Conversations about Divine Mystery: Essays in Honor of Gail Ramshaw

By Stephen Burns and HyeRan Kim-Cragg

For decades, Gail Ramshaw has lent her liturgical and theological creativity to the church's life in worship. Her past-presidency of the North American Academy of Liturgy is a signal of her gravitas in the academy, not to mention the more than two dozen books she has produced. For the churches--and not only her own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America--she has, internationally and ecumenically, and in part through active involvement in the World Council of Churches (WCC), had her work included in the ritual books of many traditions around the world.

Here, in a fitting recognition of a life of scholarship and reflection, is an esteemed collection of writing by liturgical and homiletical scholars honoring and engaging with Gail Ramshaw's work and extending it further to new questions, contexts, and concerns.

The volume is organized around the key themes of Ramshaw's work: lectionary patterns, prayer forms, and theological horizons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781506474823

Book preview

In Praise of Conversations about Divine Mystery

This collection honors in beautiful ways the things Gail Ramshaw cares about in her scholarship: an expansive language of liturgy, myth and metaphor that delve into divine mystery, a sacramental theology that cares about the earth.

—Andrea Bieler, professor of practical theology, University of Basel (Switzerland), and author of The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, and Resurrection

Words matter and words have power. Gail Ramshaw has dedicated her life’s vocation to putting into words the wit, wonder, and wisdom of God. Through her work, we are invited into a treasury of riches—lectionary, liturgy, prayer, and praise—all expressing the beauty of the divine mystery. Join in these conversations and see how Ramshaw’s treasury of riches can also shape your life.

—The Rev. Kevin L. Strickland, bishop, Southeastern Synod, ELCA

Conversations about Divine Mystery

Conversations about Divine Mystery

Essays in Honor of Gail Ramshaw

Stephen Burns & HyeRan Kim-Cragg, Editors

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

CONVERSATIONS ABOUT DIVINE MYSTERY

Essays in Honor of Gail Ramshaw

Copyright © 2023 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Library of Congress Control Number 2022060047 (print)

Cross designs created/compiled by Marti Naughton

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-7481-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-7482-3

Contents

Foreword: A Woman Writing in a Tower

Gordon W. Lathrop

Acknowledgments

Contributors

A Crowded Dining Room, a Quilt, a Grove: An Introduction to Gail Ramshaw

Stephen Burns and HyeRan Kim-Cragg

Preface: Enjoying the Conversations

HyeRan Kim-Cragg and Stephen Burns

1. Liturgical Identification

Gerald C. Liu

2. A Snake in the Garden, a Traveler on the Road: Myth and Metaphor in Liturgical Life

Rhodora Beaton

3. Embodied Reverence: Eucharistic Spirituality in Denmark, Then and Now

Jette Bendixen Rønkilde

4. Orthodoxy and Inclusivity? Naming God in Baptism

Bryan Cones

5. Liturgical Language for Self-Inclusion

Lis Valle-Ruiz

6. The Deeper Craving

Donyelle McCray

7. The Art of Intercession: Learning from Gail Ramshaw

James W. Farwell

8. Toward Prayer for the Earth: A Theological Reflection on Praying for the Whole World in a Pentecostal Megachurch

Tanya Riches and Anna Kirkpatrick-Jung

9. Praying with the Tree of Life

Kimberly Bracken Long

10. A Fragile Tree of Life: A Metaphor Touching Heaven and Earth, Death and Life

Benjamin M. Stewart

Afterword: Metaphor, Ritual, and the Mystery of Resurrection

Melinda A. Quivik

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

A Woman Writing in a Tower

Since at least 1965, the American scholar, author, and Lutheran laywoman Gail Ramshaw has sought out and written down for the benefit of the rest of us words that bring the mystery of God to expression. This volume gathers together the work of other people who have wished to engage with her writing. Those authors—and the editors, Stephen Burns of Melbourne and HyeRan Kim-Cragg of Toronto—intend this volume as grateful thanks to Ramshaw, and as an invitation for you to engage with her work yourself, if you have not already done so. The book seeks to do this with the same ecumenical and worldwide breadth that has animated her work. But at the outset, something should be said briefly about her life, and about the full range of her writing.

