Bio

Catherine Wolff is a fifth-generation Californian born and raised in San Francisco. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, she moved to the Ann Arbor to do a master’s degree in art history at the University of Michigan, then back home to teach high school. Over the years she’s lived in Phoenix, Arizona, Syracuse, New York, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, West Berlin, and Rome. She returned to Northern California in 1997 with her husband the writer Tobias Wolff, where they live not far from their three children and three young grandsons. 

Catherine’s interests have taken her on many different roads. Following her work in art history, she earned a master’s in social work at Syracuse University and spent years as a therapist and addictions counselor. Catherine turned from personal to public social work and education as Director of The Arrupe Center for Community-Based Learning at Santa Clara University. She later earned a master’s in pastoral ministries at SCU and served as a chaplain at Stanford University.

Catherine had one more vocation to follow. Disheartened by scandal and tensions in her church, she edited Not Less Than Everything: Catholic Writers on Heroes of Conscience from Joan of Arc to Oscar Romero (HarperCollins, 2013). Catholic writers and theologians contributed essays on exemplary men and women who remained steadfast in their faith while being at odds with institutional authorities. 

Beyond: How Humankind Thinks About Heaven is a wide-ranging cultural history of the hopes for life beyond.  These hopes have sustained us from our Neanderthal relatives through the great religions of the world to the present day, when we look for life beyond through science and paranormal experience as well as through faith.  In many ways, Catherine’s varied career served as good preparation such a broad, elusive subject. She was able to draw on her knowledge of art, faith, and the psyche to discover and weave together the innumerable ways we have imagined life beyond our earthly reality. 

Photo by Peter Boyer