Books on Faith & Meaning | On Vanishing with Lynn Casteel Harper

A minister, chaplain, and essayist, Lynn Casteel Harper joins Faith Initiative Director Dr. Matthew Croasmun to discuss her important book On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear. Harper’s personal, philosophical, and scientific examination of dementia encourages us to reexamine our fears of disappearance, death, and mortality.

Lynn Casteel Harper is a writer, minister, and chaplain. She is the author of On Vanishing (Catapult, April 2020), a nonfiction book that explores the dimensions of spirituality, social justice, and dementia. Lynn received a Barbara Deming Fund grant for women writers for the project.

Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Catapult, The Huffington Post, North American Review, CALYX, the Journal of Religion and Abuse, and elsewhere.  She received the New Delta Review Nonfiction Prize in 2013 and the Orison Anthology’s 2017 Nonfiction Award.  She was named runner up for the Torch Prize in 2016.

An ordained Baptist minister, Lynn completed her M.Div. at Wake Forest University and her chaplaincy residency at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.  Lynn served as the nursing home chaplain at a continuing care retirement community on the New Jersey shore for seven years.  She is currently the Minister of Older Adults at The Riverside Church in the City of New York.