The Cathedral of St. Philip

The Cathedral of St. Philip The Cathedral Parish of St. Philip serves the gospel of Jesus Christ with grace, excellence, and hospitality.
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06/09/2026

“How wonderful it is to be a community that blesses other people! It is the most important thing I do as a priest; and it is the most important thing we do as church: Bless people! Not curse people, but bless people!

Blessings to you from an ever-expanding God! Blessing is life-giving. It is hopeful and healthy. It is fun to fulfill Isaiah’s vision, to be ‘joyful (!) in my house of prayer…a house of prayer for all people.’”

From the sermon by the Very Rev. Sam G. Candler, Dean of the Cathedral of St. Philip, for Choral Evensong at the annual conference of the Association of Anglican Musicians.

05/27/2026

WE LOST KANUGA — AND FOUND EACH OTHER – by the Rev. Canon George Maxwell

I have been going to Kanuga all my life. First as a child with my parents. Then as a young parishioner still figuring out what faith felt like from the inside. Then as your priest, which is to say someone paid to notice things. I know every trail. I know the silence of the fishing dock at dawn — hours spent with the kids tying on lures, freeing fish, untangling line, talking about everything and nothing. One of the better kinds of prayer.

The script was familiar and beloved: fried chicken on the lawn, bonfires, square dancing in the parking lot, swimming to the dam and back. Bluegrass music. These were not merely activities. They were liturgy.

Not this year.

The lake had been drained to repair the dam. Rain moved in like a bad houseguest and refused to leave. No fishing. No canoeing. No swimming. No trails. No bonfire. No dancing. The whole beloved script torn away, page by page, until what remained looked an awful lot like nothing.

And then — something older than our plans moved in.

Someone produced a board game. Then another. A poker game appeared in which the object was not to win but to figure out together what winning even meant. A talent show broke out — unscheduled, unpolished, and exactly right. Bald eagles circled the empty lake. The Dean found a barn swallow feeding her chicks in a nest of mud tucked under an eave — full of hungry, wide-open life.

The Cathedral Olympics convened in the gym. A donut-on-a-string relay race descended into passionate theological dispute: must one consume the donut entirely, or merely liberate it from the string? The canon lawyers were unavailable.

Coming out of the gym, we passed a mud puddle where several of our smallest parishioners had gathered for what I can only describe as a baptism — wearing no more than Pentecost requires, completely at home in the world.

Later — and this is the moment the whole weekend revealed itself to me — some children collected rocks and filled water balloons to build a small pond in the mud, so the frogs would have somewhere to live. Nobody asked them to. Nobody suggested it was holy. But it was.

We lost the Kanuga we knew. We lost the lake, the trails, the bonfire, the script. And in losing it, we found ourselves in a place the disciples knew well — the upper room, the plan collapsed, the future uncertain, wondering what came next.

And then the Spirit moved.

Not in fire and rushing wind, but in mud and laughter, in donut arguments and unscheduled talent, in eagles overhead and a swallow’s nest built from the very mud we were mourning. In small hands laying stones so that small creatures might live. In all those words across all those hours — the kind that only happen when people are simply together, with nowhere else to be.

We didn’t just find each other. We became what we are always being called to become: the Body of Christ. Every tongue loosened. Every ear opened. Each one hearing the same word spoken into the chaos:

This. Here. Us. Now.

The Spirit does not live in our itineraries. We came to Kanuga looking for the place we remembered. We left having become the place God has been building all along.

05/26/2026

A GOOD DAY TO DREAM – a sermon by the Rev. Canon David Boyd on the Day of Pentecost, May 24, 2026

05/21/2026

I LOVE AND ADMIRE THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE! –from the Very Rev. Sam Candler, Dean of the Cathedral of St. Philip:

Last week, a self-designated prayer rally on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C. billed itself as a “rededication of our country as one nation under God.” Participants claimed to be preparing for a 250th anniversary of our independence. Apparently, however, some of the sentiment there went towards denying the “separation of church and state” principle upon which our country was actually founded.

This is not new material for me. I am an ordained minister of the gospel, and I have been leading churches through the relationship between church and state for over forty years. Thus, I am writing this week to remind my readers of what I have said before. What I might say later this summer, as these sorts of rallies continue, is not a new reaction for me. I have been saying the same thing for my entire ministry: I love and admire the United States principle of the separation of church and state. I believe it is critical for a healthy country, and I believe it is critical for a healthy religion.

Take a look back at archives of my own sermons, either here at the Cathedral of St. Philip (“I Want to Observe Dependence Day!”) or even on Day 1 in the year 2000 (“Independence Day”).

Here is an excerpt from that 2020 sermon, still valid for today:

“When European settlers gathered in this world three centuries ago, their firm religious sentiments were also solidly embedded in their political structures. It was unthinkable that a state –or a country-- could exist without some accompanying established religion.

To this land, these folks also brought their religious faith. They were Anglican, German Lutheran, Swiss and Dutch Reformed, Anabaptist, Quaker, Jewish, and Puritan. Let us never forget when we celebrate the Fourth of July in our churches, the startling and sometimes conflicting diversity of religious expression in the early American colonies. When charters were granted to various individuals and companies in the colonies, those charters usually stipulated what sort of religious expression was to be allowed. This was true in Western Europe, and it was to be true in the new colonies.

