Category: About

Reconstructed Instagram post: Tapestry volunteer training

Faith-Adjacent Spaces Are Where Religion Intersects Everything Else

Kyle 1 Comment

If you’ve been following along in the story of my dissertation research, you’re probably enjoying getting to know Tapestry and their model for “starting with the work” in order to be and to become a community.

But if you’re like me, or even like Tapestry’s co-directors as their organization has developed, then it might be hard for you to further understand the nature of this “church that doesn’t look like a church.” In the new episode of Becoming Tapestry, I explore this problem and propose a way of thinking about it.

I shared in Episode 1 that social theorist Bruno Latour is skeptical of our often unnoticed belief that calling a group by a particular name automatically tells us something about its members. It’s better to stick close to the members themselves and the interactions they have, he says.

That focus on interaction can help us appreciate an insight from another social theorist, Doreen Massey. It’s about space.

Space is more than connected locations, more than the material or even digital places where people hang out. It isn’t empty. It isn’t flat. It isn’t a Euclidean grid to be filled like the Star Trek holodeck.

“Space is a social practice,” says Massey. It’s distinct people relating to each other, often across significant differences, and often according to some unpredictable trajectory of change and becoming. Space is a great “pin cushion” of interconnected “stories-so-far.”

In my story of Tapestry, the extension from understanding the organization and its mentor teams as connected groups-in-formation (Latour) to connected spaces convened by those group members (Massey) lays the groundwork for tackling what feels to me like the biggest challenge facing faith leaders in a time of disconnection.

How do we understand religious belonging when people are religiously disaffiliating? How do we meaningfully and respectfully include people who feel strongly that they don’t want to be labelled? How do we understand the impact of faith on people’s lives without resorting to the often toxic binary of insider/outsider?

Here’s my take:

If we pay attention to spaces rather than groups, we start to emphasize relationship as it is practiced rather than how it is represented by fields in a membership database. We engage according to who is showing up in the moment rather than who we wish had showed up—and by their presence and contributions rather than by their membership status.

Here’s the most important part:

The boundaries of spaces, in this way of thinking about them, are much more amorphous and flexible than in our typical ways of describing affiliation: member, non-member, visitor/lead/prospect/member-in-training.

We hold space together simply by encountering one another. We do it all the time, and with people of all persuasions.

So when our lens shifts from what happens in the church building among the members of that church (or the online/hybrid service for the worshipers) to what happens when religious people engage in the other spaces of their lives, we don’t need new language or analytic tools. New spaces just mean slightly reconfigured orientations to the religion(s) in question.

When faith, theirs or others’, comes to bear on the spaces they’re moving through, we should simply note the connection. The spatial metaphor of adjacency, of two things being close to or next to or connected to each other, captures how such spaces are experienced in these moments.

  • When the Tapestry co-directors unpack how their background as religious leaders shaped the founding of their organization …
  • When Tapestry teams “borrow” church kitchens or church playgrounds for their meetings …
  • When a Tapestry facilitator uses a popular religious education format to develop the story of how religious concepts have informed the “multi-faith and no faith” guiding principles of the community …
  • When Tapestry turns a church yoga night into a mentor recruiting event …
  • When a beloved Tapestry mentor dies and the team gathers at that same church for her funeral …
  • When Tapestry facilitates a partner organization turning a church sanctuary into a traveling exhibit space …

… we recognize something not exactly religious, but certainly not secular or entirely non-religious. I call it faith-adjacent space. Faith is nearby. Not irrelevant. Visible, as it were, but visible among other salient details as well.

At a time when so many of us are reevaluating our relationship to organized religion, to institutions more broadly, and to our daily practices of relationship and presence, it’s very helpful to have ways of describing religious encounter that don’t center ideas of institutional membership and don’t force some kind of “religious identity acid test” onto every interpersonal interaction in our pluralistic society.

I hope you’ll try out this idea of faith-adjacency as one such way of shifting your understanding of the religious/non-religious/multi-religious spaces you move through each day.

It just might free you up to focus on the relationships you form in those spaces—and all the potentialities those relationships hold.

All this to say: Episode 2 of Becoming Tapestry is now available in your podcast feeds.

