Amazing Grace-Filled Gossip
An interview with author Kathleen Norris
January 1, 1999
One of the more "fascinating emanations on the social landscape of millennial America," writes Kathleen Hirsch in the Chicago Tribune, "is the emerging generation of what might be called latter-day Christians. White, middle-class adults, 35 to 50 years old and reasonably well-educated, are returning to the fold of traditional church congregations after years of proud exile."
Kathleen Norris is one of these latter-day Christians. She spent her early years in New York, working among secular literati as a writer and poet. Then she and her husband decided to move to South Dakota, into the former home of her grandmother. Norris began attending the nearby Presbyterian church and was also drawn to visit a Benedictine monastery to meditate and pray. This led, ever so slowly, to a conversion to Christ.
She explores her spiritual journey in three books, all of which have become best sellers. In Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) and The Cloister Walk (Riverhead, 1996) we watch her making her way to faith. In Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead, 1998), we see she has arrived.
Harvard's Robert Coles calls Norris "a person of modern sensibility who dares leap across time and space to make the interests and concerns of any number of reflective thinkers her own."
Those "reflective thinkers" happen to be mostly Christians—monks, theologians, writers, and poets. And as Norris interacts with them, she rediscovers the treasures of the church: prayer, Scripture, and biblical community.
Leadership editors Mark Galli and David Goetz visited Norris in her Lemmon, South Dakota, home to ask what drew her back to Christ and how that experience has shaped her understanding of biblical community.
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