The Short Version.

Rev. Dr. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is Associate Pastor at Tokyo Lutheran Church and the Founder of Thornbush Press. She has written, edited, and contributed to numerous books of both theology and fiction and has published hundreds of articles. She hosts the podcasts Queen of the Sciences, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson Stories, and The Disentanglement Podcast, and writes the e-newsletter Theology & a Recipe.

The Long Version.

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is the Founder of Thornbush Press, launched in 2020, and author of a number of books under its imprint: I Am a Brave Bridge, Sermon on the Mount: A Poetic Paraphrase, Small Catechism: Memorizing Edition, Pearly Gates: Parables from the Final Threshold, To Baptize or Not to Baptize: A Practical Guide for Clergy, and A-Tumblin’ Down.

Since August 2018 she has lived in Mitaka, Japan, on the campus of Japan Lutheran College and Theological Seminary, where her husband Andrew L. Wilson is Professor of Church History. Sarah serves as one of the pastors at Tokyo Lutheran Church near the Shin-Ōkubo station in central Tokyo. She’s also an Affiliated Faculty Member at the Johannelund School of Theology in Uppsala, Sweden.

From July 2016 to July 2018 Sarah and her family lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, getting reacquainted with their home territory in between international sojourns. During that period she wrote a memoir about the year she spent in the fledgling Republic of Slovakia when she was 17.

From 2008 to 2016 the Wilsons lived in Strasbourg, France, where Sarah worked at the Institute for Ecumenical Research, a close affiliate of the Lutheran World Federation, specializing in Eastern Orthodoxy and Pentecostalism. Sarah continues to serve as a Visiting Professor of the Institute and, as such, the Consultant to the International Lutheran-Pentecostal Dialogue. With her colleague Theodor Dieter from the Institute, Sarah teaches an annual course in Wittenberg, Germany, on Martin Luther’s theology.

In 2010, Sarah and Andrew followed the footsteps of Martin Luther’s pilgrimage from Germany to Rome five hundred (or maybe four hundred ninety-nine) years earlier.

Sarah earned a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology in 2008 and an M.Div. in 2003 at Princeton Theological Seminary. During that time, Sarah and Andrew got married and became parents to Zeke. She served as pastor at a Slovak-American church in Trenton, New Jersey, and became the editor of Lutheran Forum, an independent theological quarterly, which she continued to edit until the end of 2018. All of her articles from that period are available here.

Before graduate school Sarah spent one year working at First Things, where she first started publishing theological essays. Since her first in October 1998, Sarah has published hundreds of articles in popular venues like Christianity Today, The Christian Century, and Books & Culture, as well as scholarly journals like Pro Ecclesia, Pneuma, Lutheran Quarterly, and Concordia Journal. She has edited four books and contributed to a few more.

Sarah earned a B.A. in Theology and Philosophy from Lenoir-Rhyne College (which has since upgraded to Lenoir-Rhyne University).

Between high school and college Sarah spent the aforementioned year living in Slovakia with her parents and brother, where she learned to chatter in Slovak about food, piety, and boys.

Sarah did her growing up in New York and New Jersey and still thinks of herself as a New Yorker, even though she hasn’t lived there since the last millennium.