Dissertation Defense screenshot!

Introducing ‘Becoming Tapestry’

Kyle 2 Comments

I made it!

On April 13, 2022, after more than 1,100 hours of work on the project excluding coursework, a committee comprising education and communication scholars Lalitha Vasudevan, Ioana Literat, Detra Price-Dennis, and Patricia Martínez Álvarez accepted my dissertation as submitted.

I will receive my doctoral hood May 23 in a ceremony at the Louis Armstrong Tennis Stadium in Queens. But for all intents and purposes, I am now a doctoral graduate of the Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, the oldest and largest graduate school of education in the U.S.

My degree is a Doctor of Education (EdD), Communication in Education. My dissertation, Becoming Tapestry: A Multimodal Ethnographic Podcast Exploring Storytelling and Belonging in a Faith-Adjacent Foster Youth Mentoring Network, is being delivered to Proquest Dissertations.

But more importantly, my dissertation is a podcast. And you can listen right now!

Here’s the trailer:

And here’s the elevator pitch:

Organized religion in the U.S. is changing. More people than ever before identify with no particular religious tradition. But this disaffiliative trend isn’t just about religion. Individuals are participating less or opting out entirely from institutions and communities.

Against the backdrop of my interest in media making and religious education in this environment, I found a spiritual community that was growing and thriving on the highly secular U.S. West Coast. Tapestry is a foster youth mentoring network run by religious leaders according to flexible, inclusive values inspired by religious principles. It’s a “church that doesn’t look like a church.” It’s a faith-adjacent space of healing and belonging where the participants themselves get to decide how to be together and what it all means.

I’ve been embedded for more than three years as a kind of unofficial member of this community, a religious education researcher and multimedia storytelling facilitator. My mission was to co-design ways for Tapestry mentor teams to make meaning of their experiences together by producing Digital Stories, very short videos that weave together voiceover, photographs, and a simple soundtrack.

Becoming Tapestry is my audio documentary of the journey, my own digital story of the Digital Stories. Along the way, I develop new ways of thinking about religious education amid social change, new ways of facilitating team-based self-reflective media production, and new ways of composing and disseminating ethnographic research.

Wanna learn more? Episode 1, in which I elaborate on this framing and position myself within my field site, is available now where you get your podcasts.

Can’t wait? The entire show is ready for your binge listen at becomingtapestry.net/podcast. I’m excited to tell you more in the coming weeks!

Kyle at Digital Learning @ TC

Kyle joins Learning Forte

Kyle

Note: This news is a long time coming to this website, but as you can imagine, I have been busy. So thrilled to begin this new chapter!

Learning Forte has announced Kyle Oliver as a new Principal and Chief Product Officer.

Kyle brings a wealth of skills and knowledge to Learning Forte with experience leading media-rich learning activities, facilitating effective online and hybrid courses, and planning and executing communications initiatives at a variety of faith-based organizations.

He has taught or co-taught courses for Virginia Theological Seminary, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Teachers College at Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Vibrant Faith Catalyst. An Episcopal priest, he has also served congregations in the Dioceses of Washington, New York, and California.

He describes his passion as researching and practicing what it means to make meaning by making media. His dissertation work has focused on co-designing communal digital storytelling experiences with young people and their mentors in faith-adjacent settings. He is a doctoral candidate in educational media at Teachers College, Columbia University; former lead developer of the eFormation Learning Community; and former lead producer and co-host of The Way of Love with Bishop Michael Curry. 

“Kyle and I have been collaborators on a dozen or so teaching, research, and ministry projects since we met in 2014,” said Learning Forte founder and Chief Executive Officer Stacy Williams-Duncan.

“In that time, I’ve seen him serve as a thoughtful, responsive, action-oriented conversation partner to countless leaders and initiatives. Kyle’s depth of experience makes any project better, and I’m thrilled that our team, our clients, and our learning partners will get to benefit from his creative presence.”

Kyle served as lead curator of Digital Learning @ Teachers College, an exhibition of innovative teaching and learning projects at the first and largest graduate school of education in the U.S.

Kyle is eager to share his expertise and grow with the Learning Forte community.

