Alla Renée Bozarth

Alla Renée Bozarth was born in Portland in 1947, the only child of actively humanitarian parents. Her father, René Bozarth, was a well-beloved radio personality who helped organize the first Portland opera performed in Washington Park, before becoming an Episcopal priest in 1951. Her mother, Alvina Bozarth, an artist and Russian émigré, worked with Church World Service to resettle refugees throughout the 1950s, and went on to help foster international harmony through the United Nations People to People Program. Infused with her parents' spirit and vision for beneficial change and justice, Alla became the first woman to be ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon in 1971. She was one of eleven women to be ordained the first female priests in a controversial service in Philadelphia in 1974, which proved to be a watershed, breaking the barrier against women in full ministry.

"Woman priests are making a difference. How we affect the heart of humanity from our place in the Christian tradition remains to be seen, but I have faith that we are well on the way."

Alla earned a doctoral degree from Northwestern University just one month before the Philadelphia ordinations, with her landmark book, The Word's Body, integrating theology with philosophy, psychology and the arts. In 1978, she earned a certificate in Gestalt psychotherapy from the Gestalt Institute of San Diego. That year she incorporated Wisdom House, a center for spirituality and healing, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she lived with her priest husband, Phil Campbell. The Bozarth-Campbells lived there until his sudden death in 1985 at the age of thirty-seven. Alla then returned to her birthplace and moved Wisdom House to her pastoral home at the foot of Mt. Hood, in Sandy Oregon, where her work of soul-mending and soul-tending continues, as she serves as priest for an ecumenical worshipping community.

She has written forty-two books, over half of them poetry collections, and created seven audio albums. Many of her poems have inspired collaboration with other artists -- painters, composers, dancers, singers, cultural historians and playwrights -- and have been read and performed around the world as gifts to open the human heart and expand the human mind.

"Life on the edge is full of the tension between the now and the not-yet, the real and the ideal, the present and the future. Life on the edge means living creatively on the growing edge of my own life. Life on the edge is a stretching of the boundaries of our institutions, for we pull them with us as we expand ourselves."

"I find the whole of humanity too enriching to cut myself off from any aspect of it which can lead me closer to God, to my own truth, and to our shared understanding of what life on earth means." 

Honoring Acknowledgment: In celebration of the 30-year anniversary of the groundbreaking ordinations that opened the doors of priesthood to Episcopal women in 1974