Gail Dorothy Ramshaw was born in 1947 in New York City, to a family deeply but also critically engaged in the life of the relatively conservative Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. After an infancy in New York and a childhood and young adulthood in various towns in Connecticut, she was admitted to Valparaiso University in Indiana as an English major. The chapel life of that independent Lutheran university was rich, and there she found what became her lifelong vocation. It is a story she willingly tells: early in her sophomore year, she voiced her concern to the chaplain about the inadequacy of the language of the Sunday intercessions, and soon found herself appointed to write those texts herself. So it began. She has been writing and thinking about prayers ever since. Thus, before she finished college, she also undertook a project to collect such new eucharistic prayers as then existed in the churches, and to create a new such prayer herself. Then, with a BA in hand, she began to study for a master’s degree at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, writing a thesis on texts for the liturgies of the Three Days. The advisor for her thesis was the Orthodox liturgical scholar Alexander Schmemann, who was teaching at the time at the nearby St Vladimir’s Seminary. Her linguistic and Lutheran concerns came increasingly to be set in a deeper ecumenical setting. Her doctoral studies followed, this time at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, with a dissertation written on the poetry of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, especially focusing on his Cables to the Ace. Writing that dissertation brought her to visit Gethsemani Abbey in northern Kentucky, her own initial version of the contact with Benedictine monasticism that many liturgists have claimed to be formative in their development. She then began to teach English at Concordia College in Bronxville, New York. She also finished an MDiv at Union Theological Seminary in New York, working not least with the Roman Catholic biblical scholar Raymond Brown, as well as with Ann Ulanov, Cyril Richardson, and Robert Handy. Her Concordia College appointment was followed by a teaching position at the Manhattan School of Music and, at greatest length, a professorship in religious studies at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

In none of these places, however, did her appointment include a charge to carry on with what she regarded as her primary work. Still, these positions did keep her engaged with a wide range of scholarship and with a continuing care for words. That latter concern came to expression repeatedly in her writing, and in her volunteer work for the churches: she led the Lutheran Society for Worship, Music and the Arts to merge with the hitherto largely Roman Catholic Liturgical Conference, and she briefly chaired the resultant board; she was on committees that prepared texts for both the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978) and Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006); she served on the Consultation on Common Texts as it prepared the Revised Common Lectionary (1992); she helped to draft the statement Language and the Christian Assembly for the ELCA’s Principles for Worship (2002); she worked with two Seminars of the North American Academy of Liturgy (Eucharistic Prayers and, as convener, Liturgical Language), and then became that organization’s president; she began to lecture widely, including in Scandinavia, in Japan, in Australia, and in Rome; and she wrote. And wrote. And wrote. It is with the results of this writing that the contributors to this present volume especially engage.

But we need to think further about the location and the range of that writing. An image will help. An Australian artist and illustrator named Oliver Hunter has created a figure that is especially apt.¹ St. Barbara sits alone in an isolated tower, writing, while the dove of the Spirit hovers nearby. This Barbara does not carry, as is traditional, the palm of martyrdom but a pen. The traditional story of Barbara is in many ways inappropriate to our interest: according to the possibly eighth-century legend, supposedly about an early fourth-century martyr in Nicomedia, she was imprisoned in a tower by her father. There, in one version of the story, while her father was away, she read the Bible and the ancient theologians, especially Origen, and became a Christian. On returning, her father had her condemned by the imperial authorities because of this faith, the manner of her death being rather gruesomely recounted, and both her father and her Roman judge being subsequently killed by lightning.

