The Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, 26th presiding bishop, is one of 46 women featured in Time’s new multimedia project, Firsts: Women Who Are Changing the World.
Jefferts Schori, now serving as assisting bishop in San Diego, was the first woman to be elected presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and to serve as primate of a province of the Anglican Communion.
“The day I was elected presiding bishop, after all the hullabaloo in the House of Deputies when the consents were given, a man said to me, ‘Now, don’t you wear dangly earrings.’ It just confronted his image of what was proper and appropriate,” she says with a chuckle at the beginning of Time’s video interview.
Matthew Townsend is a Halifax-based freelance journalist and volunteer advocate for survivors of sexual misconduct in Anglican settings. He served as editor of the Anglican Journal from 2019 to 2021 and communications missioner for the Anglican Diocese of Quebec from 2019 to 2022. He and his wife recently entered catechism class in the Orthodox Church in America.
