Some readers here may be interested to know about a theological project I’ve been involved with over the last several months—a project that touches on many themes that are near and dear to this blog.

Beginning last summer, a group of clergy and lay people, most of whom belong to The Episcopal Church (TEC), began working on a series of essays to try to articulate some of the key aspects of a Christian theology of marriage. We’re calling our project Fully Alive. As the brief description on our website says,

There is an important conversation going on about marriage today. It is happening in society. It is also happening in the Church. People are asking questions about what marriage is and what it is for. Fully Alive is a project by a group of Christians who are seeking to answer these questions deeply and prayerfully, while also considering some even bigger questions that lurk in the background of our conversation on marriage. What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be a woman or a man? Is it possible for people who come to radically different conclusions about these things to live together with integrity in one society? What about in one church?

In the weeks and months ahead, Fully Alive will be publishing essays and creating resources. This website will have all the latest information. Fully Alive is sponsored by the Communion Partner Bishops.

The background to our work is as follows. At the 2012 TEC General Convention, a Task Force on the study of marriage was created to report back to the next convention—which is happening this year, in June, in Salt Lake City—on the history and theology of marriage. The Task Force’s report was released in February. At General Convention next month, the Task Force will propose Resolution A050 which would change the church’s canons to allow for same-sex couples to marry alongside opposite-sex couples.

Today, we at Fully Alive are responding to the Task Force’s report with an article of our own in the Anglican Theological Review. I played a part in crafting this article, and I wanted to alert readers here to it. Our essay tries to lay out a different picture of what marriage is and what it is for than the picture the TEC Task Force has offered.

If you’re so inclined, please do help us spread the word. We’d like to see our essay widely read and discussed and—please God—used next month to shed some light on the debates at General Convention. More than that, we’d like to see what we’ve written benefit the church catholic, as we all together seek God’s will for the meaning and practice of Christian marriage.