Anna Carter Florence is the Peter Marshall Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and holds degrees from Yale College and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div. and Ph.D.).

 

Dr. Florence is interested in preaching and public proclamation, and preparing leaders who can speak and listen in multiple contexts for ministry. Her research focuses on testimony, pedagogies for preaching, the creative process by which communities engage and embody scripture, and how other fields—particularly poetry and theatre—offer models for prophetic speech.

 

Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1998, Dr. Florence served as an associate pastor for youth and young adults at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. Her books include Preaching as Testimony, Inscribing the Word, and Come Back When You’ve Found Something True: New Ways to Encounter Scripture, based on her 2012 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School. Her current project is ‘A’ is for Alabaster: A Preacher’s Alphabet. She is a frequent teacher and lecturer in the United States and abroad. She and her husband, the Rev. David Carter Florence, have two grown sons. They also have two dogs, two cats, a flock of chickens, and way too much knitting yarn.