The Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori

Biography

“Shalom” – peacemaking defined by the Prophet Isaiah and reiterated by Jesus in Luke’s gospel – is a ministry priority for Katharine Jefferts Schori, who took office November 1, 2006, as 26th Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church.

Bishop Jefferts Schori was elected to this office on June 18, 2006 by vote of the 75th General Convention, in Columbus, Ohio. This Convention also set the United Nations Millennium Development Goals as the Episcopal Church’s top mission priority. In her full endorsement of these goals, Bishop Jefferts Schori calls upon Episcopalians and the wider global community to work together for their implementation.

Bishop Jefferts Schori’s career as an oceanographer preceded her studies for the priesthood, to which she was ordained in 1994. She remains an active, instrument-rated pilot – a skill she applied when traveling between the congregations of the Diocese of Nevada, where she was elected bishop in 2000 and ordained to the episcopate February 24, 2001. At the time of her election as bishop of Nevada, she was assistant rector of the Church of the Good Samaritan in Corvallis, Oregon.

Bishop Jefferts Schori, 53, holds a B.S. degree in biology from Stanford University (1974), an M.S. (1977) and Ph.D. (1983) in oceanography from Oregon State University, an M.Div. from Church Divinity School of the Pacific (1994), and an honorary D.D. (2001) also from CDSP.

Make climate change legislation a priority, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori urges Senate

Urgent action is needed by the United States in response to global warming, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said in a March 31 letter to the U.S. Senate, urging Congress' upper house "to take up climate change legislation at the earliest possible moment."

Speaking "as one who has been formed both through a deep faith and as a scientist," Jefferts Schori said she believes "science has shown us unequivocally that climate change and global warming are real, and caused in significant part by human activities.
"Climate change is a threat not only to God's good creation but to all of humanity."

The full text of Jefferts Schori's letter to the U.S. Senate is available here. [as PDF]

The Presiding Bishop's Message For Easter 2008

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop
The Episcopal Church

Your Easter celebration undoubtedly has included lots of physical signs of new life -- eggs, flowers, new green growth. As the Easter season continues, consider how your daily living can be an act of greater life for other creatures. How can you enact the new life we know in Jesus the Christ? In other words, how can you be the sacrament, the outward and visible sign, of the grace that you know in the resurrected Christ? How can your living let others live more abundantly?

The Judaeo-Christian tradition has been famously blamed for much of the current environmental crisis, particularly for our misreading of Genesis 1:28 as a charge to "fill the earth and subdue it." Our forebears were so eager to distinguish their faith from the surrounding Canaanite religion and its concern for fertility that some of them worked overtime to separate us from an awareness of "the hand of God in the world about us," especially in a reverence for creation. How can we love God if we do not love what God has made?

We base much of our approach to loving God and our neighbors in this world on our baptismal covenant. Yet our latest prayer book was written just a bit too early to include caring for creation among those explicit baptismal promises. I would invite you to explore those promises a bit more deeply -- where and how do they imply caring for the rest of creation?

We are beginning to be aware of the ways in which our lack of concern for the rest of creation results in death and destruction for our neighbors. We cannot love our neighbors unless we care for the creation that supports all our earthly lives. We are not respecting the dignity of our fellow creatures if our sewage or garbage fouls their living space. When atmospheric warming, due in part to the methane output of the millions of cows we raise each year to produce hamburger, begins to slowly drown the island homes of our neighbors in the South Pacific, are we truly sharing good news?

The food we eat, the energy we use, the goods and foods we buy, the ways in which we travel, are all opportunities -- choices and decisions -- to be for others, both human and other. Our Christian commitment is for this -- that we might live that more abundant life, and that we might do it in a way that is for the whole world.

Abundant blessings this Easter, and may those blessings abound through the coming days and years.