Karen Swallow Prior

Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is a reader, writer, speaker and professor. She is the author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos, 2023); On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018); Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014); and Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press, 2012). She is co-editor of Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues (Zondervan 2019) and has contributed to numerous other books. She has a monthly column for Religion News Service. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, and various other places. She hosted the podcast Jane and Jesus. She is a Contributing Editor for Comment, a founding member of The Pelican Project, and a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum. She and her husband live on a 100-year-old homestead in central Virginia with dogs, chickens and lots of books.

All Stories by Karen Swallow Prior

Grace Community Church let her down. Now she is standing in the gap for women.

By Karen Swallow Prior — February 16, 2023
(RNS) — Eileen’s life now is a far cry from the subservient role she once played to a domineering and violent husband.

Not all who harm the church are wolves. Some are renegade sheep.

By Karen Swallow Prior — February 2, 2023
(RNS) — The distinction makes a difference.

The alienation of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ at 100, has come to feel like home

By Karen Swallow Prior — December 13, 2022
(RNS) — The December birthday ‘The Waste Land’ shares with Christmas foreshadows the Easter that is to come.

We got here because too many good people put their head in the sand

By Karen Swallow Prior — November 7, 2022
(RNS) — Negligence is not only a vice — sometimes it’s a crime.

We can be an army of wounded warriors — or a collective of wounded healers

By Karen Swallow Prior — October 18, 2022
(RNS) — To be human is to be wounded, one way or another. Those hurts can be wielded in ways that further wound or in ways that help heal.

The scandal of evangelical Christian friendship

By Karen Swallow Prior — September 9, 2022
(RNS) — Christians more than anyone else ought to have the most robust and healthiest understanding of friendship, including, or especially, those between men and women.

A tight job market is a chance for Christians to rethink work

By Karen Swallow Prior — August 2, 2022
(RNS) — 'Ministry' is not defined by who signs our paycheck.

Can the Southern Baptist Convention be saved?

By Karen Swallow Prior — June 24, 2022
(RNS) — ‘Look for the helpers,’ said Mister Rogers, but right now in the SBC we need to look for the humble.

Overturning Roe v. Wade inches us back toward the arc of justice

By Karen Swallow Prior — May 3, 2022
(RNS) — Overturning Roe v. Wade will put abortion laws back at the state level, which only means that pro-life work is far from over.

Living with your parents — intentionally — can be life-giving

By Karen Swallow Prior — April 27, 2022
(RNS) — Multigenerational living doesn’t have to mean living in the basement.

Language is hard: Are you sure they mean what you think they mean?

By Karen Swallow Prior — March 30, 2022
(RNS) — Caring for each other includes the humility of accepting that we understand each other and our words only in part.

Let schoolkids read ‘Maus,’ lest they don’t read at all

By Karen Swallow Prior — February 7, 2022
(RNS) — The power books have is not in what they tell, but how they tell.

Being pro-life demands sacrifice — for a pandemic, too

By Karen Swallow Prior — January 25, 2022
(RNS) — It is not asking too much — in fact, it’s really the bare minimum — for those of us who believe we are justified in asking a woman to sacrifice much to preserve a life growing inside her body to inconvenience our own bodies by wearing a piece of cloth.

Childless at Christmas

By Karen Swallow Prior — December 16, 2021
(RNS) — Some holiday traditions offer particular challenges to those who aren’t part of a nuclear family at Christmas, challenges the rest of us might not even imagine.

Truth, justice and the torturing of tolerance

By Karen Swallow Prior — November 3, 2021
(RNS) — Too many in the church have tolerated too much for too long.
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