In this volume of The New Church s Teaching Series, Harold T. Lewis surveys the teachings and witness of Anglicanism and the Episcopal Church concerning the Christian vision of a righteous social order, including the challenges of the new millennium. Beginning with the Bible s understandings of social justice, Lewis summarizes the Anglican witness of theologians like F. D. Maurice and William Temple and goes on to discuss the Episcopal Church in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later chapters discuss the challenges of a new social order that face the church today raised by liberation theology, third-world debt and economic justice, and questions of race, gender, and human sexuality. As with each book in The New Church s Teaching Series, recommended resources for further reading and questions for discussion are included.

The Episcopal Church was the first in the American colonies to baptize blacks, to ordain a black minister, and to establish an African American congregation. Yet membership by blacks in the Episcopal Church has always been viewed as an anomaly. In a nation in which 80 percent of the black Christian population belong to black denominations, it has seemed incongruous to many that the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slaveholders could together find a spiritual home in the Episcopal Church. Moreover, the mode of religious expression of Anglicanism has been seen as incompatible with the black religious ethos. Attempts to explain this phenomenon frequently dismiss black Episcopalians as social climbers, and their authenticity as African Americans, and even as Christians, is called into question. Yet With a Steady Best, however, argues that blacks have remained in the Episcopal Church because they have recognized it as catholic and therefore inclusive institution. For two hundred years blacks have challenged the church to be true to its catholic claims and have used this principle as a basis for their demands for recognition. This book chronicles the steady beat of that challenge. Harold T. Lewis, former staff officer for Black Ministries at the Episcopal Church Center in New York, is a parish priest in the Diocese of Long Island, Professor of Homiletics at the George Mercer School of Theology, and Adjunct Professor of Preaching at New York Theological Seminary.