About Jane Redmont

[needs a little updating - coming soon!]

Jane Redmont is a retreat leader, pastoral minister, spiritual director, theologian, writer, writing coach, and editor who has worked in campus, urban, and parish ministries. She has been involved in work for social justice and in ecumenical and interreligious relations all her life. She also has extensive experience in organizational leadership: she has directed, fund-raised for, and served as consultant to nonprofit organizations, especially those addressing causes and consequences of urban poverty; she has served on and chaired numerous volunteer boards and committees.

Jane serves as a Congregational Consultant in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, assisting communities of faith and practice in strengthening and sustaining their common life.

In the same Diocese of [Eastern] Massachusetts, Jane also serves as Co-Chair (with the Rev. Thomas Ferguson) of the Bishops' Commission for Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations.

She is the author of When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life (1998, pbk 2008), Generous Lives: American Catholic Women Today (1992, pbk 1993), and more than 100 articles ranging from news and feature stories to personal essays and academic book reviews.

An Episcopal Christian, Jane was also formed in the Catholic tradition and has Jewish and Unitarian Universalist family roots. She has studied hatha yoga and practiced Centering Prayer and Zen meditation and, as she often notes, "came to Christianity through the contemplative gate." Her stays at the Taizé community as a young adult had a deep influence on her prayer, her life in the church, and her commitment to the work of justice. She has had a private practice in spiritual direction for two decades.

Jane Redmont was Editor of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin from 1981 to 1983 and is experienced in all phases of editing. More recently, she worked as a contractor on journal and book projects for the publications division of the World Council of Churches and for Orbis Books. She also coaches private clients and works with them on writing projects from books to op-ed pieces.

Jane has been executive director of two nonprofit organizations, the Boston chapter of NCCJ (National Conference of Christians and Jews, now National Conference for Community and Justice) and the Cambridge Forum. Her consulting clients have included, among others, Project Bread - the Walk for Hunger, Dimock Community Health Center (now the Dimock Center), and the American Jewish Committee.

During a quarter of a century as a Roman Catholic laywoman in ministry, Jane Redmont served in many volunteer positions and in three paid professional ministerial positions: Assistant Catholic Chaplain at SUNY-Stony Brook (1976-77); Chaplain at St. Paul's University Catholic Center, Madison, Wisconsin (1977-80); and Social Justice Minister at the Paulist Center, Boston (1983-86). A pioneer among Catholic women in ministry, Jane was the first woman in two of those positions.

In the Episcopal Church (into which she was received in early 2002), Jane has served on the faculty of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) as the Bogard Teaching Fellow (2003-04), team teaching the "Anglican Tradition and Life" course to first-year seminarians with L. William Countryman. During the same academic year, Jane taught the seminar "Women as Global Church" to master's students from several of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) member schools.

During her years of Ph.D. study at the GTU, Jane also taught at the American Baptist Seminary of the West (ABSW), the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (JSTB, now JST, the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, a graduate school of Santa Clara University), the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, the GTU Cooperative Summer Session (based at Pacific School of Religion, PSR), and San Francisco Theological Seminary (SFTS).

Jane's SFTS summer course, "Spirituality, Solidarity, and Justice: Today’s Farmworkers and the Legacy of Non-Violent Social Change," combined theory and practice and was coordinated with the Oregon Walk for Farmworker Justice, for which she also served as Chaplain (summer 2001).

After a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area (1995-2005), Jane moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where she taught for seven years (2005-12) at Guilford College, a Quaker-founded liberal arts institution. During this time on the Religious Studies faculty and as a member of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, her courses spanned the areas of Christian history, theology, spirituality, religion ins the U.S. and American religious pluralism, African American religion, religion and the environment, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Jane also served as Campus Ministry Associate on behalf of St. Mary's House (Episcopal/Anglican) in Greensboro and continued her involvement in interfaith and social justice concerns.

A member of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), Jane co-chaired the AAR's World Christianity Group from 2008 to 2015. Her most recent academic presentation was at the AAR's Ecclesiological Investigations Group at the 2013 Annual Meeting, on the topic of "African, Feminist, Ecumenical: The Ecclesiology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye." Jane has continued her involvement with the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) and served for several years on the Executive Committee of the Society of Anglican and Lutheran Theologians (SALT), of which she is an active member.

During her time in the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, Jane Redmont served on the Bishop's Committee for Racial Justice and Reconciliation, which she chaired from 2007 to 2009.

In January 2013, Jane moved back to Boston, where she is involved in liturgical ministries and social outreach and had served on the Stewardship Committee at Emmanuel Church. She was a regular guest preacher at Trinity Episcopal Church, Canton (MA) for over two years, until the rector's recent retirement. She has served on the Episcopal Church's Province I (Province of New England) task force on cultural competence. She continues her private practice in spiritual direction. Her retreat ministry takes place both in person and online.

Born and raised in Paris in a family of American journalists, Jane Redmont received a classical education in the French public school system culminating in the Baccalauréat in philosophy and literature (high honors). She is a graduate of Oberlin College and Harvard Divinity School. She completed the first several stages of Ph.D. work in theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, passing her Special Comprehensive Examinations With Distinction and becoming Ph.D. Candidate upon the successful presentation and defense of her dissertation proposal. Her dissertation, for now, remains unfinished.

One of the most profound experiences for Jane in the last few years has been accompanying both her parents during the final years of their life. (Her mother died in August 2016, her father in January 2017.) Jane is also a godmother, auntie, mentor, and last but never least, housemate of a small but mighty cat.