Celebrating the Women of the Church

In partnership with the Flag Guild, we have been tailoring the slides for our Sunday Zoom worship to recognize various under-represented groups and their contributions to our faith, and the Episcopal Church in particular. March is Women’s History Month, and thus we have selected a mere handful of the countless women who have enriched the life of the church with their work and witness.

Since only our on-line audience sees them, and then only in passing, we thought we would introduce them to you here in a series of posts through the month of March.

The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows – Bishop

Jennifer Lynn Baskerville-Burrows is the bishop of the Diocese of Indianapolis since 2017. She is the first African-American woman to be elected a diocesan bishop.

Born in New York City, she graduated from Smith College in 1988 with a degree in architecture and urban studies. The following year, she was baptized in the Episcopal Church after “seeking and longing for church community”. She earned her MA in historic planning at Cornell and then her Master of Divinity at the Divinity School of the Pacific in 1997.

Ordained a deacon the same year and a priest in 1998, she served at a number of parishes including St. Peter’s in Morristown, where she married Harrison Burrows in 2003.

On September 11th, 2001, Jennifer was helping film an event at Trinity Church, Wall Street with the Most Rev. Justin Welby, then Archbishop of Wales, when hijacked airplanes struck the nearby World Trade Center towers, causing them to collapse.

“We spent several hours in a stairwell in the parish house, expecting to die but found peace in Jesus, God’s grace and the communion of saints”

Thankfully, she in fact did not die, and moved the following year to San Francisco where she served at All Saints, a progressive Angl0-Catholic parish and working at her alma mater in Berkeley before taking calls in Syracuse and Chicago.

In 2016, she was elected to be the 11th bishop of the Diocese of Indianapolis. She was seated the following year and continues to serve.

Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D. – Historian (born 1959)

Diana Butler Bass is an American historian and author, and an advocate for progressive Christianity. She is the author of eleven books, notably Christianity for the Rest of Us and Strength for the Journey, which were named among the best books of their years of publication by Publisher’s Weekly.

Born in Baltimore, she grew up in Arizona and raised in the United Methodist Church, she later became an evangelical and received her BA at  Westmont College in Santa Barbara in 1981 and her MA in theology from Gordon Conwell Seminary in 1986, then earned her doctorate in philosophy at Duke University in 1991.

She has taught at a number of colleges and universities as well as at Virginia Theological Seminary, and been published regularly in Sojourners, On Faith at the Washington Post, Beliefnet and the Huffington Post.  She now publishes her own newsletter on Substack, called The Cottage and is a member of the (Episcopal) Church of the Epiphany in Washington, DC.

The Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde – Bishop (born 1959)

Mariann Edgar Budde has served as the Bishop of Washington since 2011. She is the first woman to lead that diocese.

Born in Summit, New Jersey in 1959, she grew up in Flanders, Mount Olive Township and graduating from West Morris High School. Growing up she attended what is now Christ Church, Budd Lake.

Mariann earned her BA in History at the University of Rochester, graduating magna cum laude in 1982, going on to earn her Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry at Virginia Theological Seminary. She worked in urban ministry and then as a missionary in Honduras before pursuing the priesthood, and was ordained in 1989.

After a number of parish calls, she was elected to be the ninth bishop of Washington in 2011. Our former bishop the Rt. Rev. Mark Beckwith was one of the co-consecrators.

Under her leadership, in 2017 the Cathedral Church of St. Peter & St. Paul removed stained glass windows honoring Confederate generals, replacing them in 2023 with images representing the civil rights movement. In 2018, she presided over the interment of the ashes of Matthew Shephard, a gay Episcopalian whose brutal murder in 1998 effectively changed the national conversation about hate crimes. In 2020 amid the George Floyd protests in Washington, Budde publicly criticized the forcible removal of protesters from St. John’s Church in that city. In 2025 she again drew national attention for asking the newly -inaugurated president to show mercy to some of the populations who were fearful of what his promised policies would bring.

“I am not going to apologize for asking for mercy for others.”

By NASA/Paul Alers – NASA Flickr account, Public Domain, Link

Judy Collins – Singer-Songwriter (born 1939)

Judith Marjorie Collins is an award-winning American singer-songwriter and musician with a career spanning nearly seven decades. She has released over 50 albums spanning genres from folk to rock’n’roll to show tunes, with her most popular hit single being a rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.”

