{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0273972602739726, 'fraction_numerical': 0.008651766402307137, 'mean_word_length': 4.711934156378601, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Stepping Outside: Barbara Brown Taylor as Memoirist

Barbara Brown Taylor’s career as a writer stretches from her work as a preacher to that of a spiritual memoirist. The public high point of her first vocation took place in 1995, when Baylor University named Taylor among the twelve “most effective preachers in the Englishspeaking world.”1 In that group of twelve—which was selected from a pool of over fifteen hundred by a large sampling of seminary professors and editors of religious periodicals—she was the only woman named and, at the age of 44, decades younger than most of the other honorees (for example, Billy Graham, Fred Craddock, James Forbes, and John Stott). Unlike them, she was not an internationally known evangelist, a seminary academic, a prolific sermon publisher (in 1995 she had only two collections), or in possession of a major pulpit. She was instead an Episcopal priest in a small North Georgia parish that “in a pinch” could seat eighty-five people.2 Today, twenty years later, Taylor is no longer a parish priest, although she has continued to be a preacher in a variety of churches and to bring many of her sermons into print in seven additional collections. She has, moreover, moved the center of her professional life to the classroom and, as a writer, made a shift in genre as well as in publishing venue. It comes as no surprise that the vivid personal