Pastor Heidi Neumark describes her new book while visiting the seminary for the fall meeting of the Board of Trustees.

PHILADELPHIA (October 29, 2003) - For years while serving as pastor of Transfiguration Church in New York City's South Bronx, the Rev. Heidi Neumark '82 would read news accounts about the people and issues of her neighborhood.

"I found a lot of that other stuff one-sided," she said. She also felt compelled to share the stories and witness of the people she had come to know through her service at Transfiguration. "I wanted to write about the heart of God in that place and what the Holy Spirit is doing there," she says. "I wanted to tell the story of how I had experienced that. "I always had written a lot, but it was a real challenge to accomplish what I had in mind. I really didn't know at the start how it would turn out."

The "start" began about eight years ago. The result is Breathing Space, A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx (Beacon 2003, $25). "It took a long time," Neumark says. The book emerged from notes she kept, stories she wrote. A Louisville Institute-furnished sabbatical over three months helped her find the "breathing space" to pull the volume together, but the title is really a reference too to the life and death challenges posed by the air quality that Neumark says is "shrinking children's lungs" in the South Bronx. "Sometimes I felt guilty about taking time to write the book," she says. "But toward the end I felt there was a connection to sharing this writing as a witness outside the Transfiguration community. I finally saw it as part of the church's ministry." The stories inside the volume depict the daily struggles of people in the congregation, made up both of Hispanics and African-Americans.

The book has a couple of seminary connections too. Faculty member Gordon Lathrop helped her talk through the structure for the book. Seminarian Andrena T. Ingram is the character "Angie" in the book. (Neumark is a seminary trustee.)

The book describes how Transfiguration's members entrusted the role of pastor to someone with a background different from their own. Through stories that recount the everyday heroism of the people she came to know and love, Neumark relates how the congregation made possible changes few would once have thought possible. Former addicts become church leaders; women who had never been out of the neighborhood find renewal in a mountain retreat; children looking for safety and direction flock to the church after school and soon bring their parents; the elderly and disabled insist on participating in a walkathon to raise money for a much-needed church annex. The daily work of the church - Sunday services, baptisms, bible study and Christmas pageants - become intertwined with the pressing need for social change. She traces her growing outrage at the forces that exploit and marginalize poor neighborhoods.

Neumark recently moved on to become pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church on West 100th Street in New York's Manhattan. Her husband, Gregorio, is a native of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and she is the mother of two children, Ana and Hans.

In reflecting on her South Bronx experience, she writes: "I have learned that grace cleaves to the depths, attends the losses and there slowly works her defiant transfiguration."

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote of the book, "With its hard-nosed realism and passion for God, this memoir should appeal to people of faith across the political spectrum…Neumark's perceptive reflections, lyrical writing style and ability to create a sense of place call to mind such writers as Alex Kotlowitz and Jonathan Kozol."