Fleming Rutledge – A Fireside Chat on The Crucifixion, Advent, and Preaching

Episode: In this episode, Erin hosts Fleming Rutledge for a fireside chat before a live audience at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford. Listen as Fleming shares pearls of wisdom from her decades of ministry as a preacher and a writer.

Guest: Fleming Rutledge was ordained to the diaconate in the Episcopal church in 1975, and was one of the first women to be ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church in January 1977. She holds an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary, and has been awarded two honorary Doctor of Divinity degrees, from Virginia Theological Seminary and Wycliffe College in the University of Toronto.  Since then she has had a lengthy career in ministry (she served in parish ministry for 19 years), and as an author, speaker, and teacher of other preachers. She has twice been a Fellow in residence at Princeton Seminary’s Center of Theological Inquiry, and she is invited regularly to preach in prominent pulpits in the United States and abroad.

Rutledge is the author of numerous books, including Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2018) Christ (her self-professed favourite), and The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2015), which was the winner of Christianity Today’s book of the year award in 2017.

In his forward to her first book, The Bible and the New York Times (Eerdmans, 1998), William Willimon remarks that Fleming Rutledge, “does not want just to speak to our world; she wants to change it. She wants to reorder our time, to reconfigure our year into the church’s year of grace…Is this preacher conservative? Feminist? Evangelical? Liturgical? Fleming Rutledge challenges our conventional labels. I believe the word for which we’re groping to describe her is Biblical.”