PHOTO CREDIT: © Solitafoto | Dreamstime.com A bishop carries something we call a crozier, which is really a symbol for the staff a shepherd carries. I carry one as the bishop of the church, the chief shepherd over the Diocese of Central Florida, and also as someone who is subject to Jesus’ ministry to me. If…

When I heard the news, I was sitting in the airport in Louisville, Kentucky, my CNN and Twitter feeds exploding. My natural reaction was to keep the horror of this event at a distance, keeping my heart safe from grief and outrage. But slowly, as an answer to prayer, the sadness, the weariness, the empty…

Each spring, our churches have a Collect that honors Edward Thomas Demby and Henry Beard Delany, the first and second African-American bishops consecrated in The Episcopal Church. As the prayer says, they, “though limited by segregation, served faithfully to [God’s] honor and glory” (Lessons Appointed for Use on the Feast of Edward Thomas Demby and…

Genuine Christian commitment takes courage, more now than ever before. But how do we obtain it? What will make us brave? We live in a world that is more and more suspicious of genuine religious commitment. Many of the people we know would prefer not that we would have no religious faith, but that our…