The Reverend Canon Ted Karpf, BA, ThM

There are people who simply do their work quietly and leave the world better than they found it. Ted Karpf is not one of them. He has done his work loudly, courageously, and with an open heart in some of the most difficult places on earth, and the world is immeasurably better for it.

For more than fifty years, the Reverend Canon Ted Karpf has served as an Episcopal priest, a public health pioneer, a spiritual director, a mentor, a father, and a witness to the grace that is possible even in the most broken of circumstances. His life has taken him from the parishes of Texas and Washington DC to the townships of South Africa, the halls of the World Health Organization in Geneva, and the intimate spaces where people face death, loss, and the long work of forgiveness.

Ted was among the first voices in the faith community to respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis in America, serving as the nation’s first HIV Liaison Specialist in the US Public Health Service from 1989 to 1993. He went on to receive two Ford Foundation grants totaling 1.5 million dollars to develop the concept of Decent Care, a framework for compassionate community based responses to health crises that continues to be taught and practiced around the world. His landmark book Restoring Hope: Decent Care in the Midst of HIV/AIDS, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008 and now in its second printing, remains a defining text in global public health.

As Provincial Canon for HIV/AIDS and Deputy to the Archbishop of Cape Town, Ted served under Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, successor to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, during some of the most urgent years of the AIDS crisis in Southern Africa. Ted had first worked alongside Archbishop Tutu years earlier during the struggle to end apartheid and the early work of restoring South Africa. He later served as Partnerships Officer at the World Health Organization from 2004 to 2011, where he led faith based and civil society engagement at the highest levels of international health policy. In 2010, the Secretary General of the United Nations recognised his contributions to international health and development through faith based engagement. Ted was made Canon for Life by the Diocese of Washington DC in 2008 for his global leadership in international health and development. He has been named a Distinguished Alumnus of both Texas Wesleyan University and Boston University, and has served on the faculties of the University of North Texas, Boston University School of Theology, and the College of Preachers in Washington DC. Through all of this, Ted has remained first and foremost a parish priest. He currently serves at St. Bede’s Episcopal Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he preaches, offers spiritual direction, and walks alongside those facing illness, grief, and the ordinary extraordinary challenges of being human. He is a certified Gestalt therapist, a longtime LGBTQ+ rights advocate, a gay man, a father of two adult children, and a grandfather.

His memoir, Acts of Forgiveness: Faith Journeys of a Gay Priest, published by McFarland/Toplight Books in 2019, is the story of a life lived inside contradiction with honesty, courage, and an unshakeable commitment to forgiveness as a way of living. It has moved readers around the world to reflection, to conversation, and to their own journeys of healing.