Stories from an Unintentional Preacher: a memoir

Stories from an Unintentional Preacher: a memoir

Stories from an Unintentional Preacher is a memoir and social history of a woman who inadvertently stumbled into the ordained ministry and eventually church pulpits. Following early years of elementary school teaching, raising children, and experiencing divorce, she took up the challenge as a mid-career woman, went back to school, earned a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and set out to teach in theological education. The unintentional journey into preaching came when, based on her commitments to feminism, she found herself face to face with the tradition of male-dominated institutions of religion, merely because she needed a part-time job to support her children and herself in graduate school. She had never been interested in being a church pastor–let alone preaching, but suddenly this is where she lands. As the protagonist’s life story unfolds throughout the late 20th century in the United States, readers will enjoy following one woman’s life as she weaves together her sermons along with stories from her professional career and personal life. The sermons in this memoir speak not only to her life, but the wider social structures within society then–and as now: racism, sexism, widespread poverty, our addiction to war, and the urgency of climate change. Readers will be pulled into and through this book as pulpits continue to be put before her as she moves from professor at Union Theological Seminary in NYC, to academic dean of a Methodist seminary in Kansas City, and finally, to becoming the first woman to be a president of one of the largest, mainline Protestant seminaries in the United States–at the Pacific School of Religion, in Berkeley, California.