As Darwin turns 200, Jefferts Schori the scientist reflects

NEW YORK — Decades before she was elected presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, when even the priesthood seemed an unlikely calling, a teenage Katharine Jefferts Schori wrestled with big questions through the night. In the darkness of the Stanford University chapel, she pondered the usual puzzles of young adulthood: Where do I belong? Why […]

NEW YORK — Decades before she was elected presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, when even the priesthood seemed an unlikely calling, a teenage Katharine Jefferts Schori wrestled with big questions through the night.

In the darkness of the Stanford University chapel, she pondered the usual puzzles of young adulthood: Where do I belong? Why am I here? But Jefferts Schori was also hunting bigger fish — how to reconcile her Christian faith with the science she was learning as a biology major.

“How to make sense of the wonders of creation and the scientific descriptions of how they came to be,” Jefferts Schori recalled in an interview in her office here, “I hadn’t had any conscious assistance in how to deal with that as a child.”


Now, few religious leaders are as well-suited to handle such quandaries. Jefferts Schori, who turns 55 in March, spent more than a decade studying oceanography in the Pacific Northwest, researching squids and octopuses. In 2006, she was elected presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, becoming the first woman to lead a national church in the nearly 500-year history of Anglicanism.

As presiding bishop, Jefferts Schori is CEO and chief pastor to 2.2 million Episcopalians spread across 110 dioceses in the U.S. and overseas. Her election was a seminal moment for the worldwide Anglican Communion, in which the vast majority of countries do not have women bishops. Yet Jefferts Schori said her scientific training, not her gender, is more unique and pertinent to her current job.

“It’s been a long time since somebody trained in the way I have been has held an office in the church like this,” she said. “My way of looking at the world is shaped by my training as a scientist — to look carefully, and collect data and make hypotheses.”

As the world marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, who developed the theory of evolution, science and religion continue to clash in the public square — but not in the mind of Jefferts Schori. More than two years into her nine-year term, the presiding bishop sat for her first extended interview exclusively devoted to science and religion.

“I think most of us are comfortable with our ways of seeing the world,” she said. “And if one lens works most of the time, why bother with a second one? It makes life harder in some sense because you have to wrestle with bigger questions.”

Jefferts Schori’s supporters say her unique background has invigorated her church and brought fresh insights into age-old problems. Most of the 25 previous presiding bishops, and much of the church’s current leadership, were educated exclusively in the liberal arts.


The Rev. Barbara Smith-Moran, a 63-year-old astronomer and Episcopal priest in Everett, Mass., said Jefferts Schori brings a rich, new vocabulary to the church.

The presiding bishop’s sermons are flush with references to the Book of Nature, as early Christians called it. She has compared bishops to humpback whales, and slave owners to apes.

“She’s a model for how religion does not require a person’s background in another field to be hidden, left behind, or displaced, but rather can enrich their faith,” Smith-Moran said.

Jefferts Schori said science informs everything from how she interprets the Bible to her views on homosexuality — two subjects that now embroil her church and the larger Anglican Communion.

“I think it’s pretty clear from scientific studies that homosexuality, particularly male homosexuality, has got a significant component that is determined before birth,” she said. “It is, at least from a theological perspective, part of the created order. … It’s the church’s job to help people live holy lives however they’ve been created, and sexuality is part of our creation.”

But conservatives argue that her progressive views stray far from traditional Christianity. Since her election, four Episcopal dioceses and dozens of parishes — still angry over the 2003 election of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire — have seceded.


“She’s continued the trajectory that was already established,” said Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, who led his diocese to leave the Episcopal Church last October. “The Episcopal Church has moved progressively away from classical Christianity and mainstream Anglicanism.”

Jefferts Schori’s dreams of being a scientist began as a young girl. Her physicist father worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey with Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who later won the Nobel Prize for their contributions to the Big Bang theory. Her mother earned a doctorate in the study of viruses, and her husband, Richard Schori, is a retired theoretical mathematician.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Jefferts Schori became entranced by nature and by Jacques Cousteau, the French marine explorer. Science became a way of exploring the “wonder of creation” she said.

Her love of the outdoors led Jefferts Schori to pursue oceanography at Oregon State University, where she researched squids and octopuses. At OSU and the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle, she trolled the Pacific Ocean “studying those strange and wonderful creatures.”

In graduate school, Jefferts Schori began to rediscover the faith she had lost as a teenager. The death of a friend reminded her that religious communities are well-equipped to deal with such tragedies. And in a philosophy of science class, she read famous scientists such as Albert Einstein describe physics in almost mystical terms.

“Suddenly, here were scientists talking about mystery,” Jefferts Schori said in a 2007 address, “and for me that was an invitation to try to make sense of these two worlds that had been important for me throughout my life.”


Compared to the riddles of physics, some of Christianity’s largest conundrums — such as how God can be Father, Son and Holy Spirit simultaneously — seem more plausible.

Both the Trinity and quantum mechanics are “different ways of talking in quasi-metaphorical language about what’s going on in a system that isn’t reducible to facts in the way we normally think of facts,” Jefferts Schori said.

Still, when research funding dried up, dimming Jefferts Schori’s prospects as an oceanographer, she didn’t consider the priesthood.

“I’d spent 15 years working toward a life-dream,” she said in one sermon, “and I was in deep grief over the death of that dream.” Jefferts Schori only began studying for the priesthood after her pastor and several friends insisted she give it a try. She was ordained a priest in 1994 and elected bishop of Nevada in 2001.

Jefferts Schori sometimes jokes that she’s still a “recovering scientist.” “I’m recovering in the sense of being somebody who grew up with a worldview that said science and religion are separate fields that couldn’t and shouldn’t talk to each other,” she said.

But now she says science and faith are now intimately entwined, partners in teaching the consequences of human action and the connections between all God’s creatures.


And in a way, Jefferts Schori says, she’s “still fishing, still working in the depths.”

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