The Way of Love with Bishop Michael Curry

The message of the angel is as scandalous and striking now as it was then. For in it is embedded God’s message in the death and resurrection of Jesus: to trust and believe in the invincibility of the good in spite of the titanic reality of evil, because God is good all the time. To trust and believe in the enduring power of love, of truth, of the good, and of justice when the reality of the opposite seems so prodigious.

Today's guest on the Way of Love podcast is none other than the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. Bishop Budde and Bishop Curry delve into her newest book, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith. Beyond learning about some of the most dramatic and personal moments when Bishop Budde knew she was being called to courageous action, we dig deep on what it means to cultivate and nurture bravery in the daily, small moments of life, and how we can spot the difference between ego and bravery. Bishop Budde also asks us to consider how our failures teach us bravery when we are willing to learn from them. After the Episode Check out Bishop Budde's book, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith, online or at your favorite independent bookstore. And as always, you can learn more about the Way of Love, including how to create your own personal rule of life at episcopalchurch.org.

Our guest today is Capitol recording artist Blessing Offor. Blessing is a Nigerian-born, Connecticut-raised, and Nashville-based singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. In 2023, he and Kory Caudill, musical director for The Episcopal Church’s Concert for the Human Family series, released Cross the River, a song based on the life and work of The Honorable John Lewis, and the first major label release for the project. Bishop Curry talks with Blessing about the new single as well as My Tribe - his latest solo project that brings together soul, pop, R&B, and African styles in service of a universal sound—which he fittingly dubs “the genre of humanity.”. They dive deep into Blessing’s journey of faith alongside his creative journey, from his loss of eyesight at an early age to being woken up by song ideas and even finding God in the music industry. After the Episode Listen to and share Cross the River, the new single from Blessing and Kory Caudill, as well as Blessing’s newest album, My Tribe, available wherever you stream or download music. Find out more about Blessing Offor, including upcoming national tour dates, on his website. Learn more about the Concert for the Human Family, including booking information and tour dates. And as always, you can learn more about the Way of Love, including how to create your own personal rule of life at episcopalchurch.org.

In this episode of the Way of Love podcast, Bishop Curry catches up with the one and only Jen Hatmaker, New York Times-bestselling author, host of the For the Love podcast, and leader of a tightly knit online community where she reaches millions of people every week. They discuss Jen's newest book, Feed These People: Slam-Dunk Recipes for Your Crew, and how meals connect us to life in community. They also discuss the importance of telling the truth about American history--and how we can look out and advocate for folks who are being targeted right now, especially our LGBTQ family members. After the Episode Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Check out Jen Hatmaker's book, Feed These People, online or at your favorite independent bookstore, and visit Jen online at www.jenhatmaker.com.

In this episode of the Way of Love podcast, Bishop Curry talks with the Rev. Russell Levenson, rector of St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston and author of the new book, Witness to Dignity: The Life and Faith of George H.W. and Barbara Bush. Fr. Levenson has served as rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church since 2007. With nearly 10,000 members, St. Martin’s is the largest Episcopal Church in North America. Fr. Levenson co-officiated and offered a homily at the state funeral for President George H.W. Bush in Washington, D.C. and in Houston. He also officiated and preached at the funeral for First Lady Barbara Bush in Houston. Bishop Curry and Fr. Levenson discuss the model and legacy of quiet, steadfast faith left by President and Mrs. Bush, and how their lives can inspire ours today. After the Episode Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Check out the Fr. Russel Levenson's new book, Witness to Dignity online or at your favorite independent bookstore.

In this episode of the Way of Love podcast, Bishop Curry talks with Julia Ayala Harris, who was elected president of the House of Deputies by her peers in the House of Deputies at the 80th General Convention of The Episcopal Church in 2022. She is the first Latina and woman of color to hold the position. President Ayala Harris has more than two decades of experience working in the nonprofit sector, particularly with faith-based nonprofits, and she holds a Master of Public Administration. Prior to her election as president of the House of Deputies, she served the church in multiple roles, including on Executive Council as chair of the Joint Standing Committee for Mission Within The Episcopal Church. Bishop Curry and President Ayala Harris's discuss her priorities as PHOD, how the faith traditions she grew up in formed her for this role, and also how focusing on accessibility, inclusivity, and safety fosters institutional accountability. A note of caution for our listeners - this episode contains descriptions of sexual violence that some listeners may find particularly difficult. After the Episode Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Learn more about President Ayala Harris at juliaayalaharris.com, and learn more about the House of Deputies at houseofdeputies.org.

