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, D.C., with founder Jim Wallis), and in ministry. Finally landing in a dual vocation as a writer and a Christian minister, Laurel and her husband headed to seminary and 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 forthcoming book 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 millennial” mother and pastor, Laurel is passionate about preaching, teaching, pondering the ever-surprising love of God with a diverse and multi-generational audience of serious skeptics and serious believers, parenting her two young children, ocean swimming, and well-made cookies. Her essential vocation, in the end, is as an interpreter: of texts, traditions, and contemporary experience; between Catholic and Protestant strands of Christianity; and between seemingly incongruous or unintelligible perspectives, even across the centuries.