Still, none of that appears in this image. Oliver Hunter’s Barbara is thinking and writing in that tower. She may have read other books before, but now she is herself writing! And, according to several of the old stories, most especially those included in Christine de Pizan’s early fifteenth-century Book of the City of Ladies, the now-Christian Barbara has caused three windows to be made in her tower in order both to bear witness to the Holy Trinity and to let in the light of this triune God. Our image has that light streaming from unseen windows onto the face and the book of our writer. But the image also recalls those Trinitarian windows by the two trefoil perforations set in the tower wall in the upper corners of the picture.

Gail Ramshaw was certainly not imprisoned, unless one regards her youth among biblicist Lutherans as a kind of imprisonment. But she has indeed been largely alone at her desk as she has written, never holding a position that actually corresponded to her sense of vocation, always needing to find her own motivation and her own sense of careful authority for her work, even on the occasions when that work was commissioned. And her voice has been especially Trinitarian, as her response to the descending Spirit. Then, if the legendary St. Barbara had her Bible and her Origen, our woman in the tower had her Bible too, but also her Martin Luther, her Julian of Norwich, her Catherine of Siena, her Alexander Schmemann, her Raymond Brown, her Ann Ulanov, and her Thomas Merton. It is about that woman in the tower, on her own motivation finding words for the mystery of God, that we are thinking here.

Of course, the tower image should not mislead us. Most of those words have been full of the we of the assemblies of the church, and many of them have been intended for use in those assemblies. Ramshaw is no lone ranger. I cannot share symbols, she writes, if I am galloping around by myself.² This woman writing in a tower goes faithfully to church, although she has no authority over what happens there. And a large share of her work is found anonymously in the lectionary and prayerbooks of the churches. But not all. Some—as in Under the Tree of Life: The Religion of a Feminist Christian or the more recent Blessing and Beseeching: Seventy Prayers Inspired by the Scriptures (2022)—push the horizons beyond the place where assemblies might easily go, bringing to expression a unique voice that might especially belong to an individual encountering mystery in the tower.

There have been three important themes to Ramshaw’s work, and those themes especially focus the responses and conversations from the writers gathered here: lectionary patterns, forms of prayer, and theological horizons. All three of those themes can be further seen as being addressed by her in three tension-laden ways: her work is both seriously Lutheran and devotedly ecumenical, it is marked by scholarship but also by mystagogy, and it is concerned with the liturgy faithfully enacted, but it also looks beyond the liturgy. We might allow the two trefoils in our Barbara image to stand for these two sets of three. Let us say a little more.

Lectionary patterns

The three-year lectionaries have been a very important center to Ramshaw’s work. She served as a Lutheran presence in the ecumenical consultation that created the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL). She then interpreted that lectionary for Lutherans and others in A Three-Year Banquet (2004), and in the ongoing presence of her work in the online source Sundays and Seasons.³ But she also interpreted it for Episcopalians in Much Fine Gold (2021). And Word of God, Word of Life (2019) brought her scholarship to bear on both the RCL and the Roman Catholic Ordo Lectionum, finding in both ten common principles. In 1997, she produced Between Sundays, a three-year set of daily Bible readings based on the RCL (1997), and that work became one seed from which the later Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings (2005) of the Consultation on Common Texts was developed. Still, scholarship is not all she brings. Her Treasures Old and New (2002) attended critically to forty images that are to be found in the readings of the three-year lectionaries, but it also made a rich and mystery-full feast of meanings available to preachers, hymn-writers, and people who pray. In Homilies for the Christian People (1989) and Richer Fare: Reflections on the Sunday Readings (1990), she carefully collected the words of current and then-ancient Christian preachers. And already in the mystagogy of the series Words Around the Fire (1990), Words Around the Table (1991), and Words Around the Font (1994), she thought aloud about what happens when the scripture readings are set next to each other and around the central matters of the assembly. So she says, remembering Ezekiel eating the scroll, To preach the word of God is to get your mouth around God and proclaim God to others.⁴ Still, criticism from beyond the liturgy—but needed in the liturgy—is never far away:

We only know human speech, O divine Word. To humor us, your little talkers, squeeze your merciful might into our small language, that through the Spirit of that Word, we may hear and live.⁵

She saw these things from the tower.

