Barbara Brown Taylor

An Episcopal priest for four decades, Barbara Brown Taylor built a writing career on a strange, stubborn claim: darkness teaches what light cannot, and God shows up there just as reliably. Time put her on its 2014 list of the world’s most influential people, and the write-up next to her name isn’t far off: she’s a theologian who writes like a novelist, and she doesn’t seem interested in the version of faith that’s easy to swallow.

Emory University gave her an undergraduate degree in 1973. Three years later she finished at Yale Divinity School, though academic ambition alone didn’t get her there. Time’s 2014 profile notes that the essayist and naturalist Annie Dillard had already noticed her early writing and helped her land a spot at the Yaddo artists’ colony, which tells you something about how her prose set her apart from other clergy even before ordination. That ordination came in 1984. But her first real education in ministry happened earlier, as a hospital chaplain making rounds through neonatal intensive-care units and psychiatric wards, work that echoes through nearly everything she’s written since about suffering and presence.

Even as a child she was asking the kind of question that would define her whole career. At age 8 she wrote a short story wondering why, when Adam named the animals in Eden, some got feathers, others scales, others plain skin. It’s a small, odd piece of trivia. But it previews a career built on noticing exactly what the tidy version of a religious story tends to leave out, and it’s worth sitting with for a second: most kids that age accept the story as given. She apparently didn’t, and never really stopped not accepting it.

Three congregations shaped her parish years, according to her own account on her website. Nearly a decade went to All Saints Episcopal Church in downtown Atlanta, followed by another Atlanta congregation, and then in 1992 she became rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarkesville, Georgia, a small town inside the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta. That appointment mattered more than it might look now. Women had been eligible for ordination in the Episcopal Church for sixteen years by then, yet as the New York Times pointed out in its review of her memoir Leaving Church, hardly any had actually been handed a congregation of their own to run. Taylor had one. It nearly undid her, by her own telling.

Exhaustion set in within six years, and it went well past ordinary tiredness into something closer to spiritual collapse. The baptismal liturgy asks a priest to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,” and Taylor wrote with real candor about wondering, as the Times summarized it, whether the person who wrote that line had ever actually met the “hungry, needy, angry, manipulative, deeply ill people” a parish priest runs into on a normal week. She stepped away from active parish work in the early 2000s, keeping her ordination but not her pulpit, and that departure became Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, a 234-page book HarperSanFrancisco published at $23.95. Georgia named her Author of the Year for it in 2006, and the book set an emotional register that carried through An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark, three books that now read almost like an informal trilogy on faith once certainty is gone.

Piedmont College, now Piedmont University, in Demorest, Georgia, brought her on in 1997 to build and lead a new religion department, a post she held for twenty years. Alongside that, she taught Christian spirituality part-time at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur. NPR noted what made her classes stand out: she pushed mostly Christian undergraduates into contact with other faiths, not to win converts but so they’d understand how their neighbors actually prayed. She’d already keynoted Piedmont’s religion conference in earlier years, and in February 2009 she led its second annual gathering in Athens, Georgia. That same year she gave the Annual Buechner Lecture at the Buechner Institute at King University, named for novelist and theologian Frederick Buechner, whose name keeps turning up whenever critics try to describe her own work.

Her curiosity about other traditions eventually produced a book title, Holy Envy, a phrase for the particular ache of admiring something beautiful inside someone else’s faith and knowing you can’t just claim it as your own. It’s a small idea. It does a lot of work anyway. Taylor never claimed to have invented religious pluralism. What she gave American Christians was a usable word for loving what another tradition offers without needing to own it, explain it, or convert it into something familiar. The book grew directly out of decades in the classroom, where she’d watched Baptist kids sit inside a mosque or a Buddhist temple for the first time and come out unsettled in a way that turned out to be good for them.

She’s made roughly the same argument across a dozen books: American spirituality has gotten hooked on light, and that’s a problem. Contemporary spirituality, she told Time bluntly, is “too feel-good.” For Learning to Walk in the Dark, published in 2014, she spent four years doing more or less the opposite of what self-help culture recommends. She crawled through wild caves. She lived, for stretches, as though blind. Alone on her own farm, without a flashlight, she walked out into the night just to find out what darkness might teach that daylight couldn’t. Time’s profile opens right there: 10:45 on a Sunday night, the farmhouse dark, the chickens shut in, her husband Ed already asleep, and Taylor heading out from the porch under a waning moon that wouldn’t rise again for hours.

None of that is eccentricity for its own sake. Sit with it for a moment, because the whole book turns on it: scripture rarely treats darkness as punishment, and two thousand years of reading it that way may have cost Christianity something real. What Taylor’s doing, in effect, is reviving a strand of Christian mysticism that medieval contemplatives understood better than most churches manage today. She points out that the Book of Common Prayer calls God “O Light” and begs, “Be our light in the darkness, O Lord,” and that hymns like “Amazing Grace” treat brightness as the payoff waiting at the end. Against all that, she stacks a counter-history. Abraham heard from God at night. The Exodus unfolded in darkness. Moses met God inside “thick darkness” on Sinai. Paul lost his sight before his conversion, and Jesus rose from a cave, not into a sunrise, a fact she says gets buried every spring under Easter lilies and trumpets. In her own words: “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.”

