Pem's Resignation from the Priesthood

Pem's Resignation from the Priesthood is the decisive rupture in the life of Thomas Pemberton, the Episcopal rector of St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in New York City, who abandons the Christian ministry after a long and agonizing crisis of faith and sets himself on the path toward Judaism and marriage to Rabbi Sarah Blumenthal. The resignation is not a single dramatic moment but a process of quiet decertification, accomplished through an exchange of letters rather than any public spectacle, and it is inseparable from the strange events that first unsettled him: the theft of the church's eight-foot hollow brass cross and its reappearance, tarnished and shining, lying flat on the tarred roof of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism on Ninety-eighth Street. The act closes one life and opens another, and Pem himself describes it as his final act as a Christian and an ex-Christian priest, a formulation that captures the paradox of a man who feels most completely Christian precisely when he is studying to be a Jew.