Tag Archives: publications

2019

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29 January.  We celebrated John Harbison‘s 80th birthday in our Parish Hall with some of his jazz songs, a piece composed by Michael Gandolfi with libretto of Lloyd Schwartz‘ selections from John’s recently published book What Do We Make of Bach, and a tower of cupcakes wheeled in by Pat Krol, Executive Director of Emmanuel Music.

John Harbison at the piano provided by M. Steinert & Sons with Don Berman, Lynn Torgove, Pat Krol, and singers of Emmanuel Music.

  • Thanks to a generous grant from the City of Boston’s Community Preservation, Commission restoration work on our Newbury St. façade began under the direction of Vestry member Peter K. Johnson.  The multi-year project involved repair and refinishing of five sets of doors with their tympana, masonry work for our central entrance and several staircases, and roof work to prevent ice dams.

    The Rev. Tamra Tucker with our rector, deacon, and parishioners who attended her ordination at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul.

  • Tamra Tucker was ordained to the priesthood at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. She had been parish administrator when Penny Lane (on her right) was senior warden (2013-15). Also pictured are (left to right):  Pat Krol, Paul Guttry, Peter and Margaret Johnson, Joy Howard, Pam Werntzm Bob Greiner, Jenn Poole & Liz Levin.
  • Pendragon Press published Bringing Bach’s Music to Life, a compilation of Craig Smith‘s program notes for 24 cantatas, edited by Pamela Dellal, in its series of Monographs in Musicology.

    cover of book on Bach

    Craig Smith directing the orchestra with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson on viola; Don Wilkinson, Paul Guttry et al. in the chorus.

2008

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  • The Rev. Constance A. Hammond, our first woman warden, published Shalom/ Salaam/ Peace:  A Liberation Theology of Hope (Oakville CT:  Equinox) and gave our archives an autographed copy.
  • March 2. The Rev. Pamela L. Wentz arrived as priest in charge and preached her first sermon: “The Works:  God’s work is ours to do.”
  • March 28.  Matt Griffing created our Facebook page with our rainbow banner as its profile image. Since then Joy Howard, Elizabeth Richardson, and others joined him in creating posts about events and issues of concern to our parish and posting more than a thousand images of our services and activities.
  • August 16. Parish Historian Mary Chitty created an online catalog of almost 600 works in our archives and from our defunct parish library, some of which are still floating about. Her tags can be selected to find, for example, books by and about our rectors or digitized by Google Books.  See Our Virtual Library for more about how to search it.
  • Fall.  Hartney-Greymont of Needham prepared the beds and planted shrubs and perennials in our garden, which was designed by Susan Doolittle.  The stone paths were given in memory of vestry member Frank Rose.

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2004

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Ball team with The Rev. Sara Irwin (front left), The Rev. Bill Blaine Wallace (back row, orange shirt) & Emmanuelites*

June 4. Boston Globe reported that The Rev. Dr. Willliam Blaine-Wallace had performed same-sex marriages despite The Rt. Rev. Thomas Shaw‘s proscription of such in the wake of a Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling in May, which had made them legal.

June 20. Boston Globe quoted Bill Blaine-Wallace, who supported the Rev. I. Carter Heyward in her retirement from out diocese saying,  “I want the wider community to know that a straight priest and mainstream parish are participating in constructive disobedience.”

July. Our vestry endorsed our rector’s disobedience with a statement, “Support for Same-Sex Marriage”.

Summer. Emmanuel fielded a team* for an interfaith wiffle-ball match on the Boston Common with First Church (Unitarian Universalist). Behind them are Polish freedom fighters in a sculpture called The Partisans, which has since been moved to the intersection of Congress & D Streets.

Rabbi Howard A. Berman

Bill Blaine-Wallace invited the nascent congregation Boston Jewish Spirit to hold its services as guests at Emmanuel.  Rabbi Howard A. Berman became Rabbi in Residence.  The first meetings of what would later become Central Reform Temple were held in our library.

*If you know any missing members of this line-up, please advise us:  archivist@EmmanuelBoston.org.

  • Back row from the left:  Margo Risk (seated), ??, Donald Langbein, Jimmy Tirrell (straw hat), ??, Bill Blaine-Wallace, Marianne Iauco & Mary Blocher
  • Front row:  Sara Irwin, Kelly Reed, Hugh Doherty?, Victoria Blaine-Wallace & David York.

1998

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  • August 1. Nancy Granert began as organist.
  • Building Chair David Carlson wrote a grant proposal to the Mass. Historical Commission, which awarded us a $100K matching grant for restoration of the Lindsey Chapel.
  • Scenes of The Proposition with Kenneth Branagh as priest were filmed at Emmanuel.
  • Mary Eliot (Pat) Jackson served as junior warden with John Hsia as senior warden.  She edited Emmanuel News from 2000-01.

Mary Eliot (Pat) Jackson with her poodle Zephira in 2025

1988

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  • June.  Organist Michael Beattie joined Emmanuel Music for rehearsals in our Music Room of Peter Sellars‘ version of Mozart’s opera Le Nozze di Figaro, which played that summer in the PepsiCo Theater in Purchase NY.  Craig Smith conducted; Frank Kelley sang the part of Basilio; Jayne West, the Countess; and Susan Larson, Cherubino.
  • In her “Peace Pentecost” sermon at our Cathedral Church of St. Paul, poet Denise Levertov (1923-97) emphasized the connection between contemplation and action:  “If we neglect our inner lives, we destroy the sources of fruitful outer action.

    Thanks to U. of California Press for this image.

    But if we do not act, our inner lives become mere monuments to egotism.” At Emmanuel she founded a Peace Group to foster the links between spiritual thought and action among her fellow parishioners.

