Kate McCormick, MDiv
Background and
Intersections of Interest
Raised in Indianapolis, I eventually went to Indiana University Bloomington, (semi-) confident that I would become a high school English teacher. A riveting lecture by Merriman Smith, a reporter whose single-handed coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy had been honored with a Pulitzer Prize, convinced me that my future would somehow be in reporting. I changed my major and graduated in 1968 with an undergraduate degree in journalism.
I worked first for The Indianapolis Star, and later for The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts, and finally, Newsday, on Long Island, New York. Most of my Newsday years were spent in helping to launch and develop parts of New York Newsday, the youngest edition of the Long Island newspaper. Although I began my career as a reporter, I gradually found editing to be more satisfying.
In my 18 years with New York Newsday I edited a wide variety of stories and features as a news editor, as well as a range of opinion pieces during six years as an op-ed editor. During that time I also developed a particular interest in stories and essays about faith and the histories and roles of churches in society.
In that time I also helped to launch and edit the first regular column focused on gay issues to appear in a major American newspaper.
My life in newspaper journalism ended abruptly, however, in July of 1995 when New York Newsday ended operations, and I was left looking for a new job. Fortunately, I was upheld by the church in which I had become active: the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles. Located in Manhattan, its outreach was dominated by its work as the largest daily feeding program for homeless people in New York City. It opened my eyes to the possibilities (and needs) for community service.
By 1997 I was working as an administrative assistant at Gouverneur Court, a new supported-housing venture on the far East Side of Manhattan. The job was not lucrative, but the time I worked there represented two of the richest years of my life. The 123-unit apartment building held formerly homeless people in small apartments. It was my job to help the clients learn how to negotiate daily life away from the streets.
My time at Gouverneur Court ended when I accepted an unexpected offer to become associate editor of the Episcopal News Service, based at the church’s national headquarters in Manhattan. This allowed me a view of the church from the very top of its national structure. For two years, I spoke daily with people in all kinds of ministries, learning about the church’s triumphs and problems.
During that time, a small group of women at the church center pursued the idea of organizing a prayer book reflecting the lives and experiences of women. They were inundated by responses to their church-wide request for original prayers, meditations, litanies and other religious writings; I was one of three professional editors brought in to turn the material into a book. The result was Women’s Uncommon Prayers: Our Lives Revealed, Nurtured, Celebrated (Morehouse Publishing, 2000).
And that experience nurtured the idea that I could learn even more about the church if I went back to school. In 2000 I enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, from which I received a Master of Divinity degree in 2003.
I had lived in retirement with my wife, Lu-Anne Conner, an Episcopal priest, for some years until we arrived in the Diocese of Missouri in 2016, ready to begin a new life at a new (to us) church. It wasn’t long before I took up work with a group assigned by the diocesan bishop to explore issues surrounding the prayer book and baptism, and to present our findings to the annual clergy conference.
The group continued its discussions, with an eye toward offering ideas for the ongoing study of possible changes to the Episcopal Church’s aging Book of Common Prayer. I accepted its challenge to be copyeditor of its book, A Eucharist-Shaped Church (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2022).