Amy Carr:  

I'm living in rural western Illinois (well, not that rural by UP standards, since the town has 20,000 people when the students are here, under 10,000 otherwise), in a town called Macomb. I teach at Western Illinois University, in the Philosophy & Religious Studies department. After graduating in 1985 from L'Anse, I went to college in southern Minnesota (at Carleton College), and worked each summer in a different state (in the Grand Tetons in Wyoming; in the Rocky Mountain National Park--at the restaurant at the top of a pass, about 11,000 feet up), in Youngstown, OH and then near San Francisco. After college I joined the Lutheran Volunteer Corps for a year, where I worked for an organization that was trying to improve human rights in Central America. I learned skills I've since forgotten, like how to organize a luncheon for 200 religious leaders, a state senator, and a bishop from El Salvador who was in hiding until right before he came to speak at the luncheon (six Jesuit priests had just been murdered in El Salvador by paramilitary forces, and he too was targeted). Then I moved to Nashville to pursue an M.Div. at Vanderbilt (a professional degree for ministry). I really liked Nashville. So many singer-songwriters live there. You could meet Emmy Lou Harris if you went to Quaker meetings, and Amy Grant's studio (she was big then, in the early 90's) was just by my house. Then I spent a summer in the UP, where I married and also supply preached for Lutheran pastors on vacation. My then-husband and I both moved to Chicago then, and pursued doctorates at the University of Chicago Divinity School, living in Hyde Park (on the south side). I lived there for seven years. I did not stay married; I had always felt towards Dan, my husband, more as a friend. We have remained friends, and share a meal each year wherev...Expand for more