About Randal Teague

Photograph by Kristin Underwood

Randal Teague has studied religions here, in the Holy Land and elsewhere for most of his life.

Under the auspices of an American university, he gathered Christian and non-Christian, as well as agnostic and atheist, university students for concentrated programs on their opinions. In Egypt, Greece, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and other lands they dug deep into what they had in common and did not.

As to matters of his own faith, he was raised in a mostly Baptist but somewhat Episcopalian household, an experience from which he began, even as a youngster, seeing differences among Christians. He chose Episcopal in early adulthood ~ confirmed at historic St. John’s at Lafayette Square ~ but moved in time to more traditional Anglican worship. He represented one of the largest religious orders of the Roman Catholic Church from Havana to Moscow, and studied with Greek Orthodox adherents. He learned from a career-long colleague, who was simultaneously president of his Jewish synagogue and a cantor in his community’s Catholic church, what the core distinctions were between Jesus’s teachings and those of the dominant Sadducee and Pharisee Jews of ancient Judea and Galilee.

Bolstered by another friend, a biographer of Saint Paul, he has walked many of Paul’s paths in Asia Minor and Europe. His life journey now in its second half, he refers to himself most often as Christian, giving the greatest weight to scripture in search of what Jesus would have him do, a burdened but welcomed challenge, all the time recalling two clusters of guidance: “Every saint had a past; Every sinner has a future” and St. Augustine’s “The world is a book, and he who stays at home reads only one page.” In that, he has traveled to and worked in over a hundred countries.

He holds five college degrees in law and humanities, three in course.