Today’s guest on the Way of Love podcast is Dr. Beth-Sarah Wright—writer, speaker, and passionate advocate for authenticity in our lives and communities. She is director of enrollment management at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School in Atlanta and adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Wright holds a doctorate from New York University, a master’s from Cambridge University, and a bachelor’s from Princeton University. Originally from Jamaica, she is married to the Rt. Rev. Robert C. Wright, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, and they are parents to five children. Dr. Wright is also the author of five books, including Dignity: Seven Strategies for Creating Authentic Community, which we will delve into today. After the Episode Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Check out Dr. Wright's latest book, Dignity: Seven Strategies for Creating Authentic Community online or at your favorite independent bookstore. Follow Dr. Wright's work on her website.

Jesus came to show us how to live, reconciled with God, and with each other, and He taught us that the way to do it is God's way of love. For God's way of love is God's way of life. It's our hope for our families, our communities, our societies. Indeed, it is our hope for the whole world. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, and love came down at Christmas. And as some of us are beginning to say in this Episcopal church of ours, “Love always.” Watch and share Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry's 2022 Christmas message now at episcopalchurch.org.

In this episode, Bishop Curry talks with the Rev. Adrian Dannhauser, priest in charge at Church of the Incarnation in Manhattan and author of the new book, Ask Me for a Blessing: (You Know You Need One). Every Tuesday, Rev. Dannhauser stands outside her church in New York City with a sign that says: "Ask me for a blessing (because God knows you need one). The incredible stories of how New Yorkers responded populate her both her book--and this conversation with Bishop Curry. The two explore what giving and receiving blessings really means, and how curiosity is our best friend when we are doing the work of evangelism. They discuss how spiritual and religious practices draw us closer to God and to one another and the importance of proclaiming the Good News by going out into the streets like Jesus did. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Check out Adrian's new book, Ask Me for a Blessing: (You Know You Need One) online or at your favorite independent bookstore. Follow Adrian's work on her website.

In this episode, Bishop Curry talks with Dr. Thema Bryant, clinical psychologist, incoming president of the American Psychological Association, professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, and an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Dr. Thema invites us to pause and look more closely at the intersection of spirituality and psychology – what are the bounds of each and how and where do they overlap? She encourages us to hold on to the spiritual and religious practices that have always drawn us closer to God and also explores the themes of the sacred now, interconnectedness of all living beings, mindfulness, generosity, surrender, self-compassion, and humility. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Check out Dr. Thema's new book, Homecoming: Overcome Fear and Trauma to Reclaim Your Whole, Authentic Self online or at your favorite independent bookstore. Follow Dr. Thema's work on her website and on her social media channels.

In this episode, Bishop Curry sits down with the Rev. Jay Sidebotham. Jay is an artist, an Episcopal priest, and the founder of Renewal Works, and co-creator of My Way of Love – a personal guide for your spiritual journey. My Way of Love is a free resource that offers coaching and tips that can help folks grow by following the seven practices for Jesus-centered life: turn, learn, pray, worship, bless, go, and rest. Practices that help all of us, me included, grow deeper in the love of God, neighbor, and ourselves. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Visit the My Way of Love page on episcopalchurch.org to take your own Spiritual Life Inventory and get started on your own personalized journey on the Way of Love. Check out the Rev. Jay Sidebotham's work with RenewalWorks and Forward Movement.

In this episode, Bishop Curry talks with Heather Kirn Lanier – an essayist, poet, and creative writing professor. Heather's memoir, Raising A Rare Girl, invites us into her first year of parenting a daughter born with a rare syndrome. Bishop Curry talks with her about how we can change our life and the lives of those we encounter by changing our perspective and looking for the good in every person. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Find out more about Heather Kirn Lanier's work on her website. You can purchase Raising a Rare Girl online here or wherever books are sold.

