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| photo: Elizabeth Cavagnaro Photography | |
Chelsea Kim Long is a lay theologian, meditation teacher, and writer. Her debut book, Faithfully Dissident Daughters: Reclaiming Christian Womanhood Beyond Patriarchy (Westminster John Knox Press, September 8, 2026), with a foreword by Dr. Christena Cleveland, braids personal narrative with theology and Christian history to argue that the image of God is expansive enough to hold women's full embodied lives. She lives in San Diego with her husband and three children.
Handsell readers your book:
If your body and your religion keep contradicting each other, one of them is lying to you. It isn't your body.
On your nightstand now:
I've been trying to be better about remembering my dreams when I wake up and have been slowly reading The Dreaming Way: Courting the Wisdom of Dreams by Toko-pa Turner.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. Like Harriet, my journal was the place I was always allowed to tell the truth. I'm grateful no one ever read it and made me apologize for it.
Your top five authors:
Here are five that are an immediate read for me: Sue Monk Kidd, Richard Rohr, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Madeline Miller, Yaa Gyasi.
Book you've faked reading:
Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I "borrowed" a copy from my parents' house when I moved out in 2011 and reading it has been my New Year's resolution every year since. People love to talk about the theological depth of it, but for some reason I can't commit, so it's been 15 years of nodding along in conversations I have no business being in.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Fair Play by Eve Rodsky is the book my husband and I actually used in 2020 to make the invisible work of domestic labor visible, and it changed how we figured out who was carrying what. I have shoved it into so many friends' hands.
Book you've bought for the cover:
On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen. I genuinely love the content of this book (and cite her in mine), and the cover is SO good.
Book you hid from your parents:
I still hide astrology books from my parents. The Astrology of You and Me: How to Understand and Improve Every Relationship in Your Life by Gary Goldschneider is a fun one my neighbor gave to me recently.
Book that changed your life:
The Meaning of Mary Magdalene by Cynthia Bourgeault. She didn't hand me a lost gospel or a conspiracy. She showed me what was already in the Bible I'd been reading my whole life, and I was equal parts furious and liberated.
Favorite line from a book:
It's impossible to choose; I am an avid highlighter. A line that made me feel very seen in early motherhood was this from Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder: "How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely?... And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream."
Five books you'll never part with:
Immortal Diamond by Richard Rohr; I come back to this one often, maybe because it was one of the first religious books I read that was outside of the bounds of what I had been taught was "Christian," and it felt like a breath of fresh air. Psalms for Praying by Nan C. Merrill accompanies me in my own prayer life, and Mariko Clark's The Book of Belonging, illustrated by Rachel Eleanor, is my favorite children's Bible. I reference Dr. Wilda C. Gafney's A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church series on a weekly basis. I love second-chance romance novels, and I re-read Carley Fortune's Every Summer After about once a year.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. It's so atmospheric, and I love a good fantasy that just sucks you in completely. I'm always chasing the high of feeling like a kid reading under the covers way past bedtime.