Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

The Rev. Sam Teitel is a minister, poet and storyteller with an irreverent wit and a deep, abiding love of scripture, especially the weird parts of scripture that people don't usually like to talk about. His sermons are candid, accessible, and often funnier than he means them to be. A lifelong Unitarian Universalist, he won the grand prize at the 2018 Preachers Fight Club storytelling event. Teite...

The Rev. Sarah Condon is an Episcopal priest in Nashville. She makes a home there with her husband Josh (also a priest) and their two children. Condon is the co-host of the Mockingcast and a speaker/writer for Mockingbird Ministries. She also writes an advice column called “Dear Gracie” for Mockingbird magazine. Condon lost her parents in December 2020 in a car accident. It changed everything abou...

The Rev. George Robertson began serving as senior pastor at Second Presbyterian Church in September 2017. He served as senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia, senior pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, and as lecturer/adjunct professor at Covenant Theological Seminary. Currently, Robertson is a professor and academic dean of Memphis City Seminary, part of t...

The Rev. Sarah Condon is an Episcopal priest in Nashville. She makes a home there with her husband Josh (also a priest) and their two children. Condon is the co-host of the Mockingcast and a speaker/writer for Mockingbird Ministries. She also writes an advice column called “Dear Gracie” for Mockingbird magazine. Condon lost her parents in December 2020 in a car accident. It changed everything abou...

Danielle Chapman is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Poetry International and elsewhere. Delinquent Palaces, released by Northwestern University Press in April 2015, is her debut collection of poems.

Tom Shadyac is one of Hollywood’s all-time leading writer/directors with his films, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor, Liar, Liar, Patch Adams, Bruce Almighty, and Evan Almighty, grossing nearly 2 billion dollars at the box office. Tom also produced the documentary Happy, and wrote and directed the documentary, I AM, which explores two fundamental questions – What’s wrong with our wo...

Elizabeth L. Jemison is a professor, writer, and teacher who loves questions of how we encounter the past and why it matters for our present. She teaches American religious history as an associate professor of religion at Clemson University. Beyond academic settings, Jemison regularly speaks to congregations and community groups about how religion and history shape our worlds and why studying them...

Anwar Arafat is an Imam for the Islamic Association of Greater Memphis. In Memphis since 2014, he moved here from Salt Lake City, UT, where he was born and raised, and served as an imam for several years. Arafat has traveled and lived overseas, completing his religious education locally and abroad, earning a bachelor’s degree in Islamic Studies, and most recently finishing a master’s degree in Isl...

Elizabeth L. Jemison is a professor, writer, and teacher who loves questions of how we encounter the past and why it matters for our present. She teaches American religious history as an associate professor of religion at Clemson University. Beyond academic settings, Jemison regularly speaks to congregations and community groups about how religion and history shape our worlds and why studying them...

Instead of belief being a passive, intellectual affirmation that Jesus exists and is even the son of God, belief becomes an action, a commitment, a way of life. It becomes giving one’s whole heart – one’s whole being – to Jesus. Quite honestly, it becomes a lot harder.

The Rev. Dr. Peggy Jean Craig is a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, community development nerd, wannabe poet, and personal photographer for her two-year-old identical twin girls. Growing up in rural Alabama as the only Asian kid other than her brother shaped her curiosity about marginalized places, community, and belonging. She’s most at home in borderland spaces, whether that be leading an arts...

Cole Arthur Riley is a writer and poet. She is the author of the NYT bestseller This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us. Her writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Guernica, and The Washington Post. Cole is also the creator and writer of Black Liturgies, a project that integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body. Her sp...

The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis uses her gifts as an author, activist, preacher, and public theologian to create an antiracist, just, gun violence-free, fully welcoming, gender-affirming society in which everyone has enough. Lewis has preached in pulpits and on stages in the U.S., South Africa, and France. She’s been serving as senior minister and public theologian at Middle Church for 20 years. The aut...

The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis uses her gifts as an author, activist, preacher, and public theologian to create an antiracist, just, gun violence-free, fully welcoming, gender-affirming society in which everyone has enough. The author of several books and articles, Lewis’s most recent book, Fierce Love, was published in 2021. Her Just Love Story Bible will be released in 2025. Cole Arthur Riley is a wr...

What if, maybe starting with those 10 Commandments, we saw the rules we live by not so much as boundaries and walls to protect us, but as windows into the world? As ways of structuring awareness. Openings through which we look at more and more of the life we’ve been given together on this earth and ask what love would require of us in all of it.

Joe Birch marks forty-six years of service to viewers of WMC-TV in 2024. His journey in journalism has opened pathways of community service. For example, Birch organizes the Mobile Food Pantries that provide a week’s worth of groceries to five hundred families monthly through the generosity of St. Patrick Community Outreach, Inc., and Memphis Rotary Club. He worships at St. Patrick Catholic Church...

After reading Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be in his final year of college, Mark Muesse gave up his ambition to be a physician and decided to become a philosopher. His parents were not pleased. He began traveling the world to study its significant spiritual pathways and spent thirty years at Rhodes College sharing what he learned. Along with Tillich, his way has been illuminated by figures like M...

Rabbi Micah Greenstein is senior rabbi of Temple Israel, Memphis’ historic 170-year-old synagogue and the last remaining large congregation in a four-state region. His leadership roles include the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, the National Civil Rights Museum, and creating a network of the next generation of women leaders in Cambodia and Southeast Asia through the Harpswell Foundation....

Dialogue: The Lenten Preaching Series Podcast with The Mystic by Calvary Episcopal Church

Jesus enters the scene and starts talking about losing everything, and I hear him saying ‘quite openly’ that a broken world needs a story about breaking.

Dr. Scott Morris describes himself as “a one-note guy” who focuses on the link between faith and health. He believes that to follow Jesus, Christians must have a healing ministry. The people, patients, staff, and volunteers he has worked with since founding Church Health in 1987 inspire Morris to explore the scope of God’s imagination and encourage him in his journey of love and following Jesus. M...

We are disappointed to announce that an unexpected health issue kept Barbara Brown Taylor from traveling to Memphis for Calvary’s Lenten Preaching Series. Barbara wrote a sermon to be delivered in her absence titled “Blessed are the Spiritually Bankrupt.” The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor is a New York Times best-selling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest. After serving three congregations—two in d...

Pádraig Ó Tuama’s interests lie in language, violence and religion. Having grown up in a place that has a long history of all three (Ireland, yes, but also Europe) he finds that language might be the most redeeming of all three of these. In language there is the possibility of vulnerability, of surprise, of the creative movement towards something as yet unseen. He is inspired by any artist of word...

Pádraig Ó Tuama’s interests lie in language, violence and religion. Having grown up in a place that has a long history of all three (Ireland, yes, but also Europe) he finds that language might be the most redeeming of all three of these. In language there is the possibility of vulnerability, of surprise, of the creative movement towards something as yet unseen. He is inspired by any artist of word...

Like Jesus, you will walk into some days certain on some level that you’re as worthy of love and dignity as any other human being, and then, a moment later, become deeply unsure of this truth and look elsewhere for your identity.