“The exciting and life-giving vocation I have fallen into is standing at the boundaries of different disciplines and different communities and trusting that God has called us all to learn from each other in order to serve more faithfully and effectively,” he said.

“Being the oddball priest in the Media and Social Change Lab, the dorky but caring media educator hanging out in day camps and mentoring programs, the nuclear engineer turned Christian formation podcast producer—I love seeing what happens in unexpected mashups, and then guiding projects from ‘intriguing idea’ to ‘genuinely impacting people’s stories.’”

Erin Wiens St. John

#ThankYouPatrons! – Meet Erin

Erin

Today, November 19th, is #ThankYouPatrons Day. I wanted to take the chance to express my gratitude to my Patreon supporters, newsletter subscribers, and everyone who takes the time to check out the faith-filled media I make.

I also wanted to use #ThankYouPatrons day to introduce you to Erin Wiens St. John—in case you don’t know her already. Erin has been working with me over the past few months on scheduling, drafting, editing, social media management, and content creation.

I invited Erin to collaborate so I could be more faithful to my commitment to send regular newsletters, post weekly prayer and study prompts, and generally get more of the stuff I think you’re seeking here out into the world. I hope you’ve been noticing the difference.

So thank you, Patrons, for the gift of your attention and support—and for helping fund a collaboration that has already been a blessing to me and, I hope, to you.

Now I’ll hand it over to Erin to tell you a little bit about herself . . . 

Hi! My name is Erin, and I’m a recent college graduate and nominee for ordination in the Episcopal Church. I wrote my senior thesis on thriving, progressive churches around the country–and how their success can be replicated in other places.

I’ve just launched a website and blog to share my research and bring a Millennial perspective to the conversation on the Church’s future.

Work like Kyle’s is a huge piece of that, bridging the gap between the Church and the digital sphere. It’s been a privilege to help bring these ideas to life.

#ThankYouPatrons for supporting him so that I can do that!

Digital Literacy Toolkit cover image

Digital literacy as religious leadership

Kyle

The basic argument of my professional life is that lay and ordained ministers need digital literacy skills to do their work effectively.

Proclamation, education, pastoral care—nearly every task of religious leadership is a social practice. And nearly every social practice is becoming mediated in some way by technology.

Case in point: Recently I served on the faculty of Beyond Walls, the spiritual writing program at Kenyon College. Part of that experience was participating in an OpEd Project workshop designed to get the priests, ministers, and rabbis in attendance to claim their expertise and share it in public forums.

“The public needs to hear from thoughtful religious leaders,” the facilitators told us. And that requires some skills navigating today’s marketplace of ideas.

I know few religious leaders who navigate it better than fellow Beyond Walls social media instructor Sarah Lefton. I had a blast chatting with Sarah for the YouTube channel she created and for the podcast I help create. (Sneak peak: you can listen to the lightly edited interview audio here. A 10-15 tightly edited story is in the works.)

The lesson I relearned and relearned spending a week with Sarah? You’ve got to know your medium.

I want faith leaders in training to have the chance to learn the various media they will need to navigate when they land in congregations, schools, and other contexts. And I want them to have that experience regardless of the digital literacy level of their seminary professors and other mentors.

So I’m working with colleagues to create a Digital Literacy Toolkit for Theological Educators.

The site is a work in progress. Among other things, it is still incredibly slow.

But I hope you’ll have a look (maybe at our research-based list of literacies?) and consider either contributing or sharing with a theological educator who could themselves contribute—or could benefit from the resources we’re creating and collecting.

I can’t wait to tell you more about how all this is going.

Stained glass image

Starting grad school (and a newsletter)

Kyle 2 Comments

Pentecost feels like a good day to announce what I believe has been a Spirit-led discernment process:

In September, I will start full-time Ed.D. studies (that’s doctorate in education) in the Communications, Media, & Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. I’ll miss being the digital missioner in the CMT@VTS, but I look forward to ongoing collaboration on several e-Formation initiatives.

There are too many people to thank for me to even make a go of it here. But I can’t not mention the person who envisioned and nurtured this vocation the last four years: Lisa Kimball. To say I couldn’t have done it without her would be an unpardonable understatement. Thanks, boss, for literally everything.

