My name is Katherine Ann (Kae) Evensen and I am a published poet and columnist who writes for The Christian Century as well as for workingpreacher.org., but if you know me, you'd also know I'm a pretty big goofball. I am a pastor at Mercy Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, MN and I work with the greatest colleague of all time, Mark Stenberg.
I think of myself as a preacher. I like preaching that is earthy, fleshly, daring, disturbing, hilarious, and hopeful. I believe preaching should be schooled by great poetry and literature and by as wildly eclectic disciplines as botany, geology, and engineering. I've also been employed as a plumber’s apprentice, a bartender, an editor, a groundskeeper, a mental health worker, a preaching adjunct professor, an advisor to Prairie Home Companion, and a mortician’s assistant.
A few my favorite things are theology, drinking bargain white zinfandel with Benedictine nuns, literature, blowing stuff up, weightlifting, circus life, animal training, twigs, punk rock, and worm farming.
I am married to Martin Marty (who is as funny and charming as Jack Black, but without the celebrity baggage). Marty is program manager for Hennepin County. I am also the mother of two amazing and wonderful children, eighteen-year old Emily, a freshman and Pacific Lutheran University and twenty-two year old Jimmy, a senior at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. I am also the legal guardian of three dogs, one cat and four fish.