Underneath the theology sits a plainer, more practical case. Parents line hallways with night-lights to chase off closet monsters, and kids grow up afraid of the dark for it, but the monsters don’t disappear with adulthood, they just change shape: a cancer diagnosis, months without work, a child’s addiction, a prayer that never gets answered. Keeping darkness at bay, Taylor argues, costs modern life more than we admit. Screens keep our eyes lit from morning to night, electric light wrecks our sleep once we finally lie down, and when the fear surfaces anyway we numb it with solitaire or a sleep aid rather than actually facing it. “We are supposed to get over it, fix it, purchase something, exercise, do whatever it takes to become less sad,” she told Time, adding that turning toward the dark instead of running from it functions as “the cure for a lot of what ails me,” largely because it strips away her need to control where things are headed and how fast they get there.

The argument travels well beyond its Christian frame, and that’s probably why her books find readers who’ve never sat in a pew. Nearly every honest tradition of grief has its own version of a dark night, whatever it happens to be called, and there’s real kinship between a Christian mystic willing to sit in an unlit cave and a Buddhist teacher willing to sit with impermanence without flinching from it. Taylor names two of her own guides directly: the physicist and essayist Chet Raymo, and the Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, an unlikely pair of influences for an ordained Episcopal priest to claim in public. She’s not erasing the differences between traditions to make her point, and she wouldn’t want to. Still, she’s one of the few widely read American religious writers willing to say her own tradition doesn’t hold a monopoly on the insight. That’s a kind of honesty worth pausing on.

Her reputation as a preacher is well documented outside her own books, too. Baylor University named her, in 1996, one of twelve “most effective” preachers in the English-speaking world, the sole woman on a roster that otherwise ran through Billy Graham; James Forbes, who in 1989 became the first African American to lead New York’s Riverside Church; Gardner C. Taylor, pastor emeritus of Brooklyn’s Concord Baptist Church of Christ; and the Jesuit Walter Burghardt of Washington’s Woodstock Center. Newsweek’s coverage of the list, built from a survey of 341 seminary professors and religious-periodical editors run by Baylor sociologist Larry Lyon, pointed out that most of the other eleven had built decades of institutional publishing and media presence behind them, pamphlets and videotapes and journal pieces piled up over long careers. Taylor’s reputation, by contrast, rested almost entirely on sermons delivered from a small-town Georgia pulpit.

Asked about preaching inside a liturgical church, she gave Newsweek a characteristically blunt answer: “If [my sermon] turns out to be junk food, I know they’ll still get fed because there’s communion coming.” In other words, she’s fine admitting a sermon can fall flat, because the sacrament carries the weight regardless, a theology of preaching quite different from what Duke’s James Lischer described to Newsweek about nonliturgical Protestant traditions, where the sermon itself acts as a kind of verbal sacrament, “the flesh made word.” Then, in February 2010, days ahead of that year’s Piedmont religion conference, the Southern Baptist Convention ranked her among the ten most influential living preachers, an odd and telling bit of crossover, given that an Episcopal woman was showing up in a poll run by a denomination that still doesn’t ordain women.

Dartmouth’s religion department chair, Randall Balmer, placed her, per Time’s profile, “in the pantheon of spiritual writers that includes such luminaries as the late Will Campbell, Anne Lamott and Frederick Buechner,” and praised her willingness to face big issues head-on, calling her honesty disarming. Time’s own 2014 profile went further, comparing her prose directly to C.S. Lewis and Frederick Buechner and calling her one of the souls most “synced to the world’s mysteries,” praise that sits comfortably next to Balmer’s. She’s lectured at Princeton, Duke, and Washington’s National Cathedral, and she’s a repeat, heavily requested Sunday speaker at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Her book signings, according to Time, draw an odd mix for a religious author, atheists standing in line right alongside divinity students.

She lives now on a working farm in the Appalachian foothills of northern Georgia, chickens included, with her husband Ed. It’s a modest image, and Time leaned on it deliberately ahead of Learning to Walk in the Dark: a woman in her early sixties walking alone into the dark on her own land, simply to see what’s there. That tells you more about her actual practice than any list of degrees or honors could.

After twenty years at Piedmont she retired from full-time teaching and now works, in her own words, as a full-time writer, speaker, and farmhand. Georgia inducted her into its Writers Hall of Fame in 2024, an honor that sits next to the 1998 Emory Medal she received from her undergraduate alma mater for distinguished achievement in education. Her own website greets visitors now with a line that doubles as mission statement: “I say things you’re not supposed to say.” A new book, Coming Down to Earth, is due from Convergent Books in 2027, which means a writer well past seventy shows no sign of finishing the questions that have occupied her for four decades.

What ties her whole body of work together isn’t one single argument so much as a refusal to accept the comfortable version of faith when it isn’t true. She left a pulpit because she’d stopped believing a church building was the only reliable address for God, and she’s spent the years since writing books insisting God doesn’t need a church, or daylight, or certainty, to actually show up. Readers keep finding her anyway, whether they come through Christianity, through Buddhism’s long-standing comfort with darkness and impermanence, or through no religious tradition at all. That’s probably the clearest measure of what she’s actually built.