I am the Provost of St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow, a large and active cathedral in the Scottish Episcopal Church. As a Scottish Episcopalian, I am an Anglican and am currently a member of the Anglican Consultative Council, the international body that meets every three years to discuss matters important to Anglicans across the world. I have served in ordained ministry since 1997 and have spent much of my working life in cathedral leadership, university chaplaincy, and public-facing church roles.
I have written this blog since 2003. It began as a way of sharing sermons and reflections from cathedral life, and it has developed into a place where I explore the things that I care about most.
Increasingly I am interested in how religious and civic institutions respond to cultural, ethical and technological change, and what it takes for them to remain healthy, trustworthy and effective over time.
I’m interested in the intersection of church leadership and public discourse. I have been involved in significant developments in equality and church law in Scotland, including advocacy for equal marriage in civil law and subsequent changes in canon law within the Scottish Episcopal Church to allow same-sex couples to be married in church. I was the first Anglican priest outside North America to be licensed to officiate at such marriages.
Alongside cathedral ministry, I have been active in wider public conversations about religion, law, and society. I have served in university chaplaincy in multiple institutions and continue to engage with questions of how faith communities relate to contemporary culture, civic life, and public institutions.
My interests include public theology, institutional change, and the relationship between ethics, law, and emerging technologies. A significant strand of my work is thinking about artificial intelligence and its implications for society and for religious communities.
Much of my work outside St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow has involved questions of institutional governance. I’ve been a trustee of the cathedral and of the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway for over 20 years and for nearly half of that time have been a trustee of the Scottish Episcopal Church nationally. This has involved wrestling with questions of institutional governance, the development and application of canon law and the way legal and ethical systems adapt to societal and cultural change.
I have stood for public office in both local and national elections. Though still interested in politics, I’m no longer a member of a political party.
I am an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, an honour which reflects wider engagement with questions of public ethics and institutional responsibility beyond the church.
I am interested in how institutions change, how they remain healthy, and how they respond to moral and cultural complexity. I have often argued that healthy people require healthy institutions, and that careful attention to structures of governance is as important as attention to individual belief or behaviour.
Alongside my public and ecclesial work, I continue to enjoy writing, opera and theatre. Some of my opera reviews have been published in national publications and I and remain interested in the relationship between performance, culture, and worship.
This website remains a personal space, but it is also a public one. I write here in a spirit of engagement rather than certainty, and in the belief that faith, culture, and public life are best understood in conversation with one another. This is a public space for reflecting on questions of faith, culture and institutional life.