A Dog-loving Bishop

The spark of reading the excellent new book by Larry Witham, A City Upon A Hill, How Sermons Changed the Course of American History, has rekindled my interest in the history of the Episcopal Church in this Country, as evidenced by my obsession with Arizona Missionary Pioneer Endicott Peabody (see the entry below).

It is amazing how much interesting material is available on the Internet, thanks to such sites as Project Canterbury. This weekend, I stumbled across a great picture of the Rt. Rev. William Doane, who was the first bishop of Albany. He also was for a time the rector of St. John's Church in W.Hartford, where I was curate back in the 1980's. I found on-line a contemporary biography which included a poem he had written about his St Bernard dog, Cluny. It's not bad theology, and is a great picture, both of which I share with you here. Could Bishop Doane ever have imagined that his work and likeness would be found in an electronic archive and flashed around the world 150 years later?