About the Author: Barbara Brown-Taylor

In Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, Georgia Author of the Year Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of her decision to leave full time parish ministry after fifteen years, trading her church for a college classroom and her Sunday vestments for plain clothes covered in chalk dust."When it is my turn to talk, I generally skip the points and get right to the plot," she wrote recently. "Narrative is not a choice I make when it comes time to tell the truth; it is the way that truth comes to me--not in crisp propositions but in messy tales of encounters between people and people, between people and creation, between people and the Divine."An Episcopal priest since 1984, Taylor now teaches religion at Piedmont College in rural northeast Georgia, where she holds the Harry R. Butman Chair in Religion and Philosophy. She also serves as adjunct professor of Christian spirituality at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Before becoming a full time teacher, Taylor spent fifteen years in parish ministry, first at All Saints Church in Atlanta and then at Grace-Calvary Church in Clarkesville, Georgia. In recent years, she has lectured on preaching at Yale, Princeton and Duke Universities, and has preached at churches across the country. A columnist for The Christian Century and sometime commentator on Georgia Public Broadcasting, she is the author of eleven books, including When God is Silent and Home By Another Way. Leaving Church, her first memoir, received the 2006 award for Best General Interest Book from the Association of Theological Booksellers and a Georgia Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writers Association in the category of creative nonfiction.The eldest of three daughters, Taylor was born in Lafayette, Indiana, while her father completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Purdue. Over the next several years, the family lived in Kansas, Ohio and Alabama before settling in Atlanta in 1965. Taylor attended public high school, graduated from Emory University in 1973, and Yale Divinity School in 1976. Baptized in the Catholic church as an infant, she spent time with the Baptists, the Methodists and the Presbyterians before being confirmed in the Episcopal Church during her senior year in seminary, the same year that the General Convention of the church voted to admit women to priesthood.Winding her way toward ordination, Taylor worked as a camp counselor, a cocktail waitress, and a secretary at Candler School of Theology. She also wrote short stories, saving up all her vacation time to spend in residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. While her writing went nowhere, she was invited to preach her first sermon at Saint Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta in 1978. When people asked for copies afterwards, she realized that she had sold her first story. After several more years of training, including a year as a hospital chaplain, Taylor was ordained deacon in 1983 and priest in 1984, on the feast of Dame Julian of Norwich.As the Sewanee Theological Review has noted, Taylor "possesses a gift that is in short supply these days: the gift of conveying a living sense of the transcendent, the holy, and the grace-full in and through the stuff of our lives."
  • By Published On: August 17, 2018

    Barbara Brown Taylor continues her spiritual journey begun in Leaving Church of finding out what the world looks like after taking off her clergy collar. In Holy Envy, she contemplates the myriad ways other people and traditions encounter the Transcendent, both by digging deeper into those traditions herself and by seeing them through her students’ eyes as she sets off with them on field trips to monasteries, temples, and mosques.