The Rev. Katie Silcox is a doctoral candidate in systematic and historical theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto and a priest in the Diocese of Toronto. She moved around Northern and Southern Ontario for most of her life and was intensely involved in both playing and watching hockey (ice, for my American friends), soccer, and rugby. She went down to North Carolina on a soccer scholarship for her undergraduate degree where she studied business and biology.
Her first real exposure to Christianity was through Athletes in Action while living in North Carolina. A year in the workforce brought with it many questions about truth, purpose, meaning, ethics, organizational behavior, decision-making and governance. Eight months after returning to the Church (Anglican), she started an M.Div degree in order to obtain a doctorate in theology, where she could explore these questions more fully. She spends most of her time as new, part-time, interim priest in charge working to reboot her parish and working on her dissertation on “the Catechizing of a Nation,” which looks at how three seventeenth-century theologians — William Chillingworth, John Wilkins, and Herbert Thorndike — drew on Richard Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity in the attempt to establish a society capable of discerning truth in the context of social and religious division and violence. When not working in the parish or on the dissertation, she spends the majority of her time trail running, road biking, and doing “urban exploration/parkour” around historic sites and neighborhoods in Toronto.
She lives in downtown Toronto with 80 other graduate students at Wycliffe College studying theology, law, medicine, philosophy, music, medieval studies, psychology, bioengineering, neuroscience and business. Her other interests include neuro/cognitive science, mental health research with respect to neurological, central nervous system, behavioral and social responses to various types of trauma, social psychology, anthropology, geospatial science, physics, math, climatic science, urban/regional planning, natural disaster mitigation and response, physiology, sports science, endocrinology, building and fixing bikes, indie folk music, and requiems.
