What Are We Waiting For?: Re-Imaging Advent for Time to Come

Offers a new perspective on Advent, including resources

Everyone knows that Advent is about waiting, but author William H. Petersen asks, what are we waiting for? In this book, he argues for a liturgical renewal in the life and mission of the Church by proposing an expanded, seven-week observance of Advent, taking its cue from the shape and substance of the Revised Common Lectionary, while noting (and critiquing) the Church's complicity in the "Christmas culture." Resources for a more authentic observance of Advent (other than a simple short four-week count-down to Christmas) are proposed and presented. With a renewed emphasis on eschatological formation into the Body of Christ during an expanded season, this counter-cultural approach gets beyond the secular and commercial Christmas preparation madness. Instead, it provides the Church (and the seasonally harried Christians who make up the Church) with the opportunity to enter each new liturgical year not simply as engaging a routine cycle, but with ever deeper understandings, broader horizons, and higher expectations in furthering our life and mission as reflection and agent of the Reign of God/Kingdom of Christ.


About the Author

William H. Petersen, PhD, DD, is Emeritus Dean & Professor of Bexley Hall Seminary and has been a priest in the Episcopal Church since 1966. He has served congregations, college chaplaincies, and seminaries in Iowa, California, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New York. In seminary and parish contexts, Dean Petersen has taught ecclesiastical and ecumenical history, liturgics, and, through the medium of Dante's Divine Comedy, Christian spirituality. He has also represented Anglicanism on national and international ecumenical dialogues and agencies. His continuing memberships include Societas Liturgica, the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation, the North American Academy of Liturgy (founder of the Advent Project Seminar), the North American Academy of Ecumenists (past President), and the Consultation on Common Texts. He is a graduate of Grinnell College (AB, 1963), the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (MDiv, 1966), and the Graduate Theological Union (PhD, 1976). Bill and his wife reside in Fairport, New York.