Marian Ronan was born into a working-class family in Chester, Pennsylvania, then a ship-building town on the Delaware River. Her father's parents were Irish immigrants; her mother's people had been in the US a bit longer. She spent twelve years in the Philadelphia Catholic school system, which was, in the years after World War II, truly massive. There were 106 children in her first grade class, and following the rules was pretty important. She has always been grateful to the Catholic sisters who taught her to read and write. The Irish Catholic identity instilled in her in the parochial schools and in the pro-union household in which she grew up still shapes her writing. Marian's first publication was a letter to the editor of a local paper in the early 1960s, for which other readers accused her of communism. As she earned an undergraduate degree in religion in the late 1960s, people kept asking her why anyone would do such a thing, since "religion was on its way out." (Recent developments may have led them to rethink this notion.) After college she became involved in the women's movement in the churches. In the 1980s she and some friends wrote three different books on feminism and Christianity. During this period she also began to have some questions about the liberal Christian feminism in which she was involved. She wondered, for example, exactly which women's experience the "turn to women's experience" referred to. Having three books published was gratifying but not particularly remunerative, so Marian supported herself during this period as a professional grant writer. After fifteen or so years, she began imagining how wonderful it would be if she could earn a living writing grant proposals without actually having to think about the contents of the proposals. Graduate study seemed a more realistic alternative, and Marian went back to school, by and by earning a Ph.D. in religion. Then she moved to Berkeley California where she taught theology and religion at the Graduate Theological Union, a consortium of seminaries and research centers . Her students were terrific. During these years, Marian continued to work on the problem that had preoccupied her during her doctoral studies: during and after the Second Vatican Council, the future looked extremely promising for the Catholic Church in the US. In the decades that followed, however, things went downhill: membership declined, parishes closed, the median age of priests and nuns skyrocketed, and many liberal Catholics declared war on the church that had formed them. What had gone wrong? And what's to be done about it? In May of 2009, Marian's response to these questions was published by Columbia University Press: "Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism." In this book she explores the ways in which four American writers with distinctively Catholic imaginations--James Carroll, Mary Gordon, Donna Haraway and Richard Rodriguez--work through the losses of recent years to arrive at a new, postmodern vision of the church. She hopes that lots of people -- including you -- will read it.