Earlier in the decade she had been attracted to Emmanuel by our social-justice activities, beautiful music and liturgy, and rector Al Kershaw, who counseled her.  “He assured her that doubt was part of spiritual growth and the darkness she encountered might increase her sense of dependence and lead her to God,” says her biographer Dana Greene citing Denise’s diary entry for June 13, 1988.

Denise’s father, Paul Philip Levertoff (1878–1954), born in Belarus, an early proponent of Messianic Judaism, took holy orders in the Anglican Church and preached wearing an alb with a tallit and kippa.

The Rev. Paul Philip Levertoff

In 1922 he had become director of what is now the London Diocesan Council for Work among the Jews and edited its quarterly journal, The Church and the Jews. He was a prolific writer on theological subjects in Hebrew, German, and English and translated into English the Midrash Sifre on Numbers (1926) and the Zohar  (1933).

See also:

  1. Dana Greene.  Denise Levertov:  A Poet’s Life.  Urbana IL:  U. of Illinois Press, 2012.
  2. Denise Levertov.  Making Peace.  Breathing the Water.  NY:  New Directions, 1987.
  3. Donna Hollenberg.  A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2013.
  4. Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey, eds.  The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov.  NY: New Directions, 2013.
  5. Paul Philip Levertoff. Love and the Messianic Age.
  6. Timeline: 1994

 

1963

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The Rev. Alvin L. Kershaw became our ninth rector. He had previously served as  rector of Christ Church Episcopal Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky (1944 – 1947); Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Oxford, Ohio (1947 – 1956); and All Saints Episcopal Church in Peterborough, New Hampshire (1956 – 1963).

See his biography & papers.

See also our Timeline entries:  1956, 1966, 1969.

1960

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Our centennial was celebrated with a candlelit service and a dinner at the Plaza Hotel, Copley Square.

Emmanuel Church, 1860-1960: The First Hundred Years, compiled by Harriet Allen Robeson, was published by the Vestry.  She credited these people for their help with her historical endeavor:  The Rev. Harold Sedgwick, the Rev. Rollin J. Fairbanks, the Rev. David Siegenthaler, Eleanor S. Hunneman, Mrs. Wells Mitchell, Gladys McCafferty of the Diocesan Library, and daughters of former rectors Ellen Parks and Constance Worcester.

See its introduction and appendix. For its chapters about the tenures of particular rectors, please see these years:

  1. 1861  F.D. Huntington
  2. 1869  A.H. Vinton
  3. 1878  L. Parks
  4. 1904  E. Worcester
  5. 1929  B.M. Washburn
  6. 1932  P.E. Osgood
  7. 1943  R.G. Metters
  8. 1957  H.B. Sedgwick

1959

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The Business & Professional Women’s Guild (formerly Club) had 98 members.  Its officers were Miss Lydia LeBaron Walker, President; Miss Caroline G. Whitney, Vice-President and Recording Secretary; Miss Margaret A. Cooke, Corresponding Secretary; Maude D. Gowen; Treasurer.  Our archives has its membership directory for that church year. The Guild was active for another decade.

Oct. 18-20. A series of five Healing Services were held with the Rev. Canon Alfred W. Price presiding, assisted by Rector Harold Sedgwick, the Rev. Dr.  Rollin J. Fairbanks,  and other clergy.  Their hands were laid upon more than 3600 heads.  After a nationwide outbreak of polio in 1955, the Salk vaccine had been widely administered.  People in the Commonwealth became alarmed by a recurrence of paralytic poliomyelitis, which peaked here in September. Since about half of the patients had been properly vaccinated, the vaccine’s effectiveness was called into question.  When the Sabin attenuated vaccine was distributed in oral form in 1961, the nation heaved a sigh of relief.

Dr. Fairbanks (1908-1983) was the Robert Treat Paine Professor of Pastoral Theology at Episcopal Divinity School.  Canon Price (1899–1992), who had been awarded a Purple Heart for his service in WWII, was for many years an international warden of the Episcopal Church’s Order of St. Luke the Physician. His works include:  Healing:  The Gift of God (1955), Religion & Health (1962), and a God’s Health:  Handbook for the Practice of the Church’s Ministry of Healing (1976).

Left to right: Rector Sedgwick, Dr. Fairbanks, the Rev. Don Hargrove Gross, the Rev. Canon Alfred W. Price & ?

1938

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    • The Rev. Samuel McComb, Associate Rector (1906-1916) died at the age of 74 in England.  Educated at colleges in N. Ireland and Oxford University, he became a Presbyterian minister in England, Ireland, and New York City. Ordained to the diaconate in our diocese by Bishop William Lawrence and to the priesthood in RI, he then worked with Rector Elwood Worcester to create the Emmanuel Movement. After serving as canon of the Episcopal cathedral in Baltimore, he taught at the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge MA. He finished his pastoral ministry as rector of the American Episcopal Church in Nice, France.  After having written (with Worcester) Religion & Medicine (1908), he published The Making of the English Bible (1909) and many other works. The New York Times published his obituary on Sept. 12.
    • Thanks to Nathaniel White Williams, Jr., we have these images of our choirs of men and boys, which were directed (c1930-1946) by Dr. Stone Thompson (2d from right in the banner image at the top of this page).


Nathaniel W. Williams, Jr. 1946 graduation photo, English High School, Boston

Nathaniel, (second from left in image above) born in 1929,  lived with his parents Rose and NWW, Sr. at 113 Poplar St., Roslindale (Boston) until 1952, according to research by Julian Bullitt, who digitized the above images and many of our archival images.