Crossing Thresholds

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 A. Forster-Smith is the Sedgwick Chaplain to the University and Senior Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University. From 1994 to early 2014 she served as the Chaplain of Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota. Her recent book, College & University Chaplaincy in the 21st Century: A Multifaith Look at the Practice of Ministry on Campuses across America (2013), has launched broad discussion on the vocation of chaplains in higher education.