Katharine Jefferts Schori - Biography

Biography

Born in Pensacola to Keith Jefferts of Swedish ancestry, and his wife Elaine Ryan of Irish ancestry, Jefferts Schori was raised in the Roman Catholic Church until 1963. Her parents brought her, at the age of eight, into the Episcopal Church (St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, New Providence, New Jersey) with their own move out of Roman Catholicism. Her mother converted to Eastern Orthodoxy a few years later. She attended school in New Jersey, then went on to earn a Bachelor of Science in biology from Stanford University in 1974, a Master of Science in oceanography in 1977 and a Ph.D. in 1983, also in oceanography, from Oregon State University. She earned her Master of Divinity in 1994 from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific and was ordained priest that year. She served as assistant rector at the Church of the Good Samaritan, Corvallis, Oregon, where she had special responsibility for pastoring the Hispanic community (she speaks Spanish fluently) and was in charge of adult education programs.

The statement in her nomination profile for the Episcopal Church Joint Nominating Committee for the Election of the Presiding Bishop, that she had been the "Dean of the Good Samaritan School of Theology" in Corvallis, Oregon, from 1994 to 2000 referred to her having been in charge of the adult education programs of the Church of the Good Samaritan. In conversation with Terry Ward, Schori responded to the enquiry from Ward "I have a few questions concerning the Good Samaritan School of Theology. How many students were there? Who were the faculty members? Where were the classes held? What was its theological orientation? What are the school's graduates doing?" with the response "The Good Samaritan School of Theology was the then-rector's term for all adult education programs, both internally and externally focused. They included initiation of such programs as Education for Ministry; "popcorn theology" (movies and discussion); a weeknight meal and education offerings for all ages; Lenten and Advent series; satellite-downlink programs with discussion (begun in the days when ECTN and Trinity were doing so many effective ones); invited speakers; Sunday adult forums; inquirers' classes; confirmation classes; and so on. At one point, the School offered a set of historical liturgies, about seven or eight from the time of the church father Hippolytus through the 1928 Book of Common Prayer; the series featured instructed Eucharists."

In 2001, she was elected and consecrated Bishop of Nevada. She was awarded a Doctor of Divinity (honoris causa) in 2001 from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, in 2007 from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and in 2008 from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. (It is a common practice at most Episcopal seminaries to award an honorary doctorate to alumni who become bishops.) She is an instrument-rated and third-generation pilot and her parents were both also pilots.

She married Richard Schori, an Oregon State professor of topology, in 1979. Their daughter Katharine is a captain and pilot in the United States Air Force. She has flown VIPs in VC-21 Learjets and has also flown AWACS command-and-control planes.