Janice Leah Poss is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Women's Studies in Religions at Claremont
Graduate University and holds an MA in Pastoral Theology from Loyola Marymount University.
Her BFA in fashion and photography is from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has
done all forms of ministry at her parish, Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, CA.,
where she currently teaches adult Bible Study and a course on the Vatican II interreligious
document, Nostra Aetate. She considers herself a Buddhist Catholic without hesitation.
Her areas of interest concentrate on the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, feminism,
praxis, social justice, activism, international peace-building, interreligious dialogue, and
women’s ordination, empowerment, and leadership.
As a Ph.D. candidate, She has won several awards, including the Margo L. Goldsmith
Fellowship in 2015, the John Templeton Foundation Grant -Putting the Buddhism/Science
Dialogue on a New Footing Poster Award in 2017, the Albert B. Friedman Award in 2019 to
study Tibetan in Sarnath, India, and in 2020, she won the Carolyn Spanier-Ladwig German
Proficiency Fund to continue to improve her German language skills. Her dissertation focuses on
the interreligious dialogue between Buddhism and Catholicism from a feminist perspective of
constructing a new narrative of historical women religious leaders who are powerful exemplars
for today.
She has been a leadership member of the Women’s Caucus since 2014. She helped
initiate Wikipedia’s Women in Religion project in 2018, and she has contributed two articles for
the Women in Religion Wikipedia project for ATLA vol. 1 - Claiming Notability for Women
Activists in Religion and vol. 2 - Challenging Bias Against Women Academics in Religion as
secondary sources.
Since 2012, she has been the Senior Coordinator for the Pat Reif, IHM, Memorial
Lecture at CGU, which is now in its twenty-second year.
She loves animals, particularly cats, practices Christian and Buddhist meditation, and
sang in choir for fourteen years. Meditation and music are essential to her personal worship. St.
Hildegard wrote that singing high notes brings one closest to God.