James D. Conley

Styles of James Douglas Conley
Reference style	His Excellency
Spoken style	Your Excellency
Religious style	Bishop

James Douglas Conley (born March 19, 1955) is the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lincoln in the state of Nebraska in the midwestern United States.

Raised in a Presbyterian family, James Conley was born in Kansas City, Missouri, to Carl (d. 2006) and Betty Conley (b. 1923). He has one sister by adoption, Susan (b. 1962). Conley is of Wea Native American descent through his paternal grandmother's family. He and his family moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1957, and to Arvada, Colorado, in 1959.

Conley attended Hoskinson Cottage School in Arvada before moving to Overland Park, Kansas, at age 8. He was a childhood friend and schoolmate of Paul S. Coakley, who became Bishop of Salina in 2004 and in 2011 was named Archbishop of Oklahoma City. Conley graduated from Shawnee Mission West High School in 1973, and then entered the University of Kansas (KU); because of his Native American heritage, the Bureau of Indian Affairs paid for a portion of his college education. He studied in KU's Integrated Humanities Program, whose courses on Greek and Roman classics led him to convert to Catholicism on December 6, 1975.

Conley obtained a bachelor's degree in English literature from KU in 1977, and then worked in construction in Kansas City, Kansas before traveling through Europe. Like Paul Coakley, he also considered a monastic vocation at the Abbey of Notre Dame de Fontgombault in France. Conley returned to the United States in 1978, and worked on a friend's farm near Courtland, Kansas. Following the 1979 visit of Pope John Paul II to the United States, he decided to pursue a vocation to the priesthood and entered St. Pius X Seminary in Erlanger, Kentucky, in 1980. He later studied at Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he earned a master's degree in divinity in 1985.