Thus, religious passions often became the drivers of political division. We would do well in these days of religious political partisanship to heed what our ancestors learned….. Something new happened in this country, something for which I give gracious thanks this week. The founders of our country figured out a way to separate church and state in a way that gave enormous freedom to each….

By the time of the Declaration of Independence, Americans knew first-hand what religious intoleration was like. They knew what happened when a party or a state or a country tried to impose its own particular brand of Christianity, or its particular brand of passion, on its people. Such behavior did not lead to liberty, freedom, and independence. It led to dissension, oppression, and even death.

Part of the great American experiment, then, promulgated in the United States Constitution, was the dis-establishment of religion. No one religion, nor one group's form of religion, nor one group’s form of passion, whatever it is, would be the standard of government in this new land. We are dependent upon that constitutional principle.

This decision was a beautiful one, for it allowed the brilliant diversity of American religion, and American passion, to flourish.

As a Christian in these United States of America, I give thanks today for the separation of church and state, the separation of passion and government, a separation which allows both religion and government to be truly free.”

Those were my words of six years ago, and of twenty-six years ago. I am not making this up as I go along. This is our history.

05/18/2026

I’LL FLY AWAY! ESCAPISM AND ASCENSION! – a sermon for the Sunday after the Ascension by the Very Rev. Sam Candler, Dean of the Cathedral

05/17/2026

Elizabeth & Raymond Chenault, Organists & Choirmasters Emeriti at All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Atlanta, performs this afternoon's recital, streaming live from the Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta.

Raymond Chenault, “Variations on Urbs Beata Jerusalem” (world premiere)

Ronald Arnatt (1930-2018), “Sarabande with Variations”

David Briggs (b. 1962), “Homage to Pierre Cochereau”

Chase Loomer, “Sortie on Ton-y-Botel” (world premiere)

05/04/2026

IS ABSOLUTISM THE WAY, OR IS JESUS THE WAY? – a sermon by the Very Rev. Sam Candler, Dean of the Cathedral for May 3, 2026 (John 14:6)

04/27/2026

SAFETY FIRST! – a sermon by the Rev. Canon Ashley Carr for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 26, 2026

04/22/2026

ANSELM: “I BELIEVE IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND” – by the Very Rev. Sam Candler, Dean of the Cathedral of St. Philip:

I write this article on April 21, the day on which The Episcopal Church remembers Saint Anselm of Canterbury. I love Anselm! I salute Anselm of Canterbury today! Here’s to St. Anselm and “faith seeking understanding,” which is the phrase he used to describe his pursuit of faithful wisdom. In Latin, it is “Fides Quarens Intellectum.”

Like many an archbishop in the 11th Century, Anselm of Canterbury did not always enjoy an easy relationship with whomever was the King of England. Those were the relationships (and lack thereof!) which came to define the Anglican tradition of Christianity. We are in the state, but not of the state! Anselm was exiled first by King William II, in 1097, as they disputed the king’s right to be involved in church matters (a recurring event in the Church in England!). Exiled for three years! Then, after William died, Anselm was exiled again, by King Henry I, from 1103-1106, for the same sorts of reasons.

But it is Anselm’s creative scholarship that I admire (except for his atonement theory, substitutionary atonement, which I completely deny). Anselm sought wisdom! Anselm tried to reconcile faith and reason in the Christian life. He used the phrase “Fides Quarens Intellectum” to describe that theological work: “Faith Seeking Understanding.” The intellect was important to him, but it was important because faith inspired it.

He is known for composing a distinctive and fascinating, if curious, argument for the existence of God, an argument that depends upon thought and intellect alone. By defining God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought,” Anselm reasons that God must exist. It is called “the ontological argument” for the existence of God. Here is, generally, how it goes:

First: The definition of God, in the mind, is: "that than which nothing greater can be conceived". (That makes sense to me! God is greater than anything we can think of!)
Second: A being that exists both in the mind and in reality is greater than one that exists only in the mind.
Third: If the greatest conceivable being existed only in the mind, one could conceive of a greater being (one that exists in reality), resulting in a contradiction.
Fourth: Therefore, the greatest conceivable being (God) must exist in reality.

The argument has logical fallacies, but I don’t care. I love it! Its genius, for me, actually lies in its definition of God. God is greater than anything we can think of. Whatever we can imagine, God is greater. The argument does not exactly prove the existence of God, but the argument does describe the existence of God!

Anyway, Anselm also gave us an ongoing principle for how faith and reason go together. He said, “I am not attempting, O Lord, to pe*****te your loftiness, for I cannot begin to match my understanding with it, but I desire in some measure to understand your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.” Faith seeking understanding.

Finally, Saint Anselm was a man of prayer. He was not merely obsessed with the role of reason in faith. Thus, note his prayer, “A Song of Anselm,” which is quite striking in its use of feminine imagery for Jesus, even back then!

A SONG OF ANSELM
Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you:
you are gentle with us as a mother with her children;
Often you weep over our sins and our pride:
tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgement.
You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds:
in sickness you nurse us,
and with pure milk you feed us.
Jesus, by your dying we are born to new life:
by your anguish and labour we come forth in joy.
Despair turns to hope through your sweet goodness:
through your gentleness we find comfort in fear.
Your warmth gives life to the dead:
your touch makes sinners righteous.
Lord Jesus, in your mercy heal us:
in your love and tenderness remake us.
In your compassion bring grace and forgiveness:
for the beauty of heaven may your love prepare us.

Thank you, Saint Anselm!

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