Crossing Thresholds [Hardcover]

With candor, passion, and deep love for her work, Lucy Forster-Smith takes us across the threshold as a chaplain on a college campus. This vocational narrative braids the story of her faith journey that began on a porch when she was a four-year-old, was shaken by a sexual assault as a seminarian, and through healing and grace brought her to claim a call to ministry with students. With delightful humor and an infectious love for her work, Forster-Smith invites the reader into her world. Crossing Thresholds is a theological narrative, weaving together the story of faith in the context of the professional life of a college chaplain. Lighting on the power of spiritual awakening at a college, once named as the number one institution of higher education that ignored God on a regular basis, Forster-Smith jars loose the assumptions about the avowedly secular campus. Her journey of healing and grace illuminates and guides to cross the threshold of the campus's soul. Lucy Forster-Smith served for two decades as an exemplary college chaplain at Macalester, and she captures in this book the many rewards, challenges, and complexities of that work. Anyone who wants a window into the spiritual life on a modern college campus would benefit from reading Lucy's memoir. --Brian Rosenberg, author of Little Dorrit's Shadows Crossing Thresholds is an invitation to that place of authenticity where self, role, and meaning meet. Only rarely are we gifted by such access to the inside experience of a professional role--whatever the profession--in a manner that transcends artifice. Not only chaplains, but all who care about living faithfully in a complex world, will savor this intelligent, informing, story-filled, and evocative book that reminds us how much is at stake for self and world in the conversation between generations. --Sharon Daloz Parks, author of Big Questions, Worthy Dreams Lucy Forster-Smith blends spiritual memoir with deep theological reflection to providelÃ)