Brief Bio
Eileen Flanagan speaks about spirituality on television and radio, at national conferences, and on college campuses. A leader in her Quaker community, her award-winning writing addresses people of all backgrounds, helping them to live with greater serenity and courage. Although she holds a BA from Duke and an MA from Yale, her greatest life lessons have come from caring for her two children and her dying mother, experiences that are woven throughout her writing.
Extended Biography
The granddaughter of Irish immigrants, Eileen Flanagan was raised in a working class Catholic family just outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She left the Roman Catholic Church on Ash Wednesday of her freshman year of college when she realized she wasn’t sure she believed everything in the Profession of Faith. For several years she felt closest to God in the woods, but eventually found her spiritual home in the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) where people seek divine guidance in silence and community.
Eileen's professional journey has also been circuitous. After graduating from Duke University, she spent two and a half years as a Peace Corps Volunteer, teaching in Botswana (Southern Africa). She loved the simplicity of village life, but her African experience opened her eyes to the great inequalities of the world. When she returned to the United States, she became involved in social justice issues, including supporting the unions at Yale University, where she became a graduate student. After completing her MA at Yale, she went to work knocking on doors as a grassroots fundraiser, a job that taught her how her own attitude influenced the reactions of other people. A few years of full-time activist work made Eileen realize the importance of spiritual grounding, so she became a resident student at Pendle Hill, where she began to write, something she had enjoyed since childhood.
When Eileen began her first book, it was going to be about feeling at peace with being single. While writing it, however, she began the relationship that grew into her marriage. As a result, Listen with Your Heart: Seeking the Sacred in Romantic Love is about listening to our inner guidance when deciding whether to remain single or enter a committed partnership. Since then Eileen has written numerous essays and articles, a Pendle Hill Pamphlet on parenting as a spiritual journey, and the blog Imperfect Serenity. Her new book on living the Serenity Prayer, The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Change–and When to Let Go, was published by Tarcher/Penguin in September, 2009.
Eileen is an increasingly popular public speaker, focusing on how we can live with more serenity and courage in our lives. She also continues to care for social just issues and teaches classes at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia on South African history and race in the United States.
Now in her forties, many pieces of her life are coming together. She carries a minute of religious service from her Quaker congregation, Chestnut Hill Meeting, where she serves as Assistant Clerk. Because her husband Tom is Roman Catholic, they are raising their children both Catholic and Quaker. Professionally she gets to do the two things that originally attracted her to academia—write and teach—but with a much more flexible schedule so she can be available to her two school-age children, who have been among her greatest spiritual teachers.