Biography
From her website:
Rosaria Butterfield, a former tenured professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University, converted to Christ in what she describes as a train wreck. Her memoir, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith (Crown and Covenant, 2012), chronicles her conversion. Rosaria is married to Kent, a Reformed Presbyterian pastor in North Carolina. She is a mother, grandmother, author, and speaker.
Raised and educated in liberal Roman Catholic settings, Rosaria loved books and philosophy. In her late twenties, allured by feminist philosophy and LGBTQ+ politics, she adopted a lesbian identity. Rosaria earned her PH.D. from The Ohio State University (1992), then served in the English department and women’s studies program from 1992 to 2002, earning tenure in 1999. Her primary academic field was critical theory, specializing in queer theory. Her historical field was 19th-century literature, informed by Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, with a special interest in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She advised LGBTQ+ student groups, co-authored Syracuse University’s domestic partnership policy for same-sex couples, and actively lobbied for LGBTQ+ legal advancements alongside her lesbian partner.
In 1997, while Rosaria was researching the Religious Right “and their politics of hatred against people like me,” she wrote an article against The Promise Keepers. Local Reformed Presbyterian pastor Ken Smith responded to that article, and Rosaria regularly met with Ken and his wife, Floy, over dinners in their home. Ken and Floy became a resource on the Religious Right and the Bible they loved. Eventually, they became her confidantes. In 1999, after reading through the Bible multiple times under Ken and Floy’s care, Rosaria converted to Christianity.
Rosaria has written four books: The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Crown and Covenant, 2012), detailing her cataclysmic conversion and the Lord’s beautiful faithfulness. Openness Unhindered (Crown and Covenant, 2015) answers many of the questions Rosaria received about identity, repentance, and faith before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision (2015). The Gospel Comes with a House Key (Crossway, 2018) chronicles how the Lord used a humble couple’s simple invitation to dinner to draw her – a radical, committed unbeliever—to himself. Inviting readers into her house, Rosaria shows how we can use hospitality in evangelism in a world that increasingly despises Christianity. In Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age (Crossway, 2024), Rosaria identifies the cataclysmic shift against the Christian faith in our post-Obergefell world by identifying how LGBTQ+ has become the reigning idol of our day codified into law. Offering gospel hope to people trapped in the lies of our culture and helping parents of children who have become casualties of these lies, Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age helps Christians “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), and to do so with joy.
Books
The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith
The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: Expanded Edition
Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age
My Thoughts
Rosaria Butterfield’s book’s have been very helpful to me.
Her Secret Thoughts is an excellent study of conversion… what it does to our innermost being… how is changes us from within… and how the Bible can be used by God to overpower our secret, perverse, entrapping thoughts.
Five Lies is the best book on its subject and is mandatory reading for all in pastoral and academic ministries.
Her House Key is a clear and challenging book on the role and power of hospitality in the Christian Life.
Her skills as a deep thoughtful reader, academic writer, and lecturer on literature are evident in all of her books.
Her books are very readable and highly recommended.
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