Why the weird title for this blog?

What do I mean by "evangelical" and "anglican"?

The short answer is:  By evangelical, I mean a person who is aware of one's need for a relationship with God, has a sense of awe about life, has a high view of scripture, and tries, with varying degrees of success, to be self-reflective about one's choices and actions.  By anglican, I mean a person who realizes one needs some type of system in order to nurture and develop the evangelical qualities, and that the catholic tradition of Christianity offers such a system.  I am that kind of person.

The long answer is: It's taken me years to sort this out.  I wasn't raised in any religious tradition.  You could say my family of origin was materialist, if you needed to classify it, but even that's too strong; we virtually gave no thought or discussion to such matters at all.  One important exception in the family was a step-grandmother, whom I'll write about in another post.  Being from Oklahoma (mainly), we knew many Baptists. We simply considered them to be annoying hypocrites. They thought they knew something we didn't, yet they surely didn't live or act any better than the rest of us.  And the rest of us, both old and young, were pretty immature, to put it politely. We thought Catholics were a voodoo cult.

Becoming a parent changed everything.

All the big questions about life and death and meaning and purpose suddenly came crashing down on me. Having no family tradition to turn to for answers, I became a seeker.  After many false starts, I eventually found the works of C.S.Lewis. Suddenly life began to make sense.  In Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, I finally found a worldview that fit the facts of life and explained our experiences in this world, while affirming that we are all meant for something better.

In 1994, I joined the local parish of the Episcopal Church, the American version of the Anglican Church.  I had found my spiritual home and began to thrive!  I couldn't have known it then, but a huge spiritual storm was gathering then in the Episcopal Church, and my happiness there would soon end.
That's for another post.