Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

The Very Rev. Katherine (Katie) Carlsen Churchwell has served as dean of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Oklahoma City since 2020 and is the first woman to hold the role. A graduate of Lewis & Clark College and Virginia Theological Seminary, her ministry spans multiple dioceses and emphasizes liturgical excellence, collaborative leadership, and institutional vision. As head of staff and vestry c...

Friends, please hear the good news of the gospel. God does not require you to be brave in order to be saved, and God will not condemn you, even for being afraid. I only aspire to the bravery of Nicodemus because I recognize how my fear of being wrong, my fear of being thought a fool, my fear that no one would love me, not even God, if they really knew me … I need this rabbi’s bravery because I kno...

Dr. Yolanda Pierce serves as professor and dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee. A distinguished scholar, her research focuses on Literature and Religion, Womanist Theology, and African American Religions. She is the author of several influential books, including In My Grandmother’s House, Hell Without Fires, and The Wounds Are the Witness. Dr. Pierce’s work weaves together h...

Rabbi Micah D. Greenstein—often called “everyone’s rabbi”—is a central figure in Memphis’s faith community and the national Reform Jewish movement. He has served Temple Israel, Memphis’s historic 170-year-old congregation, for more than three decades and is its eighth senior rabbi. Greenstein’s leadership is marked by intergenerational engagement, pastoral depth, and the enduring relevance of Refo...

Danté Stewart is a writer, speaker, and public theologian whose work explores race, religion, and politics in contemporary life. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Sojourners, The Witness, Comment, and on CNN. Stewart is the author of the award-winning memoir Shoutin’ in the Fire, which earned the Georgia Author of the Year Award. He holds a B.A. in Sociology from...

Temptation is not about appetite. It is about autonomy. Secure yourself. Define yourself. Prove yourself. And Jesus refuses. “I live by what God speaks.” “I serve God alone.” He does not grab. He entrusts. I am convinced that sin, at its root, is trying to save yourself. And forgiveness is God refusing to abandon you when you cannot.

Forged from his Memphis gospel roots and shaped by Houston’s vibrant jazz scene, Kirk Whalum is a singular voice in contemporary music. Discovered by jazz legend Bob James, Whalum went on to become an in-demand session musician for artists including Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Quincy Jones, and Barbra Streisand—most famously performing the iconic saxophone solo on I Will Always Love You. Wit...

Every time something has tried to dim this city, the people of Memphis have risen. The culture of Memphis has risen. The stories of Memphis have risen. The faith of this city has risen. I think that God's vision for us, Memphis, is not just for us to survive, but is meant for Memphis to be a pasture. A city where creativity feeds people, where culture nourishes people, and where community restores...

We all carry personal ashes- grief, addiction, regret, exhaustion. The forgiveness we withhold. The people we quietly despise. And we carry collective ashes -the injustices we lament and the systems we quietly benefit from and prefer not to see.

The same Jesus who was transfigured so magnificently that day taught us that the ones God calls beloved and even speaks through are not limited to a few famous prophets on a mountain a long time ago. Jesus says God's beloved ones are all around us, wherever we are, every day, if only we're given eyes to see our human sisters and brothers as the bearers of God image, God's image that they truly are...

We start by imagining ourselves as more than a bunch of broken-hearted, or just plain broken people. Can we imagine that we are salt? That we are capable of shining? And when we do that, can we imagine that we are salt for others or light for others?

When someone has nothing to prove to us and doesn’t need our approval to validate them, our souls rest a little easier, and we really can see the world a little more clearly for what it is...Maybe that’s meekness. People didn’t find their burdens lightened in the presence of Jesus because he was insecure and told everybody only what they wanted to hear. The meekness of Jesus was, and this is Rowan...

"Dr. King said, “There is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.” He lived out the absurd, but liberating conviction that the only place in a sacrificial system a follower of Jesus will faithfully occupy is as its victim, its lamb...The good news is that there really is abundant life and liberation in the way...

As I get older, and lose more of the people I love, I hang much less hope on my rational comprehension of whatever awaits us on the far side of death. Scripture itself isn’t very clear about the details and I haven’t yet been visited by an angel with inside information. But my trust in the truth and the hope of the scriptures somehow has only deepened over the years. And I find myself, if not more...

“Let it be unto me according to your will,” was not an act of blind obedience or resignation to a fate. It was an opening of a space in Mary to receive the gift of God. And in doing so, Mary wasn’t setting herself apart from us. She was showing us the way. What do you need emptying of, dear virgin friends, so that God can prime you with glorious gifts, that your life might be given away with no ex...

But if we wake up resolved to choose a relationship with God, we can be fairly certain that we’ll be asked to do things that might make the neighbors talk, that might push us toward people we’d otherwise avoid, that we’ll be asked to stand up for truths that aren’t popular or even sensible. I hate to say it, but sometimes it might even look like our lives are on fire.

" Mutual grace seems to be part of Paul's plan to unite the early Christian Church, and every generation of believers has had to grapple with this question of what is foundational to our faith. This ongoing work requires both the intervention of the Holy Spirit and I think a measure of sacred imagination to envision what has not yet come to be. And in this season of Advent, we are invited to slow...

The only moment we really ever have to become the self that Jesus is calling and loving and inviting us to be is the moment we’re in right now.

Your King is with you. Not far above, but right beside you. Not condemning, but companioning. Not turning away, but turning toward you.

We just keep showing up together in the present with the lives we actually have. And maybe find that the risen Christ does keep showing up among us, not in the ways we planned for. But with a new word, a new wisdom for a new day that we were never meant to anticipate.

Because this life is where we are now, and wouldn’t it be extraordinary if we could flip the script around, so that instead of projecting qualities of this broken world onto the next, we could instead take the hints we get about the wholeness that awaits us and get about the business of living that way now and here?

Maybe All Saints’ Day is the day we’re reminded that the Church isn’t the place where we get free of enemies Jesus asks us to love. It’s where he traps us with some of the most obnoxious ones and says, “Here we are, folks. Shall we get on with it?”

If you’ve been told you’re too much or not enough, if you’ve been carrying fear, shame, exhaustion, or rage, hear this good news. The Lord stands beside you.

And yet a door to another world still stands open to every moment. A door to a better way. Which is to see your life, not as an achievement of your savvy and your will, but as a gift. A gift from a loving God who doesn’t trick us into faithfulness or force us into submission, because that’s not love. A gift from the God who woos us with blessings that are given in spite of our selfish shrewdness,...

And so this little moment of counsel from twenty-five-some-odd centuries ago helps me learn how to do that. What to do when I find myself waking up in a strange place that I don’t recognize and can only mutter: I don’t understand this world, I don’t want this, I don’t know what to do with all this. “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce… Seek the welfare of the cit...