James Derkits

One of my mentors once described today's popular "spiritual, but not religious" designation as a stone being skipped across the surface of a lake. Maybe spiritual tourist is another way of thinking about it. I am a spiritual tourist myself. I value learning about religions other than my own and gleaning wisdom from spiritual practices within the ancient traditions and from more modern approaches such as depth psychology. Learning from other religions has helped me to grow deeper in my own religion, and find new insight from ancient teachings.  Now, my religion, for context: I'm a cleric of the theistic Christian Episcopal church. We've only been around as an autonomous denomination since the revolutionary war in the United States (after it was unpopular to be associated with England.) We are from the church of England and the Scottish Church, influenced by the Celtic Christianity of that part of the world. They/we finally split with the Catholic church because of ...

Two of my sisters and my mother were school teachers. I never sat in their classrooms, except to get help with High School biology from my sister Alyson, and to visit my sister Gretchen's kindergarten classroom. My mom stopped teaching in public schools because of our growing family, but did a lot of teaching with a household of five children ​ as well as teaching Sunday School . Maybe it was because of them that I chose a degree in Geography education, although I never joined the ranks of public school teachers. I did teach religion classes to middle school students in Houston, but like my student teaching days, I quickly learned I'm not the best at classroom discipline. ​This month  brings with it Teacher Appreciation Week (and the approach of summer break!) Besides my ongoing appreciation for all of Eli's teachers and all our public school teachers, staff, and administrators, I get to see our Trinity Day School teachers at work with our pre-K and younger students day aft...