Jean Heriot

Jean Heriot is a cultural anthropologist (doctorate from UCLA) and a Unitarian Universalist Community minister who teaches and directs the Service Learning Program at Hastings College, Hastings, Nebraska. Her writing interests include ethnography and memoir. Her book, Blessed Assurance: Beliefs, Actions, and the Experience of Salvation in a Carolina Baptist Church, was published by the University of Tennessee Press and was based on nearly two years of fieldwork with a small rural congregation. Since then she has researched women s experiences in liberal religious traditions in an ethnographic study that spanned ten years and four states. She plans to adapt this ethnographic work into a memoir. She has also worked on numerous social justice projects, including most recently, a study of food insecurity in the town of Hastings from the perspectives of religious leaders, agency providers, and recipients of food aid.