Sacred Encounters from Rome to Jerusalem

When she's not listening to NPR, reading Henri Nouwen or snickering at The Onion, Tamara Park is producer for Halogen TV, a cable newtork launching in late 2009 that targets socially conscious eighteen to thirty-four-year-olds. Park has also served as Pastor of Community at Warehouse 242, a church in Charlotte, North Carolina, overseeing small groups and spiritual formation. She has a BA in Telecommunications from Liberty University, where she learned that asking people questions is a vital way of understanding the world. She also has a Masters of divinity from Gordon-Conwell Seminary, where she learned about the ancient beauty of the church and the gift of multiple voices in the shaping of her view of God. Park is attracted to borders, with a love for those spaces where cultures and epochs intersect, where laughter and the profound cross each other, and where people's stories merge into God's epic. Through her role as a pastor she's witnessed people's desire for and struggle with being known to others and to God. And she's grappled with her own questions, including whether her view of God was sturdy enough, global enough, true enough to relate to the complexities of life--with all of its intense disappointments and immense pleasures. Out of those questions came an odyssey with friends and a book, Sacred Encounters from Rome to Jerusalem, which captures her journey and the conversations she had about God with nuns, spies and backpackers throughout the Balkans and Middle East.