Tag Archives: social justice

Episcopal Church Summit on Truth-telling and Reparations

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September 24, 2024

The first summary of the Episcopal Church’s recent Summit on Truth-telling and Reparations has been published in the Episcopal News Service: “Church Summit Deeply Explores Truth-telling and Reckoning with an Eye Toward Reparations”.

The meeting included 106 people representing 34 dioceses who gathered “to share strategies, best practices, and resources and to pray for and encourage one another in their work.” These representatives from parishes across the country have done work in three areas; truth-telling, reckoning, and discernment. “In practical terms, truth-telling means identifying theologies and practices to unearth and name historic and systemic racial injustices; reckoning takes the form of publicly owning and naming harms and injustices; and discernment is coming to a collective, agreed-upon definition of what constitutes healing and repair.”

We recommend this article which includes a helpful link to a page with resources gathered by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC. You will “meet” several of the leaders in the Church that our group has learned from in the
past year of our study in the videos linked therein.

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church September 25 & October 2, 2024

Remembering Jonathan Myrick Daniels

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August 18, 2024

This week we pause to remember Jonathan Myrick Daniels, civil rights activist and Episcopal seminarian at the Episcopal Divinity School, who sacrificed his life in the service of voting rights marchers in Selma. He defended Ruby Sales, shielding her from death in an altercation with law enforcement on August 20, 1965.

Daniels was responding to Martin Luther King’s call for clergy of all faiths to support voting rights and the integration of churches. He first attended the Selma to Montgomery March and returned to Selma to assist in a voter-registration project in Lowndes County. Daniels explained his return to Selma in this way: “something had happened to me in Selma, which meant I had to come back. I could not stand by in benevolent dispassion any longer without compromising everything I know and love and value. The imperative was too clear, the stakes too high, my own identity was called too nakedly into question…I had been blinded by what I saw here (and elsewhere), and the road to Damascus led, for me, back here.”

The Episcopal Church honors Daniels on August 14th. He is recognized as a martyr and was added to the observances of Lesser Feasts and Fasts in 1999. August 14, 1965, was the day he and the other activists were arrested in Fort Deposit, Alabama for protests calling for the integration of public places and voting rights (six days before his assassination). Continue reading →

Pauli Murray on Women’s Ordination

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July 24th, 2024

Our upcoming Chapel Camp on July 29, 2024, will mark the 50th anniversary of the ordination of women as priests in the Episcopal Church. The first ordination of women took place on July 29, 1974, at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia.

The litany written by our Assistant Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Carol Gallagher, for this commemorative year emphasizes both the struggles and firmness of faith of the Philadelphia 11 and the brave women who followed the path to ordination.

We write today about Pauli Murray’s contributions to the movement for women’s ordination a few years leading up to 1974. Pauli actively championed women’s issues before considering her own ordination as the first African American woman to become a priest in 1977. She described her efforts in this way:

“The burgeoning women’s movement absorbed much of my energies, for I was serving on a faculty committee to improve the status of women at Brandeis, on the national board of the ACLU to win support for the ERA, and on the Commission on Women organized by Church Women United and chaired by my good friend Thelma Stevens.” (Song in a Weary Throat, p. 545) Continue reading →