The Rev. Dr. Anna Carter Florence

Denomination: Presbyterian Church (USA) (PCUSA)
Organization: Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA

Anna Carter Florence is the Peter Marshall Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and holds degrees from Yale University (BA) and Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv and PhD). Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1998, Anna served as an associate pastor for youth and young adults at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis.

Anna’s books include Preaching as Testimony, Inscribing the Word, Rehearsing Scripture: Discovering God’s Word in Community, based on her 2012 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School, and most recently, A Is for Alabaster: 52 Reflections on the Stories of Scripture; her current project is a sequel called B Is for Banquet: 52 More Reflections on the Stories of Scripture. She has published articles and chapters in numerous books and journals, including a year’s worth of lectionary text commentaries for www.WorkingPreacher.org.

Anna’s research focuses on testimony, preaching pedagogies, and creative strategies for communities to engage and encounter the biblical text for our present context. She is a frequent preacher and teacher in the U.S. and abroad, which gives her plenty of opportunity to do what makes her happiest: sitting around a table with a group of people, a big passage of Scripture, and a big block of time to dive into it. She and her husband, the Rev. David Carter Florence, have two grown sons, Caleb and Jonah, and two new daughters-in-law, Kate and Kyra. They also have a dog, a cat, a log-splitter to keep their woodstove going, and way too much knitting yarn.