Like many artists of her generation, Collins’ work was punctuated by her social activism, speaking out about topics including abortion rights, the environment, free speech, landmines, and other issues.

A longtime Episcopalian, she took the church to task in 2000 over its slow progress on LGBT rights by cancelling a planned concert at the General Convention in that year, where resolutions allowing individual dioceses to bless same-gender unions or ordain gay people were being considered. In fact the first openly gay man had been ordained in 1986, right here in the Diocese of Newark, but it did not become universally sanctioned until 2012.

By Bryan Ledgard from Yorkshire, UK – judy collins, CC BY 2.0, Link

The Rev. Joan F. Conley – Priest

We celebrate our own Rev. Joan every day as she brings wisdom and humor to our parish.  You can read her full bio here.

The Delany Sisters – Civil Rights Pioneers

Sarah Louise “Sadie” (1889-1999) and Annie Elizabeth Delany (1891-1995) were sisters and human rights pioneers. In 1993, they were the subject of and collaborators on a book about their lives entitled Having Our Say, which later became a Broadway play and a television film.

Sarah was born in 1889 in Lynch’s Station, Virginia, the second child of the Rt. Rev. Henry Beard Delany, an emancipated slave who would later become the first Black person elected as an Episcopal bishop  in the United States, and Nanny Logan Delany, an educator. Annie was born two years later in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The sisters were raised on the campus of St. Augustine’s School (now University) where both of their parents worked. Sarah graduated from there in 1910 and went on to attend Pratt Institute and Columbia University, where she earned her BA in 1920 and MA in 1925.  She taught in the New York City public schools until 1960, the first Black person permitted to teach high school science in the city.

Annie also moved to New York after graduation. She and her brother Henry both became dentists, sharing an office in Harlem which also became an organizing place for civil rights marches and protests.

Annie died at age 104 and Sadie at 109, both in Mt. Vernon, New York, where they lived after retirement. They are buried in North Carolina.

“The reason we’ve lived this long is because we never married. We never had husbands to worry us to death!”

Queen Emma of Hawai’i

Emma Kalanikaumakaʻamano Kaleleonālani Naʻea Rooke was queen of Hawai’i as the wife of King Kamehameha IV from 1856 until his death in 1863. In 1859 they established the Queen’s Hospital, which still exists. In 1860, the couple petitioned the Church of England to establish an Anglican church in Hawai’i. She was baptized into the Anglican faith and confirmed in 1862.   After her husband’s death, Emma founded St. Andrew’s Priory School for girls, seeking to give them the same educational opportunities that boys got.

Kamehameha and Emma’s legacy is celebrated in Episcopal parishes on Hawai’i every November 28th on the “Feast of the Holy Sovereigns” while the rest of the church simply remembers them by their names.

By William F. Cogswell – Own work, Public Domain, Link

Rachel Held Evans – Author (1981-2019)

Rachel Held Evans was an author, blogger and columnist whose books A Year of Biblical Womanhood and Searching for Sunday were a New York Times bestsellers.

A native of Alabama, she moved with her family to Dayton, Tennessee where she attended Bryan College, graduating in 2003. She worked for newspapers for several years before publishing her first book Evolving in Monkey Town, a reference to the Scopes Monkey Trial which took place there. The book talked about moving from unquestioning religious certainty to a faith which accepts doubt and questioning. A Year of Biblical Womanhood, published in 2012, is exactly what it sounds like: a chronicle of trying to exist in modern times while taking the Bible literally.

Rachel was a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tennessee. In 2015 she wrote a column for the Washington Post chiding churches for trying to make themselves “cool” in an attempt to win back millennials like herself, opining that the stylistic aspects on which they focused “are not the key to drawing millennials back to God in a lasting and meaningful way. Young people don’t simply want a better show.”

Rachel died at age 37 after contracting an allergic reaction to medication. The Evolving Faith Conference, an annual gathering of young progressive Christian she helped found, continues as her legacy.

The Rt. Rev. Barbara Clementine Harris –  Bishop (1930-2020)

Barbara Harris was the first woman to be ordained a bishop in the Episcopal Church (and thus the Anglican Communion). Born in Philadelphia, she was recognized for her scholarship in writing and music and rose to be head of public relations for the Sun Oil Company. In the meantime, she was also active in civil rights work, participating in Freedom Rides and voter registration drives.  By 1989 she had a reputation for her progressive and outspoken views and was fiercely advocating for equal rights for women, racial minorities and LGBT people within the church.

