Rosaria Butterfield

Before

In the late 1990s Rosaria Champagne was a tenured professor of English and women's studies at Syracuse University — an award-winning scholar, a specialist in queer theory, and a respected activist living in a committed lesbian relationship with a partner she loved. Her life was full, intellectually rich, and, by her own account, good. To her, conservative Christians were not just wrong but dangerous: anti-intellectual, hypocritical, and on the wrong side of history, the enemies of everything she had worked for. So she wrote a sharp opinion piece in the local newspaper critiquing the Religious Right and its politics. The hate mail and fan mail poured in as expected, and she sorted it into two piles. But one letter would not fit either pile — and she could not throw it away.

The Turning Point

The letter was from Ken Smith, a local Presbyterian pastor. It did not condemn her or try to convert her; it was kind, genuinely curious, and full of good questions, and it invited her to dinner. To her own surprise, she went. Ken and his wife Floy welcomed her to their table not as a project to be fixed but as a person to be known, and the dinners continued — for two years — with no agenda, no pressure, and no bait-and-switch. They became real friends. Meanwhile, to research a book she was writing against the Christian right, she had started reading the Bible — cover to cover, repeatedly, in the original languages, the way a scholar reads a hostile text. But the more she read it in order to critique it, the more, she said, it started to read her. The Scriptures she had dismissed grew strange and large and inescapable; the God she had ridiculed began to seem real, and holy, and near. There was no single dramatic moment. Her conversion, she has written, was less a tidy decision than a 'train wreck' — slow, disorienting, humiliating, and total. To follow Christ she lost almost everything that had defined her: her relationship, her community, her settled identity, and the academic world that had been her home. She did not trade her hard life for an easy one; she traded it for a true one. What carried her across was not a winning argument but a kitchen table, an open Bible, and the dawning conviction that the gospel was bigger than her fear.

After

Rosaria left her career, her former life, and the identity she had built, and in time married a pastor, Kent Butterfield, becoming a mother through adoption and foster care and a homeschooling parent. She turned her improbable story into The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert and a series of later books, speaking with unusual candor about conversion, repentance, sexuality, and the cost of following Christ. Above all she champions the very thing that God used to reach her: 'radically ordinary hospitality' — the quiet, world-changing practice of opening your home and your table to neighbors and strangers, the way Ken and Floy once opened theirs to her.

In Their Words

“The gospel comes with a house key. Hospitality — opening your ordinary life to others — is the ground zero of the Christian life.”— Rosaria Butterfield