Kathleen Norris

Amazing Grace
A Vocabulary of Faith

When more than twenty years ago, Kathleen Norris began attending her grandmother's small-town church on the Great Plains, she was a transplanted poet with more doubt than faith. In returning to the church, her greatest struggle was with the language of the Christian religion. Words such as "judgment, " "prayer," "faith," "dogma," "salvation," "sinner," and even "Christ" formed what she called her "scary vocabulary"—words that often intimidate people and distance them from their religious heritage. She found she had to wrestle with them, grapple with their meanings and make them her own, before they could confer their blessings and their grace. Blending history, theology, story, etymology, and memoir, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith is a poet's journey through language to faith.

The Cloister Walk

After spending two extended residences at a Benedictine monastery, Kathleen Norris takes readers through one liturgical year. The Cloister Walk demonstrates, from the rare perspective of someone who is both an insider and outsider, how immersion in the cloistered world—its liturgy, its ritual, its sense of community—can impart meaning to everyday events and deepen our secular lives. In this stirring and lyrical work, the monastery, often considered archaic or otherworldly, becomes immediate, accessible, and relevant to us, no matter what our faith.

Dakota
A Spiritual Geography

"A book of stories, a book of prayer, a book to be read meditatively and well," DAKOTA offers a timeless tribute to a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh and forgiving, steeped in history and myth. From the award-winning author of AMAZING GRACE, DAKOTA is Kathleen Norris at her most thoughtful, her most discerning, her best. She gives us, once again, a rare "gift of hope and balance, a place to begin" (Chicago Tribune) and assurance that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.

Kathleen Norris, an award winning poet who lives in South Dakota, has been widely praised for the engaging way in which she enables readers to join her exploration of the nature of faith. She examines a spiritual world rooted firmly in the chaos of daily life, challenging our fears of difficult theological concepts while granting believers and doubters alike a brilliant and illuminating perspective on them.