The daughter and granddaughter of educators, I am a lifelong learner, and my 29 years of formal education culminated in doctoral research on how we as individuals and a society adapt to change. My response to injustice is to use scholarship to analyze root causes, and to find a way forward by exploring the past.
A ninth-generation Appalachian on both sides of my family, I am passionate about ending mountaintop removal mining that scars ever more of our beautiful hills. I am equally passionate about changing regressive economic and environmental policies that have persuaded many Appalachians that coal is not just their past, but their future, a short-sighted view that has led to widespread poverty and unemployment.
As a lifelong Methodist, I care deeply about the future of the United Methodist Church as well, given our current division over the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons. My research in seminary and grad school addressed this rift and is the subject of my book We Shall Not Be Moved: Methodists Debate Race, Gender, and Homosexuality.
As Allegheny College Chaplain, I worked for 16 years with students of different religions, and with increasingly more students who had stepped away from religion, a.k.a religious “nones.” It was a privilege to accompany these amazing young adults as they plotted the course for the rest of their lives and learned how to deal with the tensions inherent in a diverse global society, where their neighbors may be Baptist or Buddhist, Muslim or Methodist.
In retirement I am devoting time and energies to fighting our addiction to fossil fuels, as climate change is drawing to a close our window for preserving a livable planet.
These are the things that drive me. The things that nurture me are cooking, gardening, reading, working crossword puzzles, and spending time with family, friends, and my feline companions Fergus and Lacy.