Following a Jan. 6 noon Epiphany service at Church of the Epiphany in Washington, D.C., Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Michael Curry shared words of reflection and exhortation to the church and nation in a recorded message from the Lincoln Memorial. “The nightmare of last January 6th was not just an event—it was a revelation,” he said. “It was a revelation of deeply dangerous divisions in our nation. … That day, and our response to it, contain potential for both peril and promise.” On the web: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/presiding-bishop-curry-highlights-moment-of-peril-and-promise-on-one-year-anniversary-of-jan-6-attack/

In this episode, Bishop Curry talks with Bryan Stevenson – author, lawyer, and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama – about what it means to remember, reorient, and renew an active faith in Jesus and his Way of Love. This episode is a 3-part conversation recorded for the Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast’s December 4 Jubilee Revival: Just Mercy, Just Jesus. In this conversation, Bishop Curry and Stevenson reflect on three bits of scripture: Matthew 16:13-19; Luke 10:25-37; and Romans 5:1-5. This season of the Way of Love podcast is sponsored by Church Pension Group, a financial services organization providing employee benefits, property and casualty insurance, and publishing to The Episcopal Church. Follow CPG on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn to learn how it’s been a stable presence in the Church for more than 100 years. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Find out more about the work of the Equal Justice Initiative. Learn more about how Church Pension Group has been a stable presence in the Church for more than 100 years. Watch all of the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast’s revival, Just Mercy, Just Jesus. Don’t forget to post on social media how you’re BLESSing this week, using #WayofLove.

In this episode, Bishop Curry talks with the Very Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary. This audio comes from the 2020 International Black Clergy Conference, presented by The Episcopal Church’s Office of Black Ministries. To Worship on the Way of Love is to gather in community weekly to thank, praise, and dwell with God. Dean Brown Douglas and Bishop Curry discuss their understanding of being Black Episcopalians, and the lessons that the whole Church can learn from the earliest days of the Black Church through to the present day. As we explore our relationships with God, as we draw closer to God, we will find ourselves, in turn, drawing closer to each other. This season of the Way of Love podcast is sponsored by Church Pension Group, a financial services organization providing employee benefits, property and casualty insurance, and publishing to The Episcopal Church. Follow CPG on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn to learn how it’s been a stable presence in the Church for more than 100 years. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Discover more about The Episcopal Church’s Office of Black Ministries. Learn more about how Church Pension Group has been a stable presence in the Church for more than 100 years. Discover how you can Prepare to Become Beloved Community this Advent. Don’t forget to post on social media how you’re WORSHIPing this week, using #WayofLove.

In this episode, Bishop Curry talks with Kory Caudill and Wordsmith, two musicians supporting the Concert for the Human Family series – a project in collaboration with The Episcopal Church’s Becoming Beloved Community initiative, which seeks to build a world where all people may experience dignity and abundant life and see themselves and others as beloved children of God. To Go on the Way of Love is to cross boundaries, listen deeply, and live like Jesus. Kory and Wordsmith demonstrate how they’ve crossed musical boundaries in the pursuit of real and true reconciliation. As they’ve worked to support the concert series, built around the Prayer for the Human Family from the Book of Common Prayer, they discuss how music calls us into deeper relationship with God and each other. This season of the Way of Love podcast is sponsored by Church Pension Group, a financial services organization providing employee benefits, property and casualty insurance, and publishing to The Episcopal Church. Follow CPG on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn to learn how it’s been a stable presence in the Church for more than 100 years. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Say the Prayer for the Human Family from the Book of Common Prayer. Learn more about how Church Pension Group has been a stable presence in the Church for more than 100 years. Find out how you can participate in the Concert for the Human Family. Don’t forget to post on social media how you’re GOing this week, using #WayofLove. Subscribe now and listen each week wherever you get your podcasts or at wayoflove.episcopalchurch.org.