Forms of prayer

Ramshaw has been caring about the several forms of prayer since at least that complaint and subsequent assignment in 1965. There have been intercessions, first of all, culminating in her handbook for intercessors, Praying for the Whole World (2016), and in the intercessions she provided throughout the coronavirus pandemic for the Worship in the Home materials posted on the ELCA website.⁶ But there have also been prayers of the day, collected, edited, and freshly written. And there have been eucharistic prayers, some used in Lutheran books, many used much more widely—for example, the extensively and ecumenically used Triple Praise.⁷ It can be argued that the extensive variety of eucharistic praying from many authors, found in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, and the use of biblical metaphors that marks that book both owe a great deal to the work of Ramshaw. There have also been thanksgivings at the font, laments, and litanies. She selected classic prayers and hymns, organized so that people might observe the church’s calendar of the saints (More Days for Praise, 2016), many of those saints also having led her in yet another book to ask searching questions about our liturgical practice (Saints on Sunday: Voices from the Past Enlivening our Worship, 2018). And there has been scholarly thought about the form and the language of these prayers (see Worship: Searching for Language, 1988, Liturgical Language: Keeping it Metaphoric, Making it Inclusive, 1996, and Reviving Sacred Speech, 2000). Still, these various prayer forms have not only been thought about, crafted, or organized for the assembly. That woman writing in the tower also has her own unique—and not always so communally obedient—language for personal prayer, as can be seen in Blessing and Beseeching. In some ways, the conclusion of Triple Praise can stand for that personal voice, though here it comes boldly and gladly into the assembly:

You, Holy God, Holy One, Holy Three,

Our Life, our Mercy, our Might,

Our Table, our Food, our Server,

Our Rainbow, our Ark, our Dove,

Our Sovereign, our Water, our Wine,

Our Light, our Treasure, our Tree,

Our Way, our Truth, our Life.

You, Holy God, Holy One, Holy Three!

Praise now, Praise tomorrow, Praise forever.⁸

So the woman in the tower teaches us to cry out to that Trinitarian God.

Theological horizons

And in both crafting prayers and thinking about religious language, in both reflecting on lectionaries and using them in mystagogy, Ramshaw has never been very far away from a variety of theological horizons. She has urged us toward a richer naming of God, and toward inclusive language in prayer and proclamation (see, for example, her work on the emending of the NRSV for lectionary use in Readings for the Assembly, 1995–97), but she has also resisted an essentialist interpretation of gender (God Beyond Gender: Feminist Christian God-Language, 1995). She has urged Christocentric Christians (especially her fellow Lutherans) to reconsider the Trinity, but she has practiced an orthodox Trinitarian language that is a circular dance, not hierarchical, without the Father at the top. She has proclaimed the cross, but she has insisted that we remember the resurrection, and that we understand that the cross is best seen as the tree of life. She has explored the myths that make up much of Christian belief, willingly calling them myths (see, for example, the articles Liturgical Considerations of the Myth of the Crown and Liturgical Considerations of the Myth of Eden in the journal Worship in 1992 and 2015). But perhaps the most important horizons she has pushed are those found in her own works. Three of her most central books have been issued in revised second editions (Letters for God’s Name, 1984, as A Metaphorical God: An Abecedary of Images for God, 1995; Christ in Sacred Speech, 1986, as Reviving Sacred Speech, 2000; and Under the Tree of Life: The Religion of a Feminist Christian, 1998, in a second edition with the same title in 2002). Of those, Under the Tree of Life had a self-critical Postscript, and Reviving Sacred Speech had a chapter-by-chapter Second Thoughts, in which she tellingly pushed against herself in ways that open up new liturgical and theological horizons for us all, always with the mystery of God in mind.

