Holding Her Own

I was visiting with friends a couple months ago when the husband asked, Who’s in charge of Her.meneutics?” His wife chimed in: “It’s great.”

The husband added, “We read it every day. Very thoughtful.”

The husband’s comment surprised me, because Her.meneutics is the Christianity Today blog for women, as the tagline reads (christianitytoday.com/women). His comment was another sign that it is drawing more readers, female and male, every month, and one reason it’s doing so is associate editor Katelyn Beaty.

The California-North Carolina-Virginia and finally Dayton, Ohio, native (the moves were driven by her father’s service in the Marines) came to the magazine in August 2007 to become our copy editor. She was pretty much fresh out of Calvin College at the time. She says her first impression of the hallway was that it was “home to men who had strong opinions and liked to voice them frequently and loudly.” Well, yes. But one reason we thought she’d fit well at CT is that she is more than capable of holding her own in such an opinionated setting.

Katelyn’s natural editorial instincts prompted us to expand her horizons.

The first was starting the women’s blog, whose early names included Miss.iology and A Dame Good Blog. Katelyn finally came up with the current title, thank goodness. The blog is edited with help from online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey, and is written by and for women, not as a platform for women’s causes, as such, but whatever interests women—which includes a lot, of course, that interests men. The blog now attracts about 3,000 unique pageviews daily and hosts 15 regular writers. Some of them are politically left-of-center, others are firmly conservative. While all the writers agree that women should take leadership in church and society, not all are committed to women’s ordination. As Katelyn says, the blog “is distinctly evangelical—committed to scriptural authority, personal and cultural regeneration, and actively engaged in the world.” The blog’s steady growth suggests that Katelyn is a dame good blog manager.

This year we added another item to Katelyn’s portfolio: the This Is Our City project, for which she is the editorial director. This puts her peripatetic history to work as she travels with a team of people across the country, giving her “a front row seat to witness God’s movement in American cities.” She continues, “Sitting at a desk all day can numb editors to the fact that many news blips and articles originate with tangible and costly decisions to serve Christ.”

Outside work, Katelyn plays piano at Taize services at her church (St. Barnabas Episcopal), serves on the church board, and occasionally teaches adult education. Add to that bird-watching and experiments in karaoke and cooking, and it’s a wonder she has time to copy edit or write anything. We’re glad she does.

Next month: Michael Horton discusses why we can really know what God is like, Tim Stafford interviews Craig Keener on miracles today, and Katelyn Beaty profiles the largest Vineyard church in the world (in Columbus, Ohio).

Related Elsewhere:

See the introduction to the This Is Our City project, “A New Kind of Urban Ministry” and read our cover story about Portland, “Portland’s Quiet Abolitionists.”

For more updates to This Is Our City, visit the project’s website, ThisIsOurCity.org.

Check back for more stories from our November issue.

Visit Her.meneutics for news and analysis.