Marvin Ellison and Tamara Torres McGovern co-host “Queer Spirit” on OUT Cast, a forum for LGBTQ+ issues, for WMPG community radio (90.9 FM, Portland, ME) and WERU (89.9 FM, Blue Hill, ME). Queer Spirit explores queer life and the power of the Sacred through interviews with queer folks from different traditions and spiritualities.
Marvin Ellison, a scholar-activist and educator for justice, is an ordained Presbyterian minister who taught Christian social ethics for more than three decades at Bangor Theological Seminary. He founded Maine’s Religious Coalition Against Discrimination and also the Maine Interfaith Council for Reproductive Choices. Currently, he serves as a volunteer chaplain at Planned Parenthood and as a board member of the Eleanor Humes Haney Fund, which supports grassroots social justice initiatives throughout Maine.
Rev. Tamara Torres McGovern recently relocated from Maine to Colorado, where she is Head Minister of Programs for the First Congregational Church in Greeley. She found her way to ministry via a circuitous path that included spiritual formation as a yoga instructor, holistic cook, musician, and massage therapist. She has a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Mount Holyoke and a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary where her focus was Voices from the Margins. Tamara was ordained in 2013 and has served church congregations and emergent spiritual communities in Connecticut, Maine, and now Colorado. She also dreams of a spiritual community where people are welcome in all of their messy, passionate, embodied suffering and hopefulness. She dreams of a place where justice is being held up as not only as the right thing to do, but as a path to encountering God.