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 has two cats, Nicodemus and Toffee.
More about me
I moved back to Hyde Park, where I grew up, on the South Side of Chicago, in 2024. I attended Catholic schools for elementary and high school but 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 (now closed) in Ohio and Gould Farm, in Massachusetts, where I worked mostly in the kitchen, 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.
That round of seminary did not work out, so I moved back to Chicago in 2001. I was working as a legal assistant at a corporate law firm and attending 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 Bexley-Seabury Seminary. I was ordained in 2007 as a deacon and the a priest at St. James Cathedral in the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago. In between ordinations, I worked part-time as an assisting editor at the Anglican Theological Review and at a Trader Joe’s, waiting for the right church job to come along.
In November 2007, I was called to be the 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. I was awareded a Lilly Sabbatical grant in 2014, and used their funding to wander as a pilgrim, stranger, and guest for three months: on Amtrak through the Rocky Mountains, in a hermitage at a women’s monastery in Wisconsin, through the Holy Land for two weeks, and for two weeks in and around Rome.
In 2016, weeks after I became Senior Associate Rector at St. Chrysostom’s (in 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 moved home to Chicago in 2026 and for two years after the divorce, I worked as program director and writer-in-residence at Disciples Divinity House at the University of Chicago. I am currently in search to return to parish ministry, here in Chicago, my hometown. I serve on the Board at Brent House Campus Ministry at the University of Chicago, where I myself worshipped as a graduate student and served as an intern as part of my ministry formation.
I continue to work as a trained spiritual director, meeting with folks on Zoom or in person, as I have since 2016. My capacity for new clients is limited but please reach out to ask about availability. Contact me or look at this page, if you’re interested. I do a fair amount of freelance writing for magazines like The Christian Century and Gather, and write a Substack newsletter.
I 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 again 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, brother and sister-in-law, who live less than an hour away. I like to read, cook dinner, look out of the window, go to choral concerts and plays around Chicago, do yoga, walk along the Lake, hang out with my extended family, and own too many houseplants.
Heidi Haverkamp 