Dr. Katherine Douglass is an associate professor of educational ministry and practical theology in the Theology Department at Seattle Pacific University (SPU). While much of her life revolves, in some way, around her faith, most afternoons will find her running — in professional outfits — to catch her kids’ school pick up. In her free time, you might find her tucked away in a remote cabin with her family, backcountry skiing, at a concert at The Crocodile, paddle boarding across Green Lake, or finding the perfect stick to roast a marshmallow on. As a woman in theology, her career is not the only thing that defines her.
Professionally, Dr. Douglass is very content and quite successful. She currently has a $1.3 million grant “to support congregations as they support families” and to “conduct research around Christian parenting.” This quarter she’s teaching University Foundations 1000 to her undergrad students at SPU which she describes as, “a very intentional invitation” to understand and explore Christian beliefs.
She says of herself, “I’m one of the people who grew up kind of believing in God my whole life and that Jesus was a really important part of my life from the beginning.” Her parents were very thoughtful in picking what church to raise their kids in and landed on Presbyterian Church USA, which Dr. Douglass is still a part of.
For Dr. Douglass, faith and theology aren’t just about her job or her childhood. She says, “I like to tell people that my whole life completely overlaps, so I teach about Christian faith; I’m an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church; on Sundays you’ll find me at Bethany Presbyterian Church in Queen Anne teaching Sunday School to my kids, and preaching occasionally, and giving the children’s message; and then at home, my kids and my husband and I, we read the Bible together and if we’re sick we do worship at home services.” With faith being such a central part of her life, moving beyond Sunday morning or time spent in the office, she says, “It feels like a really authentic way to live out, kind of the gifts God has given me as a teacher but also as a pastor.”
But studying the Bible and teaching about it isn’t the only thing that defines Dr. Douglass. She is also someone enthralled with aesthetics and embodiment.
“I’m really into sports,” she says. Having grown up being athletic, Dr. Douglass never stopped; she still enjoys running and skiing. She says, “Being in the wilderness, to me, is a place where I really feel connected to God, but I also think there is something really elegant and beautiful about skiing or running.”
“I also love the arts,” she says, leaning into the aesthetic aspects of life. Whether it’s her husband baking bread in the kitchen or her playing the guitar while the family sings along, Dr. Douglass enjoys weaving beauty and art into her everyday life.
Dr. Douglass met her husband Dr. John Douglass (who is also a professor at SPU) at a Cape Cod wedding to which she says, “As far as romantic first meetings go, it was about as romantic as you can imagine.” In their early marriage, he worked as a paramedic ambulance driver while she finished grad school. The two then moved to Germany where she was a youth minister at The American Protestant Church in Bonn. Of their time abroad she says, “It was really good to be an outsider; to not know the culture; to not know the language well; to always be relying on other people.”
The Douglass’s have three boys: George, Paul, and Will. On being a mother, Dr. Douglass says, “It’s really fun to be a parent.” She picks her boys up from school every day at 2:25 p.m. at which point she gets to hear about their days. She says, “I feel like I’m living a really luxurious life in that I get to be the kind of person and mom that I want to be and have a career that I really love.”
Still, while living her very full “dream life,” Dr. Douglass still has things she hopes to do in the future. Her bucket list items are categorized into Grand Voyages and Grand-Grand Voyages. One of these that she was able to complete two summers ago was hiking 100 miles around Mont Blanc with her friends. Of the trip she says, “It was so fun. It was really hard, but also completely gorgeous.”
She’s still dreaming of a “Floatilla Grand Voyage.” Describing this yet-to-happen-trip, she says, “Get all my friends who have paddle boards or small boats that are human powered and start at Matthew’s Beach and paddle board my way through the Montlake Cut, South Lake Union, over to the Ballard Locks, and then go through the Locks on paddle boards, and go all the way to Golden Gardens.”
Looking at her life, her self-proclaimed “dream life,” she has much to say about her mentors who “have played a really important role.” She regards specifically “women who are similar to me, did the career or did the thing that I really hoped to do.” Of these mentors, she says, “When I don’t know what to do, I can go and talk to them and say, ‘How did you do this?,’ or “How should I do this?,’ or “What do you think?,’ But they’re also just really good friends.”
Dr. Douglass stepped into a career that has been dominated by men throughout history, but even then, she hasn’t let that be the only thing defining her. Living a full life, packed to the brim with all of these things she used to dream about, she points not only to her career but also her family, her hobbies, and her fellow female colleagues and friends in defining herself.
