Deborah Smith Douglas has degrees in literature and law. A spiritual director, writer, Camaldolese Benedictine oblate and member of the Episcopal church, she has taught classes and led retreats across the United States and Britain (including at Pleshey, the retreat house at Chelmsford in rural Essex that meant so much to Evelyn Underhill). Her essays and poems have been published in Weavings, Commonweal, Spiritual Life, Desert Call, The American Benedictine Review, The Christian Century, and other periodicals.
She is the author of The Praying Life: Seeking God in All Things (Morehouse 2003) and (with her husband David Douglas) the co-author of Pilgrims in the Kingdom: Travels in Christian Britain (Upper Room 2004).
She has served on the Advisory Board and the Board of Directors of Forward Movement, and written many meditations for Forward Day by Day.
She has been writer-in-residence at the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls in Asheville, North Carolina; visiting scholar at the Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas; faculty at a writers’ workshop at Corban University in Salem, Oregon; adjunct faculty in the Master’s in Spirituality program at Oblate Seminary in San Antonio, Texas; a keynote speaker at the millennial celebration of the Camaldolese Benedictines at Asilomar, California, and chaplain for The Glen, an artists’ and writers’ workshop sponsored by Seattle Pacific University in Santa Fe, New Mexico.