TOPEKA —First woman elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas was ordained Saturday.

The Rev. Cathleen Chittenden Bascom, D.Min., from the Diocese of Iowa,  was elected as the 10th bishop to lead the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas in October.

The diocese’s Youtube channel provided a live stream of the service from Grace Cathedral in Topeka.

According to a media release from the diocese, on October 19, the Rev. Cathleen Chittenden Bascom, D.Min., from the Diocese of Iowa, was elected as the 10th bishop to lead the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas. She was elected on the second ballot during an election that took place in the worship space of Grace Cathedral in Topeka, receiving 64 out of 122 votes from lay delegates and 56 out of 84 votes from clergy.

Bascom is the first woman to be elected bishop since the diocese was formed in 1859. This also marked the first time in the history of the Episcopal Church that a bishop heading a diocese was elected from a slate of candidates who all were women.

The Very Rev. Foster Mays, president of the governing body that has overseen the diocese in the interim period between bishops, said, “ It delights me that Cathleen Bascom will be our next bishop. While this election was historic, at its core lay delegates and clergy were selecting the person who will lead this diocese for the next decade or more. I believe Mother Bascom’s many gifts and years of experience will serve this diocese well.

“I know that clergy and lay leaders from all our congregations are looking forward to the opportunity to participate in ministry with her, to share together the good news of Jesus and to serve the world in the name of our Lord. I’m very excited for the future of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas under her leadership.”

Bascom has been serving since the fall of 2014 as Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Waldorf University in Forest City, Iowa. She previously had been dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Des Moines, Iowa, as well as rector of St. Stephen’s in Newton, Iowa.

She served for eight years in the Diocese of Kansas from 1993 to 2001, leading ministry efforts at Kansas State University in Manhattan.

She is the third priest to have served within the Diocese of Kansas to be elected its bishop. The first was Frank Millspaugh, who was dean of Grace Cathedral, Topeka, when he was elected bishop in 1895. The second was Richard Grein, who was rector of St. Michael and all Angels in Mission when he was elected in 1981.

She also is the second priest to become Kansas’ bishop while serving in the Diocese of Iowa. The first was Thomas Vail, the diocese’s first bishop, who was rector of Trinity Church in Muscatine, Iowa, when he was elected bishop in 1864.

Bascom and her husband Tim have two sons – Conrad, age 25, and Luke, age 21.

 

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — Wake Forest athletic director Ron Wellman is retiring and the school has chosen former Kansas State AD John Currie to replace him.

President Nathan Hatch announced the moves Sunday, saying Wellman will retire and Currie will start on May 1.

“John is the perfect fit to follow in the footsteps of his mentor,” Hatch said.

Mary Lawrence & I are humbled by @PresidentHatch's invitation to return home to @WakeForest @DemonDeacons . Ron & Linda Wellman have been our ultimate mentors & the consummate example of #professional #excellence & #integrity. #GoDeacs!

— John Currie (@John_Currie) March 3, 2019

Wellman, the longest-tenured AD in Division I, has led Wake Forest’s athletic department since 1992. The school has won five team national championships and seven individual titles under his watch, including men’s tennis in 2018, while raising $400 million in donations during his tenure of nearly 27 years.

The 47-year-old Currie is a Wake Forest alumnus who was Kansas State’s AD from 2009-17. He spent much of 2017 at Tennessee before he was suspended in the midst of the search to replace football coach Butch Jones that turned into a fiasco. He received a $2.5 million settlement with the school in March 2018.

He is taking over a Wake Forest program that is mostly on solid footing, with Dave Clawson’s football program winning three bowl games in three years and a collection of new facilities popping up all over the campus — including an indoor practice facility for football that opened in 2016 and a sports performance center and basketball facility that is scheduled to open later this year.

The most pressing immediate question faced by the department centers on men’s basketball, though the season will end well before Currie’s official start date.

Coach Danny Manning is 65-90 overall and 24-64 in conference play with one NCAA Tournament appearance in five seasons. Barring a miracle run in the postseason, the Demon Deacons are headed for their seventh losing season since 2010 — also the last year they finished above .500 in ACC play.

By STEPHEN KORANDA

Kansas Democrats scored critical wins in the last election. Now they’re struggling to transform those victories into Democratic-minded policies, and to hold on to the corners of power they’ve captured.

They meet in their annual convention this weekend to pick party leaders and search for consensus on strategies for governing and see if they can repeat last year’s election wins next year.

“It’s a time for Democrats to celebrate,” said Kansas House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer in an interview, “but we need to keep working and moving forward.”

In 2018, Democrat Laura Kelly won the governor’s race and Democrat Sharice Davids unseated a Republican incumbent to represent the Kansas City suburbs in Congress.

The 2020 election will put all the state legislative seats on the table and a prize Democrats have dreamed of for decades: an open U.S. Senate seat they like to think they can win.

Next year’s races could launch Democrats on a new path to political relevance in Kansas. Or it could leave the party withering into the triviality of the recent past, when Republicans held all the statewide offices, congressional seats and huge majorities in the Statehouse.

At the state Republican Party convention last month, Republicans made clear they’re eager to oust Davids from the 3rd Congressional District in 2020 and set up Kelly for defeat in 2022.

Yet some Democrats think the 2018 elections showed that the party can gain even more ground.

“That’s given folks a renewed sense of opportunity and optimism,” said Kansas Democratic Party Executive Director Ethan Corson. “It is a state that Democrats can win in and can be successful in.”

