ABSTRACT
My search for contemporary women confessors yielded two fascinating subjects: Karen Armstrong and Elaine Pagels. Like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, they are opposites in many respects. Karen Armstrong grew up a Catholic in England and became a nun. Elaine Pagels was raised by a liberal Protestant family in the United States and joined a conservative evangelical Christian congregation as a teenager. Armstrong once characterized herself as “a failed heterosexual.” Pagels was married and lived in Princeton, New Jersey, with her two adopted children after her husband was killed in an automobile accident. Both women became spiritually homeless and found themselves “seekers” to overcome their painful experiences with organized religion.