And yet we stammer and stutter,

O sweet Thesaurus of mercy,

teach us to pray.⁹

The woman in the tower has glimpsed these horizons through those Trinitarian windows and tried again to begin to pray with us.

Of course, there is more—more than these three themes, for example. There is always more, Ramshaw herself would say. There are many articles, only some collected in Worship: Searching for Language. There is the prayer book Koinonia (2004), coedited with Päivi Jussila for the Lutheran World Federation, and a prayer book for Lent (40 Days and 40 Nights, 2006). There are textbooks (Christian Worship: 100,000 Sundays of Symbols and Rituals, 2009, and What is Christianity: An Introduction to the Christian Religion, 2013). There is an essay on the Paschal Triduum (The Three-Day Feast, 2004) and a commentary, cowritten with Mons Teig, on the Church’s year (Keeping Time, 2009). Perhaps most tellingly, there are three children’s books (Sunday Morning, 1993; Every Day and Sunday, Too, 1996; and 1-2-3 Church, 1996). And there is yet more.

None of it makes up a system. In none of it does she insist we agree with her. But she does say, The tree must be tended and watered and pruned: let’s help one another each week with this continual undertaking. The tree is burning with God: let’s get as close to it as we can (Reviving Sacred Speech, 167). She does invite us to church. And she does invite us to pray.

Thanks to the contributors to this volume. Special thanks to the editors who conceived of the idea of this book. Deepest thanks to Gail Ramshaw herself. And to you who are reading: welcome to these conversations about divine mystery.

Gordon W. Lathrop

---

1 With thanks to Oliver Hunter, for granting permission for use of this image in the book. See Oliver Hunter, Windy Poplars Room, Pinterest, accessed July 21, 2022, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/344666177726741425/.

2 Gail Ramshaw, Under the Tree of Life: The Religion of a Feminist Christian, second edition (New York: Continuum, 2002), 199.

3 Sundays and Seasons.com, accessed July 21, 2022, sundaysandseasons.com.

4 Gail Ramshaw, Words Around the Table (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1991), 36.

5 Ramshaw, Words Around the Table, 40.

6 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Worship, accessed July 21, 2022, https://blogs.elca.org/worship/.

7 See Gail Ramshaw, Pray, Praise, and Give Thanks: A Collection of Litanies, Laments and Thanksgivings at Font and Table (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 54–56.

8 Ramshaw, Pray, Praise, and Give Thanks, 56.

9 Gail Ramshaw, Blessing and Beseeching: Seventy Prayers Inspired by the Scriptures (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022), 1.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the authors who contributed to this volume, responding so enthusiastically to our invitation to write in honor of Gail Ramshaw—several of whom did their writing in the midst of considerable challenges to do with the COVID-19 pandemic. As editors, we have loved learning from each contribution. Also, Will Bergkamp and Ryan Hemmer at Fortress Press; and Lisa Eaton and Cailin Jeffers, who worked with us on copyediting; Kerry Handasyde for her work on bibliography; the University of Divinity, which made a small grant to Stephen Burns in the process of editing this book; and Oliver Hunt, who most kindly agreed for us to use his image of St. Barbara.

Contributors

Rhodora Beaton (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is Professor of Systematic Theology at Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio, Texas, USA. Her publications include Embodied Words, Spoken Signs: Sacramentality and the Word in Rahner and Chauvet (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014) and Illuminating Unity: Four Perspectives on Dei Verbum’s One Table of the Word of God and the Body of Christ (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014).

Stephen Burns (PhD, University of Durham) is Professor of Liturgical and Practical Theology at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. His publications include Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives (with Michael N. Jagessar, Sheffield: Equinox, 2012), Postcolonial Practice of Ministry (co-ed. with Kwok Pui-lan, Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016), Liturgy (SCM Studyguide) (London: SCM Press, second edition 2018), From the Shores of Silence: Conversations in Feminist Practical Theology (co-ed. with Ashley Cocksworth and Rachel Starr, London: SCM Press, 2023), Feminist Theologies: Interstices and Fractures (co-ed. with Rebekah Pryor, Lanham, MD: Fortress Academic, 2023), and Ann Loades’s Explorations in Twentieth Century Theology and Philosophy: People Preoccupied with God (ed., London: Anthem Press, 2023).

