states. the name of this book is a lot of faith, the subtitle southern woman is rationality. i co-edited with my friend, wendy v. she had the initial idea for the book. she had been doing a documentary for the center for public television on early women preachers in alabama. you might think there are none, but she found them stories about them. as she was researching this documentadocumenta ry, she started looking for contemporcontempor ary women preachers, books about them comes to us about these people who didn't quite fit into their culture. she couldn't find any. she asked around. now, we don't know any books like that. she thought maybe there should be a book like that. that's a good way for folks to get started and look around for it and think maybe i'm the one to do it.

so wendy got me involved. we had known each other through the literary community in alabama and in chile. i said this sounds like a great idea. i would love to do it. once it is about more figured out how to get these essays. we began trying to compile the essays by thinking about -- we made master list of people that might be interested in being in the boat. we can make big lists. we asked some of these people and we narrowed our list to write original essays and then we also research journals, mac is means, books, any place we could think of to find pieces by people that we might not get to write an original piece that we might be able to reprint something i had done. but we're putting this book together, the thing that surprised us most was the willingness of people when we asked them what they write an

essay. yes. we were working with the university press. we had small honorary we could offer them and nevertheless we asked and people just said yes if they said yes like crazy. we thought maybe we've got something here. maybe this is something people want to talk about. so that was the first really good surprise. we were nervous ourselves about putting this book out. we thought maybe people are going to be angry with us for saying that there are different ways to be religiously and chili. we thought we might get criticized. we can deal with that. but instead, there was this tremendous openness that we found a sprinkling to bookstores and conferences and festivals for my cats having people come up and say i just love this book. i didn't know anybody else felt this way.

sort of unknowing that we had started the conversation and helped get a community college where people felt ready to say more about what they believed or experienced spiritually that they maybe had out comfortable saying before. that was a tremendous gift to investigate out there and start hearing these voices. one of the things people sometimes ask about his book is wanted a different belief systems of the writers than it. that is something that we actually shied away from a little bit. if we had somebody like jessica boskin to write about being a jewish cantor or polly murray wrote about being an episcopalian, certainly we were open to those discussions and traditional religious faith. what we wanted to emphasize more in this book was spirituality in terms of individual experience in how people make sense of the world, how they experience what

you might think of as the wonders, the mystery, the magic of being alive, w you connect to other people in the rest of the world. so we didn't focus so much on what some people might call a system of belief i found it. she'll women were able to write about. one of the things we tried to talk about in this book is how pervasive religion is an especially smaller towns. the church is often the focus of what happens in town. high school football and church are the two big influences in small town. so maybe that's not a good fit for you. you might feel cut off from a major part of her cultural lives. so that's important. for a lot of people being part of the church is part of your culture. it is part of what happens where you live. to take one example,

african-american churches in the south of the civil rights era for such a powerful source of strength for people, for the brave people who marched in protest it. so that is the way to religion shapes southerners in southern women of the south. if we talk about what tends to be more white dominated, denominations, and i think that religion gave women the freedom in a lot of ways to work within the church to have positions, if not the top positions in the church. it was a place where they could along and have agency in at the same time it is a place that often kept women out of the positions of leadership. in that sense, told them they were second-class citizens, they weren't quite good enough to run

things. when we found polly murray's essay from her autobiography, she wrote about her struggles to become an episcopal priest as a woman, an african-american woman and a lot of the ups and downs, trials and tribulations she went through in seminary and not knowing if she was going to get to be ordained or not. for finally coming through that and having a transformative moment when she was ordained on that day and then getting to perform her first holy eucharist in the church of north carolina where her grandmother had been baptized. i guess what i think about that, the transformation can occur just over a few generations, major transformations can occur. at the time she was beginning to feel the call, the episcopal

church was considering the possibility but not quite sure they wanted them yet. one of the things our book does is give voice to all these different contributors to people who feel a conflict between interpol insert inner promptings are understanding than what the rest of the world is telling them they can or can't do. i think that was her big conflict. she's fair, she's ready. she thinks this is what she is supposed to do at the church wasn't quite sure it was ready and she was able to be repaid. the women in our book, some of them had really strong struggles. some of them wrote more about spiritual awakenings they came over time the boat of a express spirituality. some of the women who face struggles among them are kids who wrote about being a

conventional religious person but slowly realizing as a feminist, somebody changing the way they look at things, she wasn't a comfortable in the structure she had been in. she writes about her daughter was 15 or 16. made teenager. every couple of couple of men down the aisle in her daughter had squatted down to stock a lower shelf and the mother happened to be in range and one of the events of the outcome toilet to see a woman. it was just this moment for one her rage just exploded. she could not stand to listen quietly to especially her daughter being spoken out that way. she had to change. maybe she had already changed and she had to sneak out. cassandra cain, the novelist was

the preacher's wife and that's the role she was supposed to play. she was supposed to help with the newsletter and be always properly dressed and attractive to be the perfect lovely wife. she realized she had a lot more that she needed to say and it couldn't be said in the newsletter. if you should be set in the novel. she reclaimed that part of herself that was like as a free, open child she writes about good she comes back to freedom and wildness as a child begins to read her room story. not the story she supposed to be writing quite telling. several of our contributors did come from this area, from alabama. we have jeannie thompson who is a poet, this might downgrade

from the vicki covington who also was from birmingham. so we did draw on the alabama literary community that we knew and then we had authors from all over the southeast in addition to that. i think you could say that pretty much all of them to start out of the conventional name string religious tradition that there were a of felt some pushback. you know, it might be what you consider sort of minor comments were, you know, people not been as friendly or it may be a major in the sense he decide the sense he decide he needs a bigger job because you can't be the person you are and still remain in that position. but i would say over all and all of these essays there is a sense of when you decide to be who you

really are, there's a tremendous freedom that comes with that. and so it's a bravery. it took courage for these women to step outside of the mainstream. but i think it was so much better for them to do that they had to conform to something that didn't fit today were any more. my sense from reading these essays is that it was worth it. [inaudible conversations]