A longtime member of the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, in 1974, Harris served as the acolyte at the historic service there in which eleven women were ordained as the first female priests in the Episcopal Church (more on this in a future installment). With the encouragement of the rector there, Harris was ordained as a deacon in 1979 and a priest the following year. In 1984, she became the executive director of the Church Publishing Company and the magazine the Witness. She returned to Advocate as its interim rector in 1988.

Later that year, a special election in the Diocese of Massachusetts elected Harris as a suffragan (assisting) bishop. The choice was controversial, not only because Harris was a woman, but she was also divorced and had not attended seminary. But she was widely popular within the church and her consecration was held in an arena with 8,000 participants including 1,200 clergy and two choirs, and also televised.  Sadly, she was also the target of obscene messages and death threats, but–in characteristic fashion–refused to wear a bulletproof vest, saying, “I don’t take this in a personal way”.

Harris served as bishop for 13 years in Massachusetts and later in the Diocese of Washington, while continuing to work at Church Publishing and the Witness. She suffered a stroke in 2010 but continued to work and preach. In 1998 a new diocesan camp and conference center was named for her. She died at age 89 in 2020.

“I certainly don’t want to be one of the boys. I want to offer my peculiar gifts as a black woman … a sensitivity and an awareness that comes out of more than a passing acquaintance with oppression.”

Julia Ayala Harris – President of the House of Deputies

Julia Ayala Harris was elected as president of the House of Deputies (laity and priests) of the Episcopal Church at its 80th General Convention in 2022. She is the first Latina to hold the position.

A first-generation American and the daughter of an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, she hails from a large working-class family in Chicago.  She joined the Episcopal Church at age 20 after experiencing “a crisis of faith” triggered by her Roman Catholic and evangelical upbringing.

Today she is resident in the Diocese of Oklahoma and pursuing a doctorate.  Her “day job” is in the nonprofit sector, working to provide housing, employment and meaningful lives to numerous marginalized communities. From 2005 to 2008 she worked with Church Ecumenical Action in Sudan and Kenya, where her child Izzy was born. The family attends St. John’s parish in Norman.

The Rt. Rev. Carlye J. Hughes – Bishop

Carlye J. Hughes is the eleventh and current bishop of the Diocese of Newark. She has served in this capacity since 2018, and is the first woman and the first Black person to hold the seat.

A native of Fort Worth, she earned her BA in Drama at the University of Texas at Austin and had a career as a corporate trainer before pursuing ordination. She graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary in 2005 and ordained the same year. She worked at several churches in New York before  returning to Texas to serve as the rector of Trinity Church in Fort Worth. She is currently a student for her doctorate in ministry at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Bishop Hughes’ father Robert was a legendary high school basketball coach and a member of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

郭佩蘭 Dr. Kwok Pui-lan – Theologian (born 1959)

Dr. Kwok Pui-lan is a Hong Kong-born feminist theologian known for her work on Asian feminist theology and postcolonial theology.  Her parents practiced Chinese folk religion at home, but she converted to Anglican Christianity as a teenager.  After attending college in Hong Kong, she earned her doctorate in theology from Harvard Divinity School.

The author of 20 books, she taught at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for many years before moving on to the Candler School of Theology. In 2023 she addressed the Episcopal revival meeting “It’s All About Love” about the intersection of Christianity and climate science. She is currently back on the EDS faculty for two years.

“as leaders, we have to bring the tribe along. Those of us who are pioneers have the responsibility of opening the door a little wider for others to come.”

By Caorongjin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

李添嬡 The Rev. Florence Li Tim-Oi – Priest (1907-1992)

Florence Li Tim-Oi was the first woman to be ordained a priest in the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part.  Born in Hong Kong, her parents encouraged her education and she was baptized, taking the name of Florence Nightingale, another saint of the church. She witnessed the first ordination of a deaconess (Lucy Vincent) and was inspired by a sermon calling for more women to engage in direct ministry. She studied theology in Canton and then returned to Hong Kong and later Macau to work with refugees of the Sino-Japanese War.

Florence became a deaconess herself in 1941 and–as neutral Macau became isolated without Anglican clergy–received special permission by Bishop Hall to administer the sacraments to the faithful.  In 1944, she traveled through occupied Japanese territory to meet Hall, and he ordained her a priest over the objections of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple. Temple nonetheless allowed Florence to continue to serve until the conclusion of the war. In communist China, Florence was inhibited both by her church and the officially atheist society, but continued to serve and teach as she was able. She was compelled by government officials for a time to work in farms and factories, and to cut up her own vestments with scissors. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, two other women were ordained and Florence’s orders were normalized, but due to her isolation she did not know!

