c. 2006 Religion News Service

PORTLAND, Ore. _ From the sky to the ocean and nearly everything in between, Katharine Jefferts Schori uses her brain and her faith to try to make sense of it all.

The self-described “recovering scientist” made the leap from professional science to religion in Corvallis, the Oregon city where she lived and worked almost half her life. On Sunday (June 18), she became the first woman elected presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States.

It was a surprising, triumphant moment for Jefferts Schori’s friends in Oregon, who _ like the bishop herself _ assumed it was unlikely she would win because she was the first woman nominated for the nation’s top Episcopal post.

“I’m overjoyed she was elected,” said the Rev. Robert Morrison, rector of St. James Parish in Lincoln City, who served on committees that supervised her training and ordination as a priest in 1994.

“She’s extremely bright and thoughtful,” Morrison added. “She’s not afraid to ask the challenging questions.”

Morrison said Jefferts Schori, who has a Ph.D. in oceanography, is “extremely curious about life but has the sense of always looking for honesty and accuracy.”

Nor is she afraid to take stands on controversial issues. As bishop of Nevada since 2001, she voted to confirm the church’s first openly gay bishop, favors scientific inquiry into Darwinism and has criticized Congress as having placed costs of the Iraq war on the backs of America’s poor.

Described by associates as quiet and thoughtful, Jefferts Schori does not back down from controversy or challenge, said the Rev. Margaret McMurren, vicar of Prince of Peace Episcopal Church in West Salem, who has known Jefferts Schori for a decade.

“She has the brains, the skills and the faculties to do this,” McMurren said. Jefferts Schori’s experiences as one of the first women in the oceanography doctorate program at Oregon State University gave her a taste of “life on the margins,” she said.

In numerous press interviews, Jefferts Schori has recalled the time a captain of an oceanography vessel wouldn’t talk to her as chief scientist because she was a woman. “That lasted about 15 minutes,” she recalled.

“She’s quiet and has a very dry sense of humor,” McMurren said. “But she’s also a firm believer in justice in the Scriptural sense.”

Among her personal interests, Jefferts Schori is an instrument-rated pilot who used an airplane to cover her far-flung Nevada territory. Her daughter, Kate, is an Air Force pilot.

Jefferts Schori likes to hike and jog, and talk and listen, friends said.

“She draws people out,” Morrison said. “When she hears differences of opinion, she looks for ways to effect reconciliation. She doesn’t force her opinion on you, but she does challenge everyone, including herself, to think through what life is about.”

McMurren said it is easy for some people to mistake Jefferts Schori’s quiet demeanor as an indication that they are prevailing in a discussion.

“She’s kind but tough-minded,” McMurren said. “Her reasoning is based on a deep, personal, practicing faith.”

Jane Ringo of Corvallis, a longtime congregant of the Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan, where Jefferts Schori was assistant rector for six years, described her as a dynamic leader. She recalled that Jefferts Schori had been particularly involved in welcoming Mexican immigrants to the church to make them a part of the community.

“Her sermons were about kindness,” Ringo said. “She is wonderful.”

After graduating with a doctorate from Oregon State, Jefferts Schori worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle, where she concentrated on squid and octopuses. Morrison said she has had strong religious feelings throughout her life, and tightened federal budgets for science helped her decide to switch careers.

In a Las Vegas Review interview after she was nominated for presiding bishop, Jefferts Schori said the death of a friend in a plane crash while she was in graduate school led her back to church to look for answers.

Jefferts Schori clearly falls into the liberal wing of the Episcopal Church. Comments on an Episcopal Web site from conservative church members criticized her comparatively short tenure as a bishop, and one writer called her a “Boomer Bishop,” suggesting that her liberal credentials appealed to that generation.

The Rev. Marianne Wells Borg, director of the Center for Spiritual Development at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, said Jefferts Schori “has the integrity, stamina and intelligence to do this work, not only nationally but internationally. … I think she is a woman for her time.”

_ Richard Hill, Ryan Frank and Gabrielle Glaser contributed to this report.

(Fred Leeson writes for The Oregonian in Portland, Ore.)

KRE/PH END LEESON

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