If you want to keep up with what I’m doing and continue to get resource suggestions, e-learning commentary, and of course podcast rhapsodizing, please subscribe to this new newsletter. My ‪#‎vtsdigimin‬ students inspired me to put it together.

I take very seriously my responsibility to share what I’m learning with the church, so don’t be shy with suggestions or requests.

Simple DIY standing desk specs

Kyle

Online and off-, a couple people have asked about my simple DIY standing desk setup in our new apartment. I thought maybe the most efficient way to answer the questions would be to share here how I did it.

My main criterion was that I didn’t want to commit to always standing. So whatever was to bring my computer(s) up to “elbows perpendicular” height, it needed to be lightweight and flexible.

I spent a lot of time at IKEA. What I came up with was a shoe rack. I didn’t know that’s what it was until I read the tag, but apparently this thing is very recognizable as a shoe rack. So if that bothers you, well, there’s that.

Anyway, I love it. I put a clipboard next to the computer to give myself a place to write, set my water bottle, etc. I hate clutter, so I rarely use the second shelf, but I can imagine it being useful at some point, for books or whatever. Also, I think this solution is more permeable to the breeze from my fan (on top of plastic drawers next to the desk) than a traditional shelf would be. Bonus.

(Obviously, all this begs a question about whether an object of the supplemental shelf’s/rack’s height, plus the height of the desk, will bring the keyboard to the right height for your body. Bring a tape measure and a schematic of your existing desk with you.

Here again is a link to a helpful diagram from Fast Company. Notice that a USB keyboard on the shoe rack connected to the “mantel” computer [see below] would get the elbow angle and the neck angle about right. I should probably get on that.)

The challenge then was getting all the stuff that was formerly at the back of my desk, stuff I wanted to actually look at or have easy access to, to somewhere where I could still see/grab them while standing with the shoe rack in place. For that I used a single long shelf (and brackets) like a mantel, plus a couple of those square-ish mini-shelves (upper left, lower right). Yes, the latter are a pain to install.

The last touch was a couple work lamps to improve video recording and conference call lighting. With really bright bulbs it gets a little hot, so again, I’m grateful for the fan-permeable setup. You can see two in the photo, and I have a third clamped to the futon behind me to get a little three-point lighting effect. (I realize now that I should have turned that one on for the photo above.)

A great unanticipated side effect of this setup is that the second computer up on the mantel is at a good angle for participating in web calls or shooting videos using QuickTime on the MacBook.  Usually I open up email, a music player, etc. on that machine, so I’m less tempted to putz with them. And again, if you look at the Fast Company illustration, that height is apparently where your monitor should be anyway.

Oh, and I stand on a chair pad. I hear there are fancy mats you can get too.

Here’s a shopping list for everything but the desk itself. Total cost, including the three sets of lamps and bulbs, is $123.77. Without them it’s $66.95.

Shopping List (or on Pinterest)

*For some reason, Google took me to the page for IKEA Kuwait for this one, so you’ll see if you follow the link that this shelf costs 6 Kuwaiti Dinar.

20441939544_5bb97ff39d_z 21054574982_3815538730_z

me on our wedding day. shout.

CSC gets a new look

Kyle

It was about time. OK, it was past time.

The old Blogger-based Contraria Sunt Complementa site has been a good personal and professional home base for me since David Meerman Scott convinced me how much I needed one back in 2007. But it was starting to look more than a little dated, and a fresh start seemed like a more tenable project than an overhaul did.

A number of professional projects have me very interested in getting better at WordPress. (Regarding these new projects: “more soon,” which has become the most-used phrase in my vocabulary after “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”). Thus, I’ve moved over to that platform. I’ve worked with WP before, but I’m realizing just how much I’ve been missing out on, even just within the world of free themes.

So I hope you like the new look, built on Oxygen by DevPress. And I hope you don’t mind switching over to my new feed. As always, thanks for reading—and enjoy!