Republicans aim to make that hard. Kelly’s major budget and education proposals have so far fallen on deaf ears with Republicans, who still hold large majorities in the Legislature and the leadership jobs that come with that.

The initial stumbles haven’t discouraged Democrats, Corson said. He points out that Kelly’s still been able to accomplish things, such as signing an executive order barring discrimination against LGBT state workers.

“I don’t think anybody by any stretch ever thought it was going to be easy for the governor,” Corson said. “I’m still optimistic that she’s going to get those priorities accomplished.”

There’s a way to grease the skids for the governor’s agenda in the future: win more seats in the Legislature. Sawyer, the party’s top leader in the Kansas House, said that needs to be a major focus for Democrats.

“The next chair (of the party) needs to focus a lot on the Legislature,” Sawyer said, “to gain a few more Democrats so we can help the governor out.”

To do that, Sawyer said the party needs to build up its infrastructure into areas of the state where it’s all but disappeared, to raise money and to recruit candidates into more races.

Departing Democratic Party Chairman John Gibson, who decided not to run for another term, started that work. He boosted outreach and said now more than 75 of the state’s 105 counties have an organized Democratic Party.

Democratic state Rep. Barbara Ballard, from Lawrence, said that push needs to expand for the party to gain influence and win elections.

“If you make sure that rural areas are being included in this process, and not just all urban, then it says we are all in this together,” Ballard said.

To make inroads, Democrats will need a message they can sell. Gov. Kelly pitched herself as a consensus builder. She pushed priorities such as Medicaid expansion and education funding while working attract to moderate Republican voters.

According to Ballard, Kelly’s victory last year shows it’s a winning political position that Democrats should continue to use.

“You moved where you needed to move in order to get the job done,” she said. “Why would you want to change it?”

Democrats have had mixed fortunes in recent years. In 2016, they picked up around a dozen seats in the Legislature. They formed a coalition with moderate Republicans that helped roll back tax cuts and increase spending on schools.

In 2018, while Democrats won the governor’s office and the seat in Congress, the party failed to pick up any other statewide offices or House seats. After the election, three Republicans switched parties, leaving the GOP with an 84-41 majority in the House and 28-11 edge in the Senate. The Senate also has one independent member.

Republicans still dominate statewide offices, the Kansas congressional delegation and the Legislature.

At least three people have announced runs for chair of the Democratic Party.

Current party Vice Chair Vicki Hiatt said she’s already had a hand in expanding the party’s infrastructure and recruiting candidates. As chair, she would continue expansion into more areas of Kansas and focus on the fundraising needed to build the party.

She’d concentrate on protecting Davids’ congressional seat and shoot to win next year’s U.S. Senate race.

“We will be working really hard for the U.S. Senate candidate,” she said. “That will be a target.”

George Hanna, from Tecumseh, was a candidate for the House in the last election and said he’d focus on gains in rural areas.

“We all have a job to do — fundraise, develop an inclusive caucus process and find our new representatives,” he said in a Facebook post announcing he would run.

A third candidate, Chris Roesel from Johnson County, touts his experience running for local elected offices.

But the field of candidates is not limited. The Democratic convention will bring together hundreds of party loyalists from across the state. The leadership elections are open to all nominations and more than 200 party members will vote to pick the winner.

“Anybody can run,” Sawyer said. “Quite often it is pretty wide open.”

Stephen Koranda is the Statehouse reporter the Kansas News Service Kansas. Follow him on Twitter @kprkoranda.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump announced Saturday he would soon sign an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal resources.

Trump is highlighting concerns from some conservatives that their voices were being censored, whether on social media or at the nation’s universities. He did not go into more detail about what the order would say, but his comments immediately drew scrutiny from those who noted that public research universities already have a constitutional obligation to protect free speech.

https://t.co/PTLqvZNwqY

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2019

“An executive order is unnecessary as public research universities are already bound by the First Amendment, which they deeply respect and honor,” said Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. “It is core to their academic mission.”

Trump invited Hayden Williams to join him Saturday while he addressed activists attending the Conservative Political Action Conference. Williams was punched Feb. 19 while on the campus of University of California, Berkeley. He was recruiting for the conservative group Talking Points USA.

Two men approached and one punched him during a confrontation captured on student cellphones. University of California, Berkeley police arrested a suspect, Zachary Greenberg, on Friday.

Williams, who had a black eye, told Fox News that the men objected to a sign that said “Hate Crime Hoaxes Hurt Real Victims.”

Neither Williams nor Greenberg are affiliated with UC Berkeley.

Trump told the audience Saturday that Williams “took a hard punch in the face for all of us.” Meanwhile, Williams said many conservative students face “discrimination, harassment or worse if they dare speak up on campus.”

Trump offered no details about what the executive order might say about what has become a thorny issue on college campuses.

DALLAS COUNTY — One person died in an accident just after 1:30p.m. Saturday in Dallas County.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2009 Acura driven by Henry J. Hekemeyer, 75, Jefferson City, was southbound on Highway 73 just south of Rainbow Road.  The vehicle traveled off the road, struck an embankment and overturned.

EMS transported the driver to Mercy Hospital in Springfield.

Lifeflight transported a passenger Phyllis A.  Heckemeyer, 71, Jefferson, to Mercy Hospital in Springfield where she died.  Both were properly restrained at the time of the accident, according to the KHP.