Biography

The granddaughter of Irish immigrants, Eileen Flanagan was raised in a working class Catholic family just outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She left the 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. 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 in African Studies. Although she originally thought of getting a PhD in History and becoming a professional academic, a human rights trip to Palestine/Israel after her first year of graduate school convinced her that she wanted to put more of her effort into working for social change. So after completing her MA, she went to work for a non-profit activist organization that was advocating for a national health care system in the United States. After a few years of full-time activist work, however, Eileen felt the need to focus more energy on her spiritual life. 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 , as well as a Pendle Hill Pamphlet on parenting as a spiritual journey. She is currently working on a book on the last line of the Serenity Prayer, The Wisdom to Know the Difference, due to be published by Tarcher in September 2009. Her teaching includes spiritual topics like “Discerning Our Calls,” as well as social justice issues, which she continues to work for. These two strands of her life have become more integrated since September 11, 2001 when Eileen was struck by how little many in the United States knew about other parts of the world. As a result, she has been offering new classes at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, including one on South African history.

Now in her forties, many pieces of her life are coming together. 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.