Excerpts from Katharine Jefferts Schori's NPR interview

Selected excerpts from Katharine Jefferts Schori's interview with Diane Rehm on NPR today.

(Click the image above for a new t-shirt design Demetrius made today.)


Diane Rehm: This seems an extremely tumultuous time for the Episcopal church. What do you regard as your immediate challenges once you are elevated to the post of Presiding Bishop in November?

Katharine Jefferts Schori: When I am installed in November, my sense is that the church's primary focus needs to be on mission. We have finished this past General Convention with a great advantage of having identified our priorities for the coming years, and the first of those is justice and peace work, to be framed by the Millennium Development Goals, and I look forward to calling the whole church to continue to work on those goals.
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Diane Rehm asks about KJS's career change from oceanography to the priesthood.

Katharine Jefferts Schori: Well, when people ask about that, I say that I'm still fishing, I'm still working "in the depths". I struggled with that transition for a good while. I think that some of the skills that I learned as an oceanographer, especially having to do with looking carefully at the world around me, and a scientific approach to the wonders of creation have been a blessing in my work in the church.

You know, I come to a situation usually without a preconceived notion of what ought to result, I'm willing to make a hypothesis and test it, and gather data, and make the best informed decision that I can.
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Diane Rehm asks KJS+ to explain her previously stated views that unity and inclusiveness are important to this church.

Katharine Jefferts Schori: The Anglican tradition, of which the Episcopal church is the American expression, has always valued comprehensiveness. We come with a variety of strands of belief and emphasis, and we are only a healthy body when we can incorporate the best of all of those strands. If we focus completely on one of those strands, we lose the diversity that makes us healthy. And, one of the perspectives of a biologist is to look at the natural world and see that--you know, if a farmer tries to grow only corn in a field, tries only to grow one crop, one quickly discovers that it takes massive inputs of fertilizer, of nutrients, of insecticides, and then you might get a crop. But the natural world flourishes when there is a diversity of creatures in the environment.
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...the House of Bishops and, certainly, by extension, the General Convention, is not unlike what happens in the Pacific Ocean every year. Humpback whales sing songs--you've probably heard recordings of them. Indeed! When they come together--they come together a couple of times a year, one of the places is off the Hawaiian islands. They come together for a time, and while they are together, they learn a new song. Each of their individual songs changes, and they begin to sing a common tune. When they go home again, they teach that song to their neighbors in their home localities, and over the coming months, that song changes again. And the next time they come back together, they learn a new song together.

And to me that was an image of what the church in its legislative gatherings might imitate. What can we learn from each other? How can we come to sing a common song?

Do you have a song in mind?

Katharine Jefferts Schori: Ahh! "The glory of God is evidenced in human beings fully alive, and that means all human beings, and that means alive in all the facets of their being.
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Katharine Jefferts Schori: There are only 9 provinces of the 38 that don't ordain women at all. Several of the others are in process to ordain women to all orders of ministry. But the reality is that women are leaders as baptized persons everywhere in the communion, and they always have been.

Diane Rehm: I thought it was interesting to hear that Bishop Desmond Tutu shouted "Whoopee!" when he learned of your selection. He went on to say, "When you think we used to say 'What? A woman doctor?!' 'What? A woman engineer?!' 'What? A woman prime minister?!' And now we have, for the first time, a woman Presiding Bishop Elect of the Episcopal Church.

(Editor's note: Bishop Desmond Tutu is one of my favorite human beings in the world)
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One of the interesting pieces of Christian history is that there's very good evidence that in the early church, women did exercise ordained leadership. And when the church began to be enculturated under Constantine, that possibility was removed. Women were slowly excluded from public leaderhip in the church. So we're returning to our roots, in some sense.

More selected excerpts from this interview at my Religious Left Blog.

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