Heidi Haverkamp is the author of five books, including Everyday Connections: Reflections and Practices for Year C (2021) // Year A (2022) // Year B (2023), Advent in Narnia (2015) and Holy Solitude (2017). She is an award-winning contributor to the Christian Century, a spiritual director and retreat leader, an Episcopal priest, and a former parish rector in Bolingbrook and Chicago. Heidi grew up in Hyde Park, Chicago, and recently moved back to settle here. In 2020, she won two awards from the Church Associated Press for her 2019 article “How I learned to love the doctrine of total depravity” in The Christian Century. She received her M.Div. from The University of Chicago Divinity School in 2006. She writes an occasional newsletter, Letters from a Part-time Hermit. She spends her days working with the students of Disciples Divinity House, taking walks, and being delighted by her two cats, Nicodemus and Toffee.
More about me
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in Hyde Park. I attended Catholic schools for grade school and high school. On Sundays, my family attended a mainline Protestant congregation, Hyde Park Union Church (UCC/American Baptist). I went to the College of Wooster in Ohio, and after college worked on a two organic farms, Grailville in Ohio and Gould Farm, Massachusetts, where I worked alongside adults with mental illness. I served for a year as pastor of a rural UCC congregation in Monterey, Massachusetts while attending seminary part-time at Andover Newton in Boston for a semester.
I moved back to Chicago in 2001 and found myself working as a legal assistant at a corporate law firm and sitting in the pews of St. Paul and the Redeemer, where I became an Episcopalian. I earned a Master of Divinity at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2006 and a certificate at Seabury Western Theological Seminary in 2007, now the Bexley-Seabury Federation. I was ordained in 2007 in the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago. I worked at a Trader Joe’s for a while, waiting for the right church job to come along.
In November 2007, I became vicar of a mission parish in Chicago’s southwest suburbs and spent nine years with the wonderful people of St. Benedict, Bolingbrook. For more about that time and the spiritual geography of strip malls and cornfields, explore the blog I kept from 2012-2016: The Vicar of Bolingbrook.
In 2016, a few weeks after I became Senior Associate Rector at St. Chrysostom’s (downtown Chicago), my mother died unexpectedly during cancer treatment. This changed many things in my life and, in 2017, I left St. Chrys to freelance as a writer, retreat leader, and spiritual director. My ex-husband, Adam Frieberg, and I spent several years moving around the Midwest: DeKalb, Illinois, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Des Moines, Iowa.
I now work as program director and writer-in-residence at Disciples Divinity House at the University of Chicago. I also work as a trained spiritual director, meeting with folks on Zoom or in person. My current capacity for new clients is limited, but please reach out to ask about my availability. Contact me or look at this page, if you’re interested.
I like to call myself a Part-Time Hermit. I love people and being part of communities, but spending time in solitude helps me recharge, reconnect with the Spirit, and be a better human, writer, priest, and friend. I write about solitude, church, theology, and other things in my newsletter: Letters From a Part-time Hermit. I was quoted in reference to hermits during the pandemic for an article in The New York Times, “What We Can Learn from Solitude” in November 2020, because of a piece I wrote for Raven’s Bread, a hermit newsletter edited by Paul and Karyn Fredette, the primary focus of the article, and my second book, Holy Solitude,
I enjoy living in the neighborhood where I grew up, near my father and an extended community of friends and many dear people. I have a delightful nephew and niece, who live less than an hour away. I have two cats, Nicodemus and Toffee. I like to read, cook dinner, go to choral concerts, do yoga, and walk along the Lake or around my neighborhood.
Heidi Haverkamp 