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.
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 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 spirituality in this season is comprised of more questions than answers and grounded in myth, storytelling, interior examen, and embodiment.
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 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. Lewis produces an annual justice conference with Middle Church—Freedom Rising: You. Move. The World is scheduled for April 2024.
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 and has an active and robust prayer life.
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 Meister Eckhart, William James, Ibn ʿArabī, Confucius, and Willie Nelson. Now retired from academics, he tries to live a quiet life of reflection, still pondering the mysteries that prompted his turn to philosophy.
The Mystic is a catalyst; through music, story, silence, and dialogue, we hope to strengthen our attachment to hopes and dreams. In the mystic, diversity is a prerequisite for all creativity. In The Mystic, the world is far better served by different beliefs than it could ever be if limited by rigid uniformity. Join Scott Morris, Joshua Narcisse, Kirk Whalum, Micah Greenstein, and Lillian Lammers for this amazing evening.
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. With antisemitism and demonstrations of Jew-hatred becoming commonplace and met mainly by silence, Greenstein is passionate about building bridges across faith communities. He cares deeply about the future of Jewish life in North America and the dramatic action necessary to preserve, build, and grow vibrant, diverse Jewish communities.
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. Morris holds that if we care for our bodies as well as our spirits, we will become closer to God.
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.
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 downtown Atlanta and one in rural Clarkesville, Georgia—she became the first Butman Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College, where she taught until 2017. Since then, she has spoken at events with wonderful names like Wild Goose, Evolving Faith, Awakening Soul, and Gladdening Light, but her favorite gig is being the full-time caretaker of a farm in the foothills of the Appalachians with her husband Ed and very many animals.
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.