DESCRIPTION:

Interview with Rev. Dr. Bernice Kirkland, Clergy and Critical Care Nurse. 

The Reverend Doctor Melissa Sexton is a post-doctoral fellow in the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine and an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church.  Dr. Sexton is completing a practicum with the Interfaith Health Program as part of her fellowship; as part of that work, she is interviewing those with particular insights into the religious and spiritual dimensions of the COVID-19 outbreak and our responses to it.  

The interview begins with Reverend Kirkland discussing how her response to COVID-19 has been informed by her own life and the things that ground her.  Her skills as a nurse and her call to ordained ministry have offered her a particular perspective to see what God is calling us to do as a society—to be faithful stewards of the entire creation.  Bernice believes that we have made the individual the focus in most of her efforts; we are being called by COVID-19 to respond not as individuals but by working together.  We can only get through this together.  Yes, we have to respond in our individual ways but we must also do so collaboratively.