(This article was originally published in 2009 by Search magazine and is posted with permission.)
Katharine Jefferts Schori loved being an oceanographer. She thought searching the sea for squids and octopuses and trolling the Pacific Ocean with the National Marine Fisheries Service was the most fascinating job in the world, and had spent more than a decade studying biology, chemistry, geology, and meteorology to prepare for it.
As a young girl, she had reveled in the outdoors of the Pacific Northwest and listened avidly to tales of Jacques Cousteau’s Aqualung. She dreamed of exploring nature for a living and had ready-made role models in her parents. Her father, a former physicist, worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey with Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for detecting the remnants of the Big Bang in the background noise of the Milky Way. Her mother earned a doctorate in virology. Jefferts Schori herself entered college at sixteen, graduated with a degree in biology from Stanford University and a doctorate in oceanography from Oregon State University, setting her career on the seas in motion.
But in the mid-1980s, the federal government slashed funding for scientific research. It was the Age of Reagan, with tax cuts and big military budgets but little money for anything else. When the fisheries job dried up, Jefferts Schori applied for work from Hawaii to Washington, D.C., and received countless letters back telling her she was “one of more than 125 qualified applicants … ” It became apparent that continuing in oceanography would entail many hours of sitting at a desk, filling out grant applications that would never be funded. She was angry and frustrated. “I’d spent fifteen years working toward a life dream, and I was in deep grief over the death of that dream,” she says.
Friends at her Episcopal parish, Church of the Good Samaritan, in Corvallis, Oregon, knew of Jefferts Schori’s troubles and urged her to consider the priesthood. Serious and cerebral, her unassuming and serene personality is suitable for pastoral work. But the scientist, then in her mid-thirties, dismissed the suggestion. Her husband, Richard Schori, a theoretical mathematician and active Episcopalian, thought it was “the craziest idea he’d ever heard of,” Jefferts Schori recalls. The Episcopal Church only began ordaining female priests in 1976, and a decade later they were still rare. “It wasn’t something little girls aspired to when I was growing up, and I just couldn’t see how it could make sense,” Jefferts Schori says.
She had given some thought to religion. Years before, as an undergraduate, Jefferts Schori sometimes sat alone through the night at Stanford’s Memorial Chapel trying to reconcile the faith of her youth with the science she was learning. “I grew up in an Enlightenment world with an Enlightenment worldview,” she says, in which religion and science were separate and often clashing spheres. “How to make sense of the wonders of creation and the scientific descriptions of how they came to be, I hadn’t had any conscious assistance in how to deal with that as a child.”
But if science led her heart to fear, science also, in part, her fears relieved. In a postgraduate class on the philosophy of science, she encountered the meditations of three great twentieth-century physicists, Heisenberg, Einstein, and Bohr. “They began to show me that even my fellow scientists saw the world as full of mystery-and that maybe understanding the world doesn’t always require sensory data.” Reading physicists pondering the enigmas of quantum mechanics made Christianity’s more incredible doctrines, such as belief in a God who is simultaneously Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, seem less dubious.
Even so, the priesthood seemed an odd career move for a scientist. But being approached by three people separately about ordination was strangely moving, too, so she discussed it at length with her pastor. Meanwhile, Jefferts Schori, never one to sit idle, threw herself into volunteer work, chairing the parent-teacher organization at her daughter’s school, founding a chapter of Habitat for Humanity, and serving on the board of a women’s philanthropic group in Corvallis. She also studied religion at Oregon State University, taking courses she was later asked to teach. Slowly, her grief over a lost career in oceanography began to fade.
One Sunday in 1991, Jefferts Schori was asked to preach at Good Samaritan while the clergy were away at a convention. The Episcopalians gathered at Good Sam that morning liked what they heard and told her so. “The experience of preaching, of preparing to do it, and the feedback I got afterward, finally let me hear the surprising thing people in the congregation were asking of me,” Jefferts Schori says. She is no pulpit thumper, but the former scientist’s sermons are quietly effective. She moves with ease from biblical exegesis to scientific analysis to wry, self-deprecating anecdotes, goading and exhorting along the way but rarely stooping to preachiness or sentimentality. Six months after that Sunday in the pulpit, Jefferts Schori entered the seminary.
Now Jefferts Schori, fifty-five, sits at the very top of her second calling. As presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, she is CEO and chief pastor to 2.2 million Episcopalians spread across 110 dioceses in the United States and overseas. This socially prestigious church-about one-quarter of U.S. presidents have been Episcopalians-separated from the Church of England during the American Revolution. It is now the American branch of an international fellowship called the Anglican Communion, which is the world’s third largest Christian body, after Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Jefferts Schori is the first and only woman in five hundred years of Anglican history to lead a national church.
