority. In the meantime, we can find the equivalent to the Catholic Counter Reformation in the “re-traditioning” Christians who are refurbishing their church environments. Close to them are the “Progressives” who often stay in the traditional framework but seek to let go dogma-based ideas and doctrinally-restricted governance and praxis, re-modelling their environment. Phyllis talks about “Hyphenateds”, the Presby-mergents etc who hold together their inherited tradition with emerging expressions of church. At the centre, she says, are the people who are pulling together elements of each of the four quadrants of church without needing to belong to the inherited institutions of the past.
 

Where is Our Authority

Phyllis concludes with a section on where we find our authority in a Post Protestant era. We’re needing to recognize that our bases of authority are expressed in our understanding of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Alongside these, however is the concept of orthonomy, the use of aethetic or harmonic purity as a tool for discerning the truth, and theonomy, in which God is seen as the source of authority. The Emergent concept of “conversation” is provided as an example of networked authority founded in “center set” Christianity.

“We begin to refer to Luther’s principle of ‘Sola Scriptura, Sola Scriptura’ as having been little more than the creation of a paper pope in place of a flesh and blood one. And even as we speak, the authority that has been in place for five hundred years withers away in our hands. ‘Where now is the authority?’ circles overhead like a dark angel goading us towards disestablishment. Where indeed?”

"Enter the battle of The Book. Enter the warriors, both human and inanimate, who will hack the already wounded body of Sola Scriptura into buriable pieces,”

“Literalism based on inerrancy could not survive the blow (though is would die a slow and painful death); and without inerrancy-based literalism, the divine authority of the Scripture was decentralized, subject to caprices of human interpretation, turned into some kind of pick-and-choose bazaar for skillful hagglers. Where now is our authority?“

“When it is all resolved-and it most surely will be-the Reformation’s understanding of Scripture as it had been taught by Protestantism for almost five centuries will be dead. That is not to say that Scripture as the base of authority will be dead. Rather it is to say that what the Protestant tradition has taught about the nature of that authority will be either dead or in mortal need of reconfiguration.”

“If in pursuing this line of exegesis, the Great Emergence really does what most of its observers think it will, it will rewrite Christian theology-and thereby North American culture-into something far more Jewish, more paradoxical, more narrative, and more mystical that anything the Church has had for the last seventeen or eighteen hundred years.”