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.

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.

Rabbi Katie Bauman serves as the senior rabbi of Touro Synagogue in New Orleans, Louisiana. Bauman was blessed to spend the first ten years of her rabbinate at Temple Israel in Memphis, Tennessee, where she focused on worship renewal, youth and adult education, young adult engagement, and counseling and pastoral care as an assistant and then associate rabbi. Along with her Temple Israel work, Rabbi Bauman was the founding chairperson of MICAH, Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope, and was a passionate advocate for social justice as described by the Hebrew prophets. Bauman’s sense of purpose as a rabbi is derived from the experiences of revelation she has encountered through relationships across lines of difference. She believes that our capacity to bring healing and wholeness to the world is predicated on our ability to trust and love each other. Her work inside the synagogue and beyond is inspired by and devoted to bringing people into authentic and even courageous relationships with one another, believing that holiness springs from that place.

Dr. Ellen Davis spends most of her waking hours writing and teaching (or getting ready to write and teach) about the Bible in ways that may illuminate the difficulties and beauties of being human. Those difficulties may be personal (getting along with our neighbors), spiritual (getting along with God), or public and global (climate change, interfaith relations). Her latest book, Opening Israel’s Scriptures, was published in 2019. She is currently collaborating with professional dancers, musicians, and painter Makoto Fujimura on interpreting the Psalms through the arts.

Rabbi Micah Greenstein and Rev. Sam Teitel have been buddies since 2017. They share a love of scripture, a belief in social justice motivated by faith, and an aversion to weak coffee. Micah is the senior rabbi at Temple Israel; Sam is the minister at The Church of the River. They are thrilled to be collaborating on this sermon together for LPS and hope to multiply the life of a sermon by the power of two!