In the half-year since a leading bishop struck and killed a bicyclist on a suburban Maryland roadside, much has changed. A husband and father has been buried. Heather Cook has been charged with manslaughter and drunken driving and has been defrocked. The Episcopal Church has launched conversations about addiction and the process of how clergy are picked.

But silence continues to surround Cook herself, a popular 58-year-old raised in a prominent Baltimore church family who has been in treatment for addiction since her Subaru struck Thomas Palermo on Dec. 27. She has said nothing publicly, and details of what happened that day, or in Cook’s life in the months and years previously, have remained relatively thin.

Cook is scheduled to go on trial Thursday, although some members of the diocese close to the court process say the proceedings are likely to be postponed. Efforts to confirm this with Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and the office of Judge Wanda Heard were unsuccessful Wednesday.

Cook’s attorney, David Irwin, has said his client was driving the car that hit Palermo, and a bicyclist near the accident scene reportedly tailed her severely damaged car before she returned to the scene.

Prosecutors laid out some of their case when they charged her in January with a slew of crimes, including manslaughter, leaving the scene, driving under the influence of alcohol and texting while driving. Irwin, however, has said nothing about Cook’s defense or whether she will testify — if the trial goes forward.

Much of the intense interest around Palermo’s killing has been not on Cook’s trial but on broader questions about church accountability, addiction and how clergy are treated and screened.

Cook had had a drunken-driving arrest in 2010 when she was working in the Easton Diocese — on Maryland’s Eastern Shore — before coming to the Baltimore area, the graphic details of which were not known to the small committee that picked her. They knew she had a drunken driving arrest but not that she was too inebriated to take a sobriety test, had vomited on herself and was driving on her tire rims. They did not share even the basic detail of her arrest with the hundreds of people who approved her election a year ago.

Disgust with the decisions around these issues led the denomination to create committees focused on how drinking is handled in the church, as well as how leaders are selected and whether their histories are properly vetted and shared with the community. At the denomination’s General Convention this month, an event that takes place every three years, they will discuss possible policy changes.

The question, said the Rev. Gay Jennings, president of the House of Deputies for the denomination, is: How are leaders picked?

“Are we being fully aware of their histories and backgrounds and strengths, weaknesses, the areas that need attention? . . . I think what happened in Maryland focused attention on it,” she said Wednesday. “Are we doing a good job? Was this an outlier? Or were there things we should take a look at?”

Some in the denomination say the Cook case reflects resistance in the Episcopal Church to put bishops fully into the public light, to demand total transparency around them.

“We may want someone who is perfect, but if the pedestal is too high, that means there is farther for them to fall,” Jennings said.

Last month, Bishop Eugene Taylor Sutton, head of the Maryland diocese, announced that Cook’s spot would be filled by Chilton Knudsen, a former Maine bishop who has been in recovery from alcoholism for decades and has written and taught extensively on the topic.

Knudsen, who will start in the fall in Maryland, has co-written two books on addiction and recovery, including “So You Think You Don’t Know One: Addiction and Recovery in Clergy and Congregations.”

The Rev. Daniel Webster, a Sutton spokesman, said Knudsen’s appointment is part of the process of the diocese improving its understanding of the factors that led to the deadly December crash.

“Bishop Sutton has said we didn’t know a lot before about addiction, and we are committed to learning more,” Webster said Wednesday.