Bryan Cones (PhD, University of Divinity) is a priest-in-charge of Trinity Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, Illinois, USA, and honorary researcher at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. His publications include Liturgy with a Difference (co-ed. with Stephen Burns, London: SCM Press, 2019), This Assembly of Believers (London: SCM Press, 2020), Fully Conscious, Fully Active (co-ed. with Stephen Burns, Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2020), and Twentieth Century Anglican Theologians (co-ed. with Stephen Burns and James Tengatenga, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021). He is editor of Australian Journal of Liturgy.

James W. Farwell (PhD, Emory University) is Professor of Theology and Liturgy at Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia, USA. His publications include The Liturgy Explained (New York: Church Publishing, 2013) and Ritual Excellence: Best Practices for Leading and Planning Liturgy (New York: Seabury Press, 2023).

HyeRan Kim-Cragg (ThD, University of Toronto) is Principal and Timothy Eaton Memorial Church Professor of Preaching at Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her publications include Story and Song: A Postcolonial Interplay Between Christian Education and Worship (Berlin: Lang, 2012); Hebrews (Wisdom Bible Commentary) (with Mary Ann Beavis, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015), What Does the Bible Say? In Conversation with Popular Culture (with Mary Ann Beavis, Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), Interdependence: A Postcolonial Feminist Practical Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), Reading In-between (co-ed. with Néstor Medina and Alison Hari-Singh, Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2019), Religion and Migration (co-ed. with Andrea Bieler et al., Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstal, 2019), Postcolonial Preaching: Creating a Ripple Effect (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2021), and Religions: Practical Theology Amid Climate Crises (co-ed. with Pamela McCarroll, Basel: MDPI, 2022).

Anna Kirkpatrick-Jung is an independent researcher based in Mittengong, New South Wales, Australia. Her recent publications include Towards East Asian Ecotheologies of Climate Crisis (with Tanya Riches) in Religions 11, no. 7 (2020).

Gordon W. Lathrop (PhD, University of Nijmegen) is Emeritus Professor of Liturgy, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He is a past-president of the North American Academy of Liturgy. In retirement, he lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his spouse Gail Ramshaw. His publications include The Four Gospels on Sundays (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), Saving Images: The Presence of the Bible in Christian Worship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), Proclaiming the Living Word: A Handbook for Preachers (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 2019), and The Assembly: A Spirituality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022).

Gerald C. Liu (PhD, Emory University) is Director of Collegiate Ministries, Initiatives, and Belonging, Global Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church, USA. He previously taught at Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, USA, and his publications include Music and the Generosity of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and A Worship Workbook: A Practical Guide for Extraordinary Liturgy (with Khalia Williams, Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2021).

Kimberly Bracken Long (PhD, Drew University) is the editor of the Presbyterian Church USA’s (PCUSA) journal Call to Worship: Liturgy, Music, Preaching, and the Arts. She formerly taught at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, USA. Her publications include The Eucharistic Theology of the American Holy Fairs (Louisville, KY: WJKP, 2011), Inclusive Marriage Services: A Wedding Sourcebook (co-ed. with David Maxwell, Louisville, KY: WJKP, 2015), and From This Day Forward: Rethinking Christian Marriage (Louisville, KY: WJKP, 2016). She is also coeditor of the PCUSA’s Book of Common Worship (Louisville, KY: WJKP, 2018).

Donyelle McCray (PhD, Duke University) is Associate Professor of Preaching at Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Her publications include The Censored Pulpit: Julian of Norwich as Preacher (Lanham, MD: Fortress Academic Press, 2019) and A Surprising