Seabury-Western Theological Seminary Commencement 2007: Feast of Justin Martyr

A couple of weeks ago I read an intriguing book review. Actually, what caught my eye and drew me to the article was a picture of an octopus, which is hardly a common sight on the front page of a major metropolitan newspaper! It was a review of The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the […]

Diverse mission fields

Was Pentecost just something that happened 2,000 years ago? Is it just a theological way of talking about the presence of the Spirit in the earliest church? What does it mean for us today? This church has a mission, or, as someone has more accurately put it, God's mission has a church, and that mission […]

Coe College Baccalaureate

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, […]

The Church is called to aid immigrants, Presiding Bishop says in letter

Presiding Bishop’s Easter message affirms ‘new life out of death’

Renewal of Ordination Vows with the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania St. Stephen’s Cathedral

Isaiah 49:1-6; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; John 12: 37-38, 42-50 The summer I was 14 my mother sent me and my younger siblings off to camp.  My father had been called to active duty, and she wanted to spend the summer nearer where he was stationed.  One of the things I got to try that summer […]

Protecting our children

I had a remarkable encounter recently with a young woman who still bears the scars from abuse she experienced as a child. She has a deep and abiding faith in God, but not much use for religion. She asked me a hard question: “How can your church help to prevent the same thing from happening […]

Palm Sunday with the Church of St. James the Less, Jamaica, New York

This is the most schizophrenic Sunday of the entire Christian year.  We begin in a great and joyous celebration of Jesus’ reign, and then we experience the pain and pathos of his passion and death. We might appropriately call this “whiplash Sunday.”  Life seems full of the promise of earthly and divine fullness, and then […]

Presiding Bishop’s homily at House of Bishops’ closing Eucharist

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts SchoriPresiding Bishop and PrimateThe Episcopal Church Homily for Closing EucharistHouse of Bishops’ MeetingCamp Allen, TexasMarch 21, 2007Thomas Ken I look around here and see lots of folks with glasses. And some of us who don’t obviously wear them have contacts or have had our eyes adjusted surgically. Most of us […]

Presiding Bishop’s address at the TEAM conference: The church moving forward in prophetic witness

Boksburg, March 14, 2007 It is a great joy and delight to be here with you and I am terribly sorry that I could only come to the last two days of this conference, but we had a new bishop to consecrate in the Diocese of Hawai’i on the very other side of the world. […]