What's it like being both chair of the board and shepherd of the flock? The Right Reverend Carolyn Tanner Irish is learning day by day.
Recently appointed to the Episcopal Diocese of Utah, Irish is one of only five women among 109 Episcopal bishops in the United States. She also presides over the family business, the O.C. Tanner Co., a jewelry firm with 2,000 employees and $240 million in annual sales. Irish, who hails from a prominent Mormon family, inherited her corporate position -- but her place in the church came only after a long spiritual odyssey.
As a student at Stanford in the late 1950s, Irish began questioning the tenets of the Mormon religion and eventually left the church. After marrying Leon Eugene Irish, '60, she studied philosophy at the University of Michigan and at Oxford. They settled in Washington, D.C., and Irish discovered the Episcopal Church in the mid-'70s. "I had attended a lot of different services and religious groups, but I wasn't particularly searching for another church home," she recalls.
But that's exactly what she found. As her involvement with the Episcopal Church increased, Irish decided to study for a divinity degree and was ordained in 1983. Both her marriage and a two-year stint as Michigan's archdeacon ended in 1988. Returning to Washington, she worked as staff associate for spiritual development at the National Cathedral before being consecrated bishop in Utah two years ago.
When she's not conducting services for 1,200 congregants at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark in Salt Lake City, Irish travels to the 5,000 parishioners and 56 clergy at the 21 churches throughout her diocese. "I preach and teach," she says. "That's my favorite part of the job.".
Friends say Irish is a good fit for her new post. "It's hard for me to think of anybody with a better combination of the intellectual or the emotional or attitudinal components that you require in a priest," says Stanford philosophy professor Julius Moravcsik.
That combination seems to be equally important in her other job, as chair of the board at the O.C. Tanner Co., where she has overseen gifts to homeless shelters, the YWCA and the Utah Symphony. "I'm very proud of being a good corporate neighbor," Irish says.
She concedes it's surprising to find a businesswoman who's also a bishop. But she adds: "Almost everything that's happened to me has been kind of a surprise."
-- Matthew E. Milliken, '93