In 1980 Florence was permitted to leave China and she emigrated to Canada, working in several Anglican churches there. In 1984 the Church of Canada (which began ordaining women in 1975) officially reinstated her priestly orders, and Florence was honored by a celebration of the fortieth anniversary of her ordination at Westminster Abbey. She died in Toronto in 1992.

By AndyScott – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

St. Mary Magdalene – First Witness to the Resurrection

Mary Magdalene was a companion of Jesus who is mentioned twelve times over the four canonical gospels, more than most of the apostles and more than any woman outside Jesus’s family. Magdalene may actually refer to Magdala, a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee from which she may have come.

According to Luke 8, she helped support Jesus’s ministry, indicating she may have been wealthy, and that she had “had demons driven out of her” and it may be this–as well as the popularity of Mary (or Miriam) as a given name–that caused her to later be conflated by Pope Gregory I with a repentant prostitute who anoints Jesus. She is always mentioned first when listed in a group of women, indicating she may have been as important among Jesus’s female followers as Peter was among the men.

All the gospels agree that Mary would have been present–if at a distance–at Jesus’s crucifixion. Mark places her at the scene of his burial, and although they differ in their accounts, all four Gospels name her–either alone or in a group–as being the first witness(es) of the empty tomb and Jesus’s resurrection.  She is also mentioned, and given an elevated role, in numerous apocryphal and Gnostic gospels which are not considered as canonically reliable. It was St. Gregory of Nyssa (~330-395) who coined the title “first witness to the resurrection”.

 

Helen Prejean CSJ (born 1939)

Sister Helen is an American Catholic nun who is in the forefront of the movement to abolish the death penalty. Her 1993 book Dead Men Walking, based on her ministry with prisoners on “death row” (some of whom she accompanied to their executions) explores the impact of capital punishment on society. It has been adapted into a film and an opera.  Based in New Orleans, she continues to write and speak publicly.

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, Ph.D (born 1954)

Katharine Jefferts Schori was the first woman to be elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and thus to lead a province of the Anglican Communion. Born in Pensacola and baptized as a Roman Catholic, she was introduced to the Episcopal Church at age eight when her parents joined St. Andrew’s: New Providence, in the Diocese of New Jersey. Katharine attended Stanford, where she earned both a Masters in Oceanography and Doctorate of Philosophy, and then a second doctorate (in oceanography) at Oregon State, where she met her husband Richard.  Katharine is also a licensed instrument-rated pilot, as were both of her parents.

Katharine attended the Divinity School of the Pacific and was ordained a priest in the Diocese of Oregon in 1994. Fluent in Spanish, she worked particularly with the growing Hispanic community there.  In 2001 she was elected as the Bishop of Nevada, where her flying skills came in particularly handy as she shepherded the far-flung diocese. Her book A Wing and.a Prayer, a collection of sermons published in 2007, alludes to this experience.

In 2006, she was chosen by the General Convention to serve as the church’s next Presiding Bishop. Conservatives were unhappy, and the Diocese of Fort Worth asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to place them under the jurisdiction of a male primate in another province of the church. Despite her vocal willingness to work with them, in 2008 four dioceses voted to leave the church, and she instituted lawsuits to retain the property they held.  Over the course of her term she drew criticism from conservatives both within our own province and the wider church, both for being a woman and for what some saw as unorthodox views.

Although she was young enough to seek a second term, Katharine chose to stand down in 2014. Since then she has served as an assisting bishop in California.

Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)

An American author, Madeleine L’Engle drew upon both her Christian faith and her deep love of science. She is best known for her books A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Born in New York, her father was also a writer and her mother a pianist. Madeleine was writing by age five, but struggled in school and vexed her parents, who subjected her to numerous boarding schools and governesses as the family moved around.

Graduating cum laude from Smith College, Madeleine returned to New York, where she met husband Hugh Franklin and they started a family, relocating to a farm called Crosswicks near Goshen, Connecticut. She published her first two novels prior to 1942 but struggled to find success with her writing. A Wrinkle in Time, completed in 1960 after an epic family camping trip, was rejected thirty times before it was finally published, winning the Newbury Medal in 1962. It became the first of a series and the impetus of two films. On her ability to fuse faith and science, she wrote:

“It’s often possible to make demands of a child that couldn’t be made of an adult… A child will often understand scientific concepts that would baffle an adult. This is because he can understand with a leap of the imagination that is denied the grown-up who has acquired the little knowledge that is a dangerous thing.”

