Welcome!

My name is Miguel Escobar and I am an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Long Island, currently serving a two-year curacy at San Andrés Episcopal Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. My work centers on the intersection of faith, justice, and economics, including through research and presentations on Christianity’s complicated relationship with money, wealth, and poverty. I write and think about these issues from my location in a parish setting, and more specifically as someone committed to Spanish-language, Latino ministry.  

As a writer, I focus on how Christianity has wrestled with questions of money from its earliest days to the present. My first book, The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today, traces how the early Church’s stance on wealth shifted over the first five centuries, going from a position of sharp critique to eventual accommodation, and reflects on what was gained and lost in that transition. I’m currently working on a second book that explores the ways money shows up during Jesus’ final week of life. By my count, money surfaces fourteen times in Holy Week, with overarching themes of corruption and sacrificial offering. Money is present in the motivations behind Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion but it is also a way of talking about sacrificial offering and the effect of the Resurrection. Click here to read a sermon which talks about this in more depth. 

Although only recently ordained, I have been working in the Episcopal Church for eighteen years including roles in communications, program administration, and fundraising. I have served as communications assistant to Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, directed leadership and formation programs at the Episcopal Church Foundation, and coordinated the Anglican Studies program at Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary, later serving as operations director. In each role, I have worked to strengthen theological education and leadership formation for a changing and diverse Church, skills which I now bring to the parish. See more of my professional background here. 

My academic path began at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, where I studied Roman Catholic social justice traditions and Latin American liberation theologies. I later earned a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 2007.  I currently serve on the boards of Episcopal Relief & Development and Rural & Migrant Ministries, and on many Fridays I spend my mornings accompanying asylum seekers in immigration court with The New Sanctuary Coalition.