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.”