Pearly Gates: Parables from the Final Threshold

Since August 2018 I've lived in Mitaka, Japan, on the campus of Japan Lutheran College and Theological Seminary, where my husband Andrew L. Wilson is Professor of Church History. I serve as one of the pastors at Tokyo Lutheran Church. I'm also an Affiliated Faculty Member at the Johannelund School of Theology in Uppsala, Sweden.

From July 2016 to July 2018 we lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, getting reacquainted with our home territory in between international sojourns. During that period I wrote a memoir entitled "I Am a Brave Bridge: An American Girl's Hilarious and Heartbreaking Year in the Fledgling Republic of Slovakia." Coming soon!

From 2008 to 2016 we lived in Strasbourg, France, where I worked at the Institute for Ecumenical Research, a close affiliate of the Lutheran World Federation, specializing in Eastern Orthodoxy and Pentecostalism. I continue to serve as a Visiting Professor of the Institute and, as such, the Consultant to the International Lutheran-Pentecostal Dialogue. During this time I published two books on ecumenical topics: "Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel" and "A Guide to Pentecostal Movements for Lutherans." I also had a series of lectures on Luther and ecumenical theology published in Chinese... which means I've written a book I can't actually read!

In 2010, Andrew and I followed the footsteps of Martin Luther's pilgrimage from Germany to Rome five hundred (or maybe four hundred ninety-nine) years earlier. He wrote a book about it (and I contributed the afterword): "Here I Walk: A Thousand Miles on Foot to Rome with Martin Luther."

I earned a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology in 2008 and an M.Div. in 2003 at Princeton Theological Seminary. During that time, Andrew and I got married and became parents to Zeke. I served as pastor at a Slovak-American church in Trenton, New Jersey, and became the editor of Lutheran Forum, an independent theological quarterly, which I continued to do until the end of 2018. I've published over 200 articles on theological topics in various venues. I now write a quarterly free e-newsletter called "Theology & a Recipe"--sign up on my website!

I did my growing up in New York and New Jersey and still think of myself as a New Yorker, even though I haven't lived there since the last millennium.