About the Book and Author

Now Featured in the Patheos Book Club
The Soulmaking Room
By Dee Dee Risher

About the Book

In this personal story, Dee Dee Risher weaves experiences from her life with the biblical story of the prophet Elisha and the Shunammite woman. Risher is captivated by this spiritually attuned, generous, hospitable, honest, and bold woman. The woman from Shunem extends radical hospitality to the prophet, expecting no reward. But when disaster strikes, she does not hesitate to hold Elisha accountable or talk back.

Hidden in the story, Risher believes, are the questions that lead to a more authentic life:

What does it mean to build a holy room in our lives?

How honestly do we confront our inevitable losses and griefs? As we work to transform our world, how do we grapple with failure?

Do we have the kind of faith that can ask bold questions in the face of death?

What openings does radical hospitality create in our lives?

"Every human being goes through so much," Risher reflects, "and there is some heartbreakingly beautiful fruit we are to shape from that. That is our own unique, authentic gift to the world." Her book encourages each of us to find a holy room in which we are in community with others and where we can shape our souls into their unique dimensions. We each need a space for this work-a soulmaking room.

"If we cannot deal with failure, if we do not know how to put our deepest losses in our holy room, and if we do not know who our people are, we can never fully join the joy and power of God's story," Dee Dee Risher asserts. Embark with her on the adventure of creating and discovering the joys of The Soulmaking Room.

About the Author

Dee Dee Risher is a freelance writer and editor who wrote for and edited the award-winning Christian social justice magazine The Other Side for two of its four decades. She also helped launch and edited Conspire magazine, an ecumenical quarterly publication. She is a cofounder of Philadelphia's Alternative Seminary and on the board of the Karitas Foundation, which supports several community-based initiatives in Mexico. Risher is a longtime resident of Philadelphia's southwest Germantown neighborhood, a poor and working-class community, where she has helped launch Vine and Fig Tree, a faith-based, intentional cooperative housing community.