But Jefferts Schori believes her scientific background is more pertinent and unique to her current job than her gender. “It’s been a very long time since somebody trained in the way I have been has held an office in the church like this,” she said during a recent interview in the church’s Manhattan headquarters. Most Episcopal bishops, and bishops of any stripe for that matter, tend to study the liberal arts. Many are idea men, the theoretical physicists of the religious world, who keep their heads in the sky and hands clean of life’s messy particulars. While Jefferts Schori has studied theology in depth, she says her way of looking at the world has been shaped by her training as a scientist digging for cephalopods in the sediment. “I look carefully, collect data and make hypotheses,” she says.
Her scientific mentality also brings an openness to new ideas and technology; barely one-third of the way through her nine-year tenure, Jefferts Schori has already made major changes. She has disbanded the church’s power center in New York City, replacing it with regional offices scattered across the country. And she employs the latest Internet tools-a new blog, Web site, and Webcasts-to preach the church’s message. Many Episcopalians praise Jefferts Schori for bringing fresh life into the church.
But novelty has its dangers, too, and some traditionalist Episcopalians say her progressive theology is leading the church to ruin, imperiling the souls of the faithful and pushing the church into conflict with fellow Anglicans throughout the world.
Tall and slender with a corona of curly salt-and-pepper hair, Jefferts Schori speaks softly and tends to give thoughtful but terse responses to open-ended questions. The Rev. Sally Bingham, a San Francisco priest and environmentalist who attended the Church Divinity School of the Pacific with Jefferts Schori during the 1990s, said the future presiding bishop wasn’t the type to attend after-class bull sessions at the corner coffee shop. “Unless someone approached her she was not apt to reach out,” Bingham said. Jefferts Schori says it’s a sign of God’s sense of humor that such an introvert has been installed in the very public role of presiding bishop.
To be sure, she was a longshot candidate for the job; as the only woman nominated, Jefferts Schori was thought to be a token of Episcopalians’ progressive values, but an unlikely choice at such a tumultuous time for the church. Bishop of the small diocese of Nevada at the time, she came from a family of converts from Catholicism, had never been rector of a large parish, and was just fifty-two years old. Presiding bishops typically follow a long path that starts in old Episcopal families and winds through top seminaries and posts at prominent parishes before election to the bishopric of a large East Coast diocese. Until the twentieth century, the church’s top job went to the bishop with the longest active tenure, said church historian David L. Holmes. Even Jefferts Schori pronounced the odds against her “ridiculous.”
The roomful of Episcopalians collectively gasped three years ago in Columbus, Ohio, when the House of Bishops announced they’d elected Jefferts Schori as presiding bishop. Some women cried. A minority of male traditionalists who believe the Bible forbids women’s ordination shook their heads and vowed to leave the church (some later did). Happily surprised supporters quickly manufactured pink buttons reading “It’s a Girl!” and handed them out.
At a press conference following her election, Jefferts Schori briefly described her former life and how it relates to her new job. Her master’s work involved studying the worms, shrimp, clams, and other creatures that live off the coast of Oregon, she explained. She did doctoral research on the squids and octopuses of the northeastern Pacific. Her specialties were biological systematics, which describes species, and zoography, which studies where they live. “I think the connection with what I’m doing now is an incredible delight in the diversity of creation. I never cease to marvel at the strange and wonderful ways in which we and the rest of this earth are made,” she said.
But Jefferts Schori’s past was largely overshadowed by questions about her future. Specifically, how would her gender and theology color the conflicts churning in the Anglican Communion? One reporter asked how she would relate to patriarchal Anglican archbishops from the Global South, who don’t ordain women as priests, much less bishops. Jefferts Schori said her life in science taught her to survive in male-dominated fields. “Thirty years ago now, the first time I was chief scientist on an oceanographic research cruise, the captain would not talk to me because I was a woman,” Jefferts Schori recalled. “That lasted about fifteen minutes. We got over it.”
Resolving the acrimonious debate among Anglicans over how to interpret what the Bible says about gay sex will take a good while longer. Like other American denominations, the Episcopal Church has grown increasingly liberal during the last thirty years, especially in matters of gender equality and human sexuality-a trend that Jefferts Schori encourages.
Meanwhile, conservative Episcopalians have grown increasingly upset, and the election of an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 caused numerous fissures in the church. Four dioceses and dozens of parishes have seceded from the denomination, leading to expensive and time-consuming court battles over who keeps the property. In a clear affront to Jefferts Schori’s authority and the Episcopal Church, conservatives established a rival church on American soil in December 2008. The American conservatives are backed by a majority of powerful Anglican archbishops who say the Bible clearly denounces gay sex as “an abomination.” Some have tried to kick the Episcopal Church out of the Anglican Communion for its apostasy.
