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Patheos Featured Writers

Heather King
Columnist

Pilgrim, mystic, friend. Lover of Flannery O'Connor, Dostoevsky, Emily Dickinson, Kafka, Hank Williams, and the Gospels. Frequent Mass-goer. Extreme introvert. Reader, writer, ponderer of paradox, adorer of birds, flowers, and trees. Interested in the habit of art, the Little Way, the creative urge, and bringing the light of Christ to writing, music, painting, architecture, film, gardening, cooking, filling cavities—in fact, every aspect of our daily lives.

Heather King (J.D., Suffolk University Law School) is an ex-lawyer, ex-drunk Catholic convert with three memoirs: Parched (the dark years); Redeemed (crawling toward the light); and Shirt of Flame (forthcoming - her year of wandering around Koreatown, L.A. "with" St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a cloistered 19th-century French nun).

You can find Heather on Facebook. She blogs at shirtofflame.blogspot.com.

Works by Heather King
Read an Excerpt From "Stripped": Chapter 6
Heather King | September 16, 2015
"I had faith, but faith did not relieve me of the terrible, terrible anxiety known by......
Read an Excerpt From "Stripped": Chapter 11
Heather King | September 16, 2015
"My prayer was never for things to go a certain way but rather a surrender, an opening......
Read an Excerpt From "Stripped": Chapter 9
Heather King | September 16, 2015
"I gazed south toward the Art Deco tower of the Wiltern Theater and thought, Well, one......
And Then There Were Books
Heather King | May 24, 2011
You can’t press violets in an e-reader, or size up a potential friend whose bookcase......
The Reduction of Desire
Heather King | May 17, 2011
To want to stay in people's good graces isn't necessarily a bad thing, but becomes a bad......
The Flowers of Evil
Heather King | May 10, 2011
As French poet Baudelaire said, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing......
Freak for Christ: The Cost of Conversion
Heather King | May 03, 2011
Our task is to constantly set ourselves on fire with Christ....
The Saint from UCLA
Heather King | April 26, 2011
A cancer-clinic encounter with an atypical saint, or, finding Christ in the surprising......
Finishing the Race: Christ as Athlete and Agoniste
Heather King | April 19, 2011
The Crucifixion was Christ's "race." He trained all his life. Declining to measure......
Marta Becket and the Three Temptations of Christ
Heather King | April 12, 2011
In the desert of Lent, Marta Becket's journey may inspire us to hear that still small......
Fast, Pray, Love
Heather King | April 05, 2011
A Lenten fast from "badmouthing" doesn't go as planned: "Ash Wednesday dawned . . . and......
Back in the USSR!
Heather King | March 29, 2011
People who rail against religion cannot have looked too closely at what happens when......
Lion of Judah, Lamb of God
Heather King | March 23, 2011
A conference on Catholic Religious Education yields insight on the troubling increase of......
The Word and Our Stories: Transports of Grace
Heather King | March 16, 2011
Maybe the most telling distinction between believers and non-believers isn't faith in......
Ash Wednesday: I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Heather King | March 09, 2011
We do not come to Christ as Protestants or Catholics, as Democrats or Republicans, or......
The Small Act
Heather King | February 04, 2011
"Sometimes I think the whole reason I converted to Catholicism is because its churches......
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