Bohr Doodle Googlers: Welcome

Kyle

I’ve written in the past that one of the best things I ever did for my blog’s traffic was to name it after a Latin expression that folks occasionally have reason to look up. For the kind of traffic I’m used to, today is a significant day for this phenomenon. That’s because the phrase “contraria sunt complementa” is mentioned in at least one of the write-ups for today’s Google Doodle send-up of Niels Bohr.

So if you’ve found this blog because of the Doodle and your curiosity about this lovely expression, let me just say welcome to you. Although I started this blog when I resided mostly on the latter end of the “letters and science” spectrum (I was a graduate student in nuclear engineering), I’ve now moved closer to the middle with a technology-heavy ministry job in the Episcopal Church. I remain committed to the idea that opposites are indeed complementary, and I might in particular direct you to an online course I developed about the relationship between science and theology, which course discusses some of the modern physics issues that Bohr had such keen insight into.

Anyway, I’m glad you’re here, and I’m glad you’re interested in one of my major role models. Here’s to Niels Bohr on what would have been his 127th birthday! Enjoy.

CSC Ethos Scores Scholarship

Kyle 1 Comment

I recently got some glad tidings about a scholarship I applied for back in the spring. The award is given in memory of Anne McNair Kumpuris, and in their note her parents told me they thought their deighter “would have appreciated [my] view on life.” It’s a view that’s been largely teased out on this blog, so it seemed appropriate to post the principal essay here. Enjoy:

One important ah-ha moment that came in a very different setting from where I am today but continues to shape my life occurred during my junior year of college. As part of a history of science class, I was reading about Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Bohr was influential in developing what came to be known as quantum mechanics, a subject I studied in some depth as an undergrad and then graduate student in engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But the moment itself came as I worked through a piece on Bohr’s philosophy. What I already knew about Bohr was that he’d changed physics through one simple but daring mental leap. Scientists were currently arguing about the nature of light, whether it was a wave or a particle. For decades, they’d been successfully studying it under the assumption that it was a wave. The wave hypothesis had great explanatory power, and there was no real doubt that it was true. However, a series of key experiments then came along and seemed just as unambiguously to show that light is, in fact, a particle. Bohr was the one who forced us to get our heads around the fact that it is both; light behaves as a particle or as a wave depending on the way you observe it, the way your experiment aims to study it. Previously, it hadn’t occurred to anyone that this was even an option. The idea is part of what came to be known as the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics, and Bohr abstracted it into the slogan that would eventually end up on his Coat of Arms: contraria sunt complementa (“opposites are complementary”).


As I read this article on how Bohr applied “a general lesson to be drawn from quantum mechanics” to other fields of study, I noticed a vague but palpable sense of excitement building up inside me. Sitting on a beat-up blue couch in a crummy college apartment, I began reinterpreting whole swathes of my life and studies. I had ideas for research papers, a new understanding of my church and it’s dual Catholic-Protestant identity, and some much-needed affirmation that my trying to keep up with honors humanities coursework during engineering school could be fruitful and worthwhile. There were many new facts before me, but the resounding force was more like an emotional understanding: the fact that reality is inherently multifaceted felt right to me, like few things in my life had ever felt. It’s an idea that I’ve in some sense staked my life to, and it’s one of the forces that brought my spiritual life into balance with my intellectual life and eventually gave me the courage to leave my Ph.D. program in engineering and head to seminary.


I’ve learned a few things about the Bohrs of the theological world since coming to Virginia. I’ve seen contraria sunt complementa at work in the early church rejecting the Diatessaron (the gospel harmony that eliminated the distinct, multifaceted witness of four separate gospels), the Council of Nicea affirming the dual nature of Christ as both fully human and fully divine, and Thomas Aquinas’s ingenious philosophical method of engaging the tension between two apparently contradictory truths. Time after time, God prods us into acknowledging that this world we live in is stubbornly resistant to oversimplified or monolithic thinking. It’s there in the doctrine of the Trinity and in our Anglican via media and in the sub-microscopic phenomena that I think a little bit less about these days than that morning four years ago. As I reflect on that strange day in my life, I realize the Holy Spirit must really have been with me if today I can sit at my desk at Virginia Theological Seminary and write that—at least in some sense—everything I learned in seminary I learned first from Niels Bohr.