Ex-R.I. priest who follows two faiths faces ouster

Sunday, March 15, 2009
By Richard C. Dujardin
Journal Staff Writer

Even as a Brown University student, Ann Holmes Redding was never far away from controversy.

She was barely into her freshman year in 1968 when she joined a black student walkout to get the university to admit more blacks — a move that resulted in a near quadrupling of the number of black students to about 250 the following year.

And after students staged a strike that effectively closed down the university to show their opposition to the Vietnam War, Redding was part of a “blue ribbon” delegation from Brown that went in the spring of 1970 to Washington to talk to such alumni as White House aide Charles Colson and U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell about ending the conflict.

But these days, as she approaches the 25th anniversary of her ordination as an Episcopal priest on March 25, Redding, who lives in Seattle, faces controversy of a different sort. She is on the verge of being defrocked by Rhode Island Episcopal Bishop Geralyn Wolf because of her insistence that she can be a Muslim and Christian at the same time. the rest