Laurel Mathewson

Laurel Mathewson was born and raised in Oregon, where she received

a lasting love for the natural world, rural communities, and social justice.

She graduated with honors from Stanford University, where she found her

intellectual passion in the intersections of literature and landscape, faith

and politics, and social transformation—as well as a life partner in her

now husband, Colin. In her existential and vocational quest after losing

her mother to cancer at the age of twenty-one, Laurel worked in academia,

in media (as an editorial assistant at Sojourners in Washington, DC, with

founder Jim Wallis), and in ministry. Finally landing in a dual vocation as

a writer and a Christian minister, Laurel, along with her husband, headed

to seminary, and both were ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church

in 2013. Their current church, St. Luke’s, is a multicultural community in

San Diego where the Lord’s prayer might be heard in English, Arabic, or

Swahili, depending on the Sunday.

Laurel is the editor of The Interior Castle: Exploring a Spiritual Classic

as a Modern Reader. She has written award-winning work for Sojourners

magazine, Geez magazine, and The Christian Century. As an “elder millen-

nial” mother and pastor, Laurel is passionate about preaching, teaching,

pondering the ever-surprising love of God with a diverse and multigen-

erational audience of serious skeptics and serious believers, parenting her

three children, ocean swimming, and well-made cookies. Her essential

vocation, in the end, is as an interpreter: of texts, traditions, and contempo-

rary experience; between Catholic and Protestant strands of Christianity;

and between seemingly incongruous or unintelligible perspectives, even

across the centuries.