By this time the family was splitting time between Crosswicks and the Upper West Side. Madeleine taught at St. Hilda & St. Hugh’s (Episcopal schools) and served as writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, while also continuing to write for both children and adults. Her belief in Christian universalism led many conservative religious bookstores from carrying her books.

“I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”

Despite this, she found wide acclaim with young and old readers alike and an enduring legacy. L’Engle continued to write and teach until 2002 despite surviving a serious automobile accident. She died in 2007 and is interred at St. John the Divine.

 

By Square Fish Books, Fair use, Link

The Rev. Pauli Murray – Lawyer, Activist, Poet and Priest (1910-1985)

Born Anna Pauline Murray but known widely as Pauli, she was a civil rights advocate, legal scholar, author and priest who influenced the civil rights movement and expanded legal protection for gender equality.

Born in Baltimore and raised principally by her aunt in Durham,  North Carolina, where she attended St. Titus’ Church, Paulie moved to New York at age 16 and attended Hunter College, graduating with a BA in 1933.  In 1940, she was arrested after she and a friend sat in the whites-only section of a bus in Virginia. The experience prompted her to pursue a career in civil rights law. She attended law school at Howard University in Washington, graduating in 1944 as valedictorian, but was denied admission to Harvard Law School for post-graduate work due to her gender.  Undeterred, she earned her MA in Law at U.C. Berkeley instead and then a doctorate at Yale Law School.

As a lawyer, Murray argued for racial equality and women’s rights. She authored a book which Thurgood Marshall called “the bible of the civil rights movement”.  She served on a presidential commission on the status of women under John F. Kennedy and co-authored with Ruth Bader Ginsburg a brief by the ACLU in the landmark Supreme Court case Reed v. Reed.

In 1973, Murray turned back to the church.  In 1977 she became the first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. In addition to two autobiographies, a 1970 collection of her poems entitled Dark Testament was re-released in 2018.

By Carolina Digital Library and Archives – Carolina Digital Library and Archives. “Murray, Pauli, 1910-1985.” 5 July 2007. Online image. UNC University Library. Accessed 8 April 2011. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/vir_museum&CISOPTR=431., CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

The Rev. Canon Dr. Stephanie Spellers – Author and Evangelist

Stephanie Spellers got the church’s attention with her first book The Church Cracked Open, which invited us to face our present circumstances and how we got here as a means of deciding where we should go next. For nearly a decade, she served as canon to our now-former presiding bishop, the very charismatic Michael Curry. She brought a lot of energy to the church’s “Way of Love” campaign with a series of revivals across the country, including the “It’s All About Love” event in Baltimore which a number of St. Markers attended in the summer of 2023.

Prior to her stint with the presiding bishop’s office, Stephanie led evangelism efforts in the Diocese of Long Island and at General Theological Seminary in New York. She also founded the Crossing, a ground-breaking emerging congregation that is resident at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston.

Today she is an assistant priest at St. Bartholomew’s parish in New York City and working on a new book exploring what non-religious Americans (the “nones” and the “dones”) can teach us about our faith.

Sojourner Truth, Activist (~1797-1883)

Born into slavery in Esopus, New York (home of Holy Cross Monastery) and originally named Isabella Baumfree, she passed between several abusive owners and escaped with her infant daughter in 1826. Two years later she  filed a successful lawsuit to get custody of her son, the first Black woman to win a suit against a White man. In 1827 she became a Christian and helped found a Methodist parish in Kingston, New York.

On the feast of Pentecost in 1843, she took her new name, convinced that she was called by God to travel the countryside and preach.Her most famous speech was given in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, which only later became known by its popular name “Ain’t I a Woman?”

During the Civil War, Sojourner helped recruit troops for the Union army. She continued to fight for women and African-Americans until her death. A bust of her likeness was placed in the US Capitol in 2009 and she was named by Smithsonian as one of the 100 most influential Americans in 2014.

The Philadelphia Eleven

“The Philadelphia Eleven” are the first class of women to be ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church. The service which took place at the Church of the Advocate in the summer of 1974 sent shock waves through the church and society, but we have not looked back!

We published a full article about these courageous women on the 50th anniversary of the event.