Your coverage of Canon Linda Strohmeier's talk [TLC, Oct. 8] is quite correct. She did precisely what she was asked to do. Canon Strohmeier was asked to present the keynote address, a humorous or in some other way "attention-getting" talk to the 1993 conference of the Association of Diocesan Liturgy and Music Commissions in Chicago.

As the program chair for that conference, I invited Linda Strohmeier, not only for her intelligence and humor, but because I know her as a person of faith who has the ability to see beyond the bounds of one narrow view of faith. Hers was not to be a witness on a street corner to crowds of searching people nor an exhortation to a group of convicts in the Cook County Jail. No, hers was to be a keynote, an attention-getting event.

The late Urban Holmes, dean of the School of Theology at the University of the South, has likened the work of the priest to that of the shaman. I haven't seen his works pilloried by the folks at Episcopalians United.

Well, he was a male, after all, and a seminary dean, and he wasn't helpful as a target for EU to bash in its attempt to scare people and raise money.

All I can say to EU is get a life ... and a sense of both humor and perspective. What we Anglicans do must seem curious to an outsider. In this Decade of Evangelism, Linda Strohmeier is a breath of fresh air: a loving person of the Christian faith who is able and willing to speak to all people, a humorous and intelligent speaker, and a person not limited by the confines of any narrow "man-made" (sic) orthodoxy.

(The Rev.) James A. Newman

St. Bede's Church

Los Angeles, Calif.