Welcome from the Dean
Dear Members and Friends of the Philadelphia Cathedral:
With great joy and gratitude, I have walked through the open door set before me to return to Philadelphia Cathedral as your Dean. Over the coming weeks and months, I look forward to getting to know each one of you, to renewing relationships, and to listening to your hopes, concerns, and dreams for your own lives and for our common life in this magnificent and holy place.
There is much before us in the years ahead as our Cathedral is poised to grow and flourish as a sacred place of prayerful inspiration, healing, and gathering. We at the Cathedral are uniquely called through ministries of grace and hospitality to be the hands and heart of Christ as we tend to the needs of both the urban community around us and our Diocese as it moves towards reconciliation and new life. Our worship at the Cathedral has the power to promote more profound communion with God and one another and to reveal the loving compassion and hope at the core of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. After the ancient pattern of the Church, our Cathedral is also a place where we may come together beyond differences for learning, vigorous theological exploration, liturgical innovation, and beautiful religious expression as we also enjoy the experience of God’s good gifts of music and the arts. Advancing this vision together will require our love, wisdom, courage, patience, and the strength that we gain from God and one another as we prayerfully discern and follow the leading of the Holy Spirit.
You will find that I am generally uncomfortable with much use of the first person nominative singular pronoun, but I would like to begin to introduce myself to those of you whom I have not yet met by sharing some personal history beyond my recent ministry at the Church of the Redeemer, Bryn Mawr. I was born and raised in Connecticut, but I have lived in Philadelphia all of my adult life and consider myself to be a Philadelphian. I am a graduate of Wellesley College where I majored in English and Political Science. I pursued studies in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded the M.Div. from the General Theological Seminary. I completed a portion of my theological studies at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia where I received the Winters Scholarship Award and the Maul Award for academic merit and promise for ministry. Prior to ordination, I left a career in corporate marketing to direct non-profit organizations which promoted access to higher education for youth with limited opportunity through a combination of long-term mentoring, academic enrichment, and scholarship support. The Sponsor-A-Scholar Program, replicated in 16 cities throughout the U.S., through private and public partnerships, was recognized by President Clinton with a Point of Light Award. My experiences working with these youth and their families were instrumental in discerning my call to ordained ministry.
Liturgical expression, spiritual formation, seminary preparation, urban outreach, and interfaith dialogue are deep interests of mine. In the Diocese of Pennsylvania, I am currently Chair of the Diocesan Liturgical Commission and a member of the Spiritual Growth Resources Committee. I have served as Adjunct Faculty at the Lutheran Seminary, leading a group of Episcopal and Lutheran seminarians in pastoral formation. I have also served on the faculty of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation’s Preaching Excellence Program for students in Episcopal seminaries throughout the U.S. and have recently been invited to be a reader for the General Board of Examining Chaplains. I have had the privilege of supervising several seminarians who are all now ordained and I look forward to welcoming a new seminarian to the Cathedral in the fall. Episcopal Community Services and the Greater Philadelphia Interfaith Center, housed at our Cathedral, are two organizations about which I am passionate and serve on the Board of Directors. As Cathedral Dean, I look forward to the deepening of vital and meaningful partnerships with these groups and many others across the Diocese and the City of Philadelphia.
My husband Gil Rosenthal and I have been married for 26 years. Gil is an architect, urban designer, and partner in the multidisciplinary design firm of Wallace Roberts & Todd. Our older daughter Emily is a Wellesley graduate and has just finished her first year of medical school at Thomas Jefferson University. Our younger daughter Grace graduated from Kenyon College in May. We live in the Chestnut Hill section of the City with our two dogs: Milo who is a Bichon Frisé and Biddy who is a Golden Retriever. Milo and Biddy frequently accompany me to work and on walks. My family, with the exception of Milo and Biddy, will be in church this Sunday and look forward to becoming part of the Cathedral community.
As we begin our journey together, I invite you to pray regularly and with renewed vigor for the ministries of the Philadelphia Cathedral, for its members and its friends, and for the Diocese of Pennsylvania. If you have not participated at the Cathedral recently, I invite you to come and see “that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new …by him through whom all things were made…” (Book of Common Prayer, 528). And please know that my door is always open.
Faithfully,
Judy Sullivan+
Dean
1 Jul, 2010 — The Very Rev. Judith A. Sullivan