But for the most part Jefferts Schori says science, rather than church politics, guides her thinking on the issue. Scientific studies strongly suggest that homosexuality, particularly male homosexuality, is determined before birth, she says. In other words, being gay is God-given, rather than chosen. “What I frequently say is that the church’s job is to help people live holy lives however they’ve been created, and sexuality is part of our creation.” Jefferts Schori says a scientific perspective also pervades the way she reads Scripture, including the biblical passages that condemn homosexuality. “I don’t take pieces of out context. I want to understand the whole system. And the breadth of Scripture, over the long haul, is toward a broader and more inclusive community.”
While homosexuality is a significant and divisive issue for the church, Jefferts Schori’s approach to knowledge may prove just as consequential. The Rev. John Polkinghorne, an Anglican priest and former particle physicist who writes widely on science and faith, identifies two intellectual traits common to scientists but often lacking in religious thinkers: epistemic humility and openness to novelty. He suggests theologians adopt the scientific mentality. “Theology is a truth-seeking enterprise,” he writes, “and when it is conducted in a context of science it is liable to see particularly clearly the need to be open to correction and change.” Jefferts Schori agrees that, in this way, her mentality is closer to science than theology. She has chided Episcopalians for making an “idol of truth,” saying it limits God’s possibilities. “When the various sources of authority seem to be in tension, we must use all our rational and spiritual faculties to discern the direction in which the preponderance of evidence points,” she says. “To do otherwise is to repudiate the very gifts that God has given to us.”
But bridging the divide between epistemic humility and religious certainty, between the essentials of the faith passed on by church fathers and the discoveries of science, is a challenging task, as Jefferts Schori found out shortly after her election. During an interview with Time magazine one month into her term as presiding bishop, Jefferts Schori said that Jesus is one vehicle to salvation, but he may not be the only way. Later, she elaborated: “If I believe that God is more than I can imagine, conceptualize, or understand, then I must be willing to acknowledge that God may act in ways that are beyond my ken, including in people who do not follow the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
As presiding bishop, Jefferts Schori is the Episcopal Church’s main missionary and messenger. This message of different paths to God, common enough in academia but rare among religious leaders responsible for assuring believers that they are on the right path, enraged conservatives, who hold fast to the Bible’s promise that only Christian believers are saved, and puzzled many others in the pews. Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh, who co-founded the rival Anglican church and who fashions himself a modern Martin Luther, said Jefferts Schori misrepresents key Christian tenets and is leading the faithful astray. “Our constant quarrel with the presiding bishop is her inability to claim without any qualification that Jesus is in fact the only way to the Father. Her theological position is, in fact, universalist-that everybody gets saved by some means. That’s not classical Christianity, that’s not what the New Testament says.”
Jefferts Schori wants to create a culture in the church in which traditionalists like Duncan and progressives like herself are both heard and respected. Anglicans have always encouraged a variety of beliefs and emphases, she says, and intellectual variety is key to the church’s health. She compares it to the crop rotations that keep farms fertile. “If a farmer tries to grow only one crop, one quickly discovers that it takes massive inputs of fertilizer, nutrients, insecticides, and then you might get a crop. But the natural world flourishes when there is a diversity of creatures in the environment.”
Jefferts Schori seems to delight in drawing such unexpected connections between her scientific background and her religious duties. She compares Episcopal bishops to humpback whales because they gather for a few days each year, learn to sing a new song together, then head home to teach the song to others. She says “gravity” is an apt translation of “kabod,” the Hebrew word for God’s glory, because it suggests something pervasive, substantial, and inescapable. And while God shouted down Job’s doubts by pointing to His awesomely fashioned hippopotamus, Jefferts Schori urges Episcopalians to consider the anableps. These four-eyed fish can see above and below water simultaneously-a good example for Christians conflicted about whether to salvage this world or just wait for the next one. The point of such examples, Jefferts Schori says, is to encourage the church to see itself with new eyes, stop bickering about finer points of doctrine, and get about the business of healing the sick, clothing the naked, and relieving the impoverished.
Ultimately, religion and science speak the same language, and impart the same lesson, she says. Each teaches that the world is made of connections and that actions in one place have consequences, often unforeseen, in other places and times. And nowhere are the effects of our deeds as grave as in how we care for the environment, a dear subject for the nature-loving presiding bishop who once trolled the seas. Numerous times, she has passionately urged believers, politicians, and all people of good will to make care of God’s creation their topmost priority. As she explained in testimony before the U.S. Senate in 2007, “As a priest, trained as a scientist, I take as a sacred obligation the faith community’s responsibility to stand on the side of truth-the truth of science as well as the truth of God’s unquenchable love for the world and all its inhabitants.”
In the beginning, Katharine saw the world, and saw that it was good; in the end, she is trying to save it.
