Amy Spagna is a priest from the Diocese of Virginia. She has served parishes in Bethlehem and Rhode Island, where she focused primarily on formation, pastoral care, and communications. She will be spending the upcoming academic year as an STM student at the School of Theology at Sewanee. Amy’s secular interests include singing, cooking, coffee, ice hockey, and learning to play the piano.
In comments made during the online election service for the new Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, Justin Welby said that Anglicans must confront their own history of racism.
The Church of England’s highest-ranking cleric was speaking in a virtual ceremony to mark the formal election of Stephen Cottrell as the 98th Archbishop of York.
The Church of England, established in 1534 after king Henry VIII’s split from Roman Catholicism, last month apologised for its links to slavery, calling […]
Our friends at ENS report that Episcopal congregations in Charlottesville, Virginia are hopeful the Confederate statues in their city will soon be removed.
Three years ago, Charlottesville was the epicenter of a renewed national debate over the legacy of slavery and the Confederacy after a white supremacist rally in August 2017 ended in clashes and violence, including the killing of a counterprotester. The hate groups said they chose Charlottesville in opposition to the city’s plan to remove its statue […]
From the Diocese of South Carolina:
South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Edgar Dickson, tasked in November 2017 by the South Carolina Supreme Court (SCSC) with a remittitur to enforce the final judgment of the SCSC which ruled in August 2017 that the diocesan property and 29 parishes should be returned to the parties affiliated with The Episcopal Church, issued an Order earlier today that seems to be contrary to that decision. In his Order, he ruled that the properties […]
To end the week on an upbeat note, we share a story of the repurposing of a long-closed church property in North Philadelphia, via the Episcopal Church Foundation.
On his first visit to the property that would become St. James School, [School Head] David [Kasievich] remembers hearing that the school side of the campus was for sale. In a not unfamiliar story, the Church of St. James the Less, an historic Episcopal Church founded in 1846, had closed in […]
In an interview with Axios on HBO which aired earlier this week, the Presiding Bishop says that it is time to speak up about racism and the need for police reform.
“I believe in this country and what it stands for: freedom, justice, equality,” the Most Rev. Michael Curry said in the interview. “Those are ideals worth standing for. And when they are challenged, we must speak up.”
…”There have been dramatic changes in American society,” Curry says. […]
Episcopal and Anglican bishops from all over the world have weighed in on the Black Lives Matter protests taking place across the United States this week, as well as the use of St. John’s, Lafayette Square as a prop for a presidential photo. (See the Cafe’s previous coverage of the protests and reactions here, here, and here.) What follows is a collection of more statements from the past few days.
The Province III (covering dioceses in the mid-Atlantic) bishops write:
We […]
From Episcopal News Service:
On May 22, the Supreme Court of Texas issued a ruling against the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth and in favor of a breakaway group now affiliated with the Anglican Church of North America in a dispute over which group legally controls the diocese and its property.
The ruling reversed a 2018 appeals court decision that established The Episcopal Church’s diocese, led by Bishop Scott Mayer, as the rightful controller of the Diocese of […]
There have been several items in the news this week about Episcopal churches stepping up to help in any way they can during the pandemic. Here is a small sampling of those efforts.
From Vermont, a parish which has expanded its homeless ministry:
With the pandemic came an opportunity.
The Rev. Earl Kooperkamp and the people of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Barre had been working to help homeless people in Washington County for more than a […]
Faith leaders, Episcopal and otherwise, have been far less enthusiastic this week about the prospects of returning to business as usual. That has been especially true in Georgia, following the governor’s announcement that businesses would be allowed to open over the course of the next several days. From our friends at ENS:
The prospect of physically gathering in church for a worship service would have been unthinkable for most Episcopal congregations just a month ago, after the escalating coronavirus […]
There have been a number of stories in the mainstream press this week about parishes and dioceses stepping up to offer food assistance during the COVID-19 emergency. A Google search for “Episcopal food pandemic” yielded over 800,000 hits. Here is a sampling of some of those news stories:
From the NY Times:
When the coronavirus upended ordinary life in New York, John Merz, an Episcopal priest who looks like a band manager of mid-1990s vintage, determined that more people needed […]
