Home By Another Way

Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest. She holds the Harry R. Butman Chair in Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College in northeastern Georgia and serves as adjunct professor of Christian spirituality at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur. Recognized as one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English language by Baylor University in 1995, Taylor has published numerous collections of her sermons and theological reflections, including Mixed Blessings, The Preaching Life, Home By Another Way, The Luminous Web, Speaking of Sin, and Gospel Medicine.

Taylor is extraordinarily skillful at bringing the biblical message to life and linking it to human experience. She does not hover on the surface of either text or experience, but instead probes both deeply, bringing text into ever broader and deeper resonances with life and vice versa. She possesses an imaginative vision revealed in her attention to detail—she paints concrete biblical portraits and landscapes and then invites readers in. She makes the bible stories seem ‘real' in compelling ways. In effect, she tells us that the lives and struggles of these colorful characters from millennia ago are not all that different from our own.