A Kind of Solitude

Six months into a deep personal crisis occasioned by the unexpected end of his marriage, Jamie Howison traveled halfway across the continent to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to engage in a unique and intense five-week contemplative retreat served in the context of the chapel community of the University of King’s College. Immersed in the liturgies of the Canadian Book of Common Prayer, mentored in the writing of an Orthodox icon of Christ Pantocrator, challenged to confront the hard truths behind his brokenness, and laid bare by the hours of silence and solitude, Howison discovered something of the power of the ancient spiritual traditions in the restoration of a twenty-first-century soul. A Kind of Solitude tells that story.

Jamie Howison is a priest of the Anglican Church of Canada and the founding pastoral leader of saint benedict's table in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He was ordained in the Diocese of Rupert's Land in 1987, and has remained in his home diocese, ministering in parish contexts--including serving as pastor for the first fully amalgamated Anglican/Lutheran congregation in Canada--as well as in campus and institutional chaplaincy. A member of the Primate's Theological Commission of the Anglican Church of Canada from 2004 to 2010, he has also been a short-term resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute in 2009, 2011, 2014, and 2016, and was named a Burke Library Scholar-in-Residence at New York's Union Theological Seminary for the winter of 2011. Jamie is the author of God's Mind in that Music: Theological Explorations through the Music of John Coltrane (Cascade, 2012) and A Kind of Solitude (Resource, 2021), and the co-author with Steve Bell of I Will Not Be Shaken: a songwriter's journey through the Psalms (Signpost, 2015).