You can also subscribe to the Calvary podcast on your favorite podcast app.
You can also subscribe to the Calvary podcast on your favorite podcast app.
Dr. Nichols, a native of Memphis, TN, is the organizing pastor of Freedom’s Chapel Christian Church (DOC). Following the death of a childhood friend, Dr. Nichols created A More Excellent Way, Inc., an organization with a mission to help individuals from all walks of life to enter into, engage in, and maintain spiritually healthy relationships while eliminating relationship violence. She is a founding member of MICAH (Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope) and serves as Inter-Faith Officer for MIFA (Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association). She has been a visiting professor in Gweru, Zimbabwe, a church planter throughout China, and a Holy Land pilgrim. Dr. Nichols’s deepest passions are transformational teaching and working with others to seek justice, love, and mercy.
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 words: from Krista Tippett to Lucille Clifton; from Patrick Kavanagh to Emily Dickinson; from Lorna Goodison to Arundhati Roy. Ó Tuama loves words — words that open up the mind, the heart, the life. For instance — poem: a created thing.
A highly respected scholar and public intellectual, the Rev. Dr. Serene Jones is the sixteenth President of the historic Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The first woman to head the 182-year-old institution, Jones is a past president of the American Academy of Religion, which annually hosts the world’s largest gathering of scholars of religion. Jones came to Union after seventeen years at Yale University. She is the author of several books including Trauma and Grace and, most recently, her memoir Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World. Jones, a popular public speaker, holds deep grounding in theology, politics, women’s studies, economics, race studies, history, and ethics.
A highly respected scholar and public intellectual, the Rev. Dr. Serene Jones is the sixteenth President of the historic Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The first woman to head the 182-year-old institution, Jones is a past president of the American Academy of Religion, which annually hosts the world’s largest gathering of scholars of religion. Jones came to Union after seventeen years at Yale University. She is the author of several books including Trauma and Grace and, most recently, her memoir Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World. Jones, a popular public speaker, holds deep grounding in theology, politics, women’s studies, economics, race studies, history, and ethics.
The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers serves as Canon to Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry and spearheads Episcopal efforts concerning evangelism, reconciliation, and creation care. Her newest book, The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline and New Hope for Beloved Community (March 2021), follows her popular titles Radical Welcome: Embracing God, The Other and the Spirit of Transformation and The Episcopal Way. Spellers has served as chaplain to the Episcopal House of Bishops, directed and taught mission and evangelism at General Theological Seminary, and served as a canon in the Diocese of Long Island. Before that, she founded The Crossing, a ground-breaking church within St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston, and led numerous church-wide renewal and justice efforts. A native of Frankfort, Kentucky, she and her husband Albert deGrasse make their home in New York’s Harlem neighborhood.
Over nearly 20 years at LPS, Marcus Borg challenged assumptions and nurtured lifelong friendships at Calvary. After his death in 2015, several of those friends began an endowment in order to continue his legacy of intellectual and spiritual inquiry. Marcus Borg Endowed Speakers reflect Marcus’s willingness to challenge sacred texts and ideas while still remaining grounded in them.
The Reverend Canon Dr. Stephanie Spellers is one of the Episcopal Church’s leading thinkers around 21st-century ministry and mission. A writer, speaker, and priest, Spellers reflects Dr. Marcus Borg’s bold ideas paired with a gracious spirit. Canon Spellers addresses some of the most compelling issues of our day: racism, the ecological crisis, and the future of the institutional church. She exhorts us to delve into shared histories of injustice and of healing, reckoning and hope. However fraught the topics, the basis of Spellers’s work is love. In her writing and preaching, Canon Spellers seeks to help people “follow Jesus’s way of love and to grow loving, liberating, and life-giving relationships with God, each other, and the earth.”
After retiring as rector of St. Bartholomew’s in Manhattan, Buddy Stallings wondered what church for him would look like going forward, even pondering life with very little church involvement. To his delight, no matter how maddening the church sometimes can be, the church—all it is and longs to be—continues to live at the center of his life. As a priest, his path to God has been most vividly illuminated by the experience of God in others: we bear God to one another. His consolation and hope for the world rest in that conclusion. Stallings believes the marriage of an ancient faith and the postmodern world, though tricky business, is the mission of the church, a mission which can be realized only in the gritty reality of love for God, one another, the planet, and ourselves.
After retiring as rector of St. Bartholomew’s in Manhattan, Buddy Stallings wondered what church for him would look like going forward, even pondering life with very little church involvement. To his delight, no matter how maddening the church sometimes can be, the church—all it is and longs to be—continues to live at the center of his life. As a priest, his path to God has been most vividly illuminated by the experience of God in others: we bear God to one another. His consolation and hope for the world rest in that conclusion. Stallings believes the marriage of an ancient faith and the postmodern world, though tricky business, is the mission of the church, a mission which can be realized only in the gritty reality of love for God, one another, the planet, and ourselves.