In this episode, recorded in July 2020, Bishop Curry talks with the Most Rev. Thabo Makgoba, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa. Archbishop Thabo’s life is punctuated with stories of hope and oppression, joy and anger, truth and reconciliation. To Pray on the Way of Love is to dwell intentionally with God each day, whether in though, word, or deed, individually or corporately. Far from a trite bit of advice or a platitude awkwardly expressed or a passive response to injustice, prayer is an intensely powerful practice that centers us on our relationship with God and undergirds the love we show to neighbors. Bishop Curry and Archbishop Makgoba discuss how prayer has been integral to the work of peace with justice in South Africa – through ministries and advocacy from the environment to racial reconciliation. As members of the worldwide Anglican Communion, The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Southern Africa work with partners around the world to share the love of God and neighbor in our varied contexts. This season of the Way of Love podcast is sponsored by Church Pension Group, a financial services organization providing employee benefits, property and casualty insurance, and publishing to The Episcopal Church. Follow CPG on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn to learn how it’s been a stable presence in the Church for more than 100 years. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. See how The Episcopal Church’s Office of Global Partnerships builds bridges beyond ourselves, including in South Africa. Learn more about how Church Pension Group has been a stable presence in the Church for more than 100 years. Check out Archbishop Thabo’s book, Faith & Courage: Praying with Mandela. Don’t forget to post on social media how you’re PRAYing this week, using #WayofLove.

In this episode, Bishop Curry talks with legendary leader Ruby Sales about her long and enduring work for civil rights and freedom in the United States. The two discuss how she was introduced to these movements, her search for a calling, and the potential of The Episcopal Church to lead in honest racial justice and reconciliation. To Go on the Way of Love is to cross boundaries, listen deeply, and live like Jesus. To do any of these things, and to have any hope of healing, we need to be able to tell each other the truth and go, as Ruby Sales says, “where it hurts.” Bishop Curry and Sales discuss how going where it hurts led to an encounter with Jonathan Myrick Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian whose ministry in Lowndes County, Alabama would lead to his martyrdom and her decades-long legacy of justice-making. They describe seeing past a dualistic understanding of history and toward a spiritual revolution that can actually affect change in society. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Consider where you and your congregation can Go through Becoming Beloved Community NOW. Watch our most recent episode of Traveling the Way of Love: Liverpool. Don’t forget to post on social media how you're GOing this week, using #WayofLove.

In this episode, Bishop Curry talks with Richard Rohr, OFM, about what it takes to turn and follow a Christ as big as the universe, choosing the Way of Love instead of the ways of our egos. The two discuss the spiritualities of addition and subtraction and the consequences for our country and ourselves when we spend more time placing Jesus on a pedestal than we do actively following him. The good news in all of this is that, like Fr. Rohr and Bishop Curry, we are all called by Jesus to follow the Way of Love. With God’s help, we can turn from the powers of sin, hatred, fear, injustice, and oppression toward the way of truth, love, hope, justice, and freedom. It is this reorienting of our whole selves - body, mind, and soul - on the love and life of Jesus that leads us away from cynicism and into freedom. This episode of The Way of Love podcast is sponsored by Church Divinity School of the Pacific. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Listen to Richard Rohr’s Another Name for Everything Podcast. Join in honoring all of creation through the Good News Garden Movement. Learn more about Church Divinity School of the Pacific. Consider where you and your congregation can Turn through our free offerings around Becoming Beloved Community. Don’t forget to post on social media how you're TURNing week, using #WayofLove. Resources mentioned during this episode: Reclaiming Jesus The Perfect Joy of St. Francis by Felix Timmermans The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr Center for Action and Contemplation Another Name for Everything Podcast

In this episode, Bishop Curry talks to Shane Claiborne, founder of the Simple Way and co-founder of Red Letter Christians, about the importance of spending time in the words of Jesus and allowing them to directly inform our thinking and actions. The two discuss what it means to pay particular attention to the “red letters” of the Bible – those in which Jesus is directly teaching and guiding us, even now. To learn on the Way of Love is to reflect on Scripture each day, especially on Jesus’ life and teachings. In a world that is only too eager to use scripture to justify cruelty, judgmentalism, and party politics, we as Christians are called to keep re-centering our lives and minds on our Lord’s words– to help bring about God’s dream for ourselves, our societies, and the whole world. This episode of The Way of Love podcast is sponsored by Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. After the Podcast Learn more about the Way of Love and creating your own rule of life based around the practices of Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Learn about Emory University's Candler School of Theology. Hear more from Bishop Curry on an episode of Traveling the Way of Love. Try a daily meditation on Scripture like Forward Movement's Forward Day by Day. Don’t forget to post on social media how you're LEARNing this week, using #WayofLove.