Janice Poss

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 as the readings of Thich Nhat Hahn led her back to her faith.   

As she became more involved in ministry, she studied foundational theology as a quest for knowledge to help those to whom she ministered, went on to a master’s degree in pastoral theology and is completing her Ph.D.

Her areas of interest concentrate on the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, feminism, praxis, social justice, activism, international peace-building and women’s ordination, empowerment and leadership. 

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In 2017, she presented a poster project on the intersection of Tibetan Buddhism and Science at the Mangalam Center’s Summer in Berkeley, Ca. She helped initiate Wikipedia’s Women in Religion project, and for ten years has been the senior coordinator for the Pat Reif, IHM, Memorial Lecture at CGU now in its twentieth year. For her dissertation studies, she won the Albert B. Friedman Award in 2019  to study Tibetan in Sarnath, India, and then in 2020, she won the Carolyn Spanier-Ladwig German Proficiency Fund to continue to improve her German language abilities. Her dissertation focuses on interreligious dialogue between Buddhism and Catholicism from a feminist perspective of retrieving the stories of historical women religious leaders who can serve as powerful exemplars for women today.

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She loves animals, practices Christian and Buddhist meditation, and sang in choir for fourteen years.  Meditation and music are important to her personal worship. St. Hildegard wrote that singing high notes brings one closer to God.