Nancy Vernon Kelly

Nancy Vernon Kelly grew up in Hollywood, California, during the Cold War. She is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and a freelance writer. Recurrent themes in Nancy's writings include the complexity of breaking down social barriers, nurturing community, the development of conscience, and the enlargement of the soul. She and her husband Robert live in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and have two grown daughters and two grandchildren. Preface to Souls at Risk: Extremism at Home in...See more

Nancy Vernon Kelly grew up in Hollywood, California, during the Cold War. She is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and a freelance writer. Recurrent themes in Nancy's writings include the complexity of breaking down social barriers, nurturing community, the development of conscience, and the enlargement of the soul. She and her husband Robert live in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and have two grown daughters and two grandchildren. Preface to Souls at Risk: Extremism at Home in Red Scare Hollywood : "When hateful, anti-communist extremism invaded my Hollywood home during the Red Scare, it didn't get a foothold in a vacuum. Extremism's grip had clear public and personal roots. It seized my family in risky and damaging ways and contaminated our lives with something so unsavory that for many years I didn't want to dwell on it. But neither could I forget it. The story I tell here embodies the disruption of extremism and, no less, the disruption of grace. Souls at Risk revolves around a two-hour concert my father produced for Pete Seeger, a popular blacklisted folksinger. The concert itself took place in a public high school auditorium in San Diego, California in 1960, but much of the social, political, and personal history I witnessed or heard about occurred in other places long before the concert and long after. Indeed, the sweetest slice of mercy arrived in my inbox in 2009, almost fifty years after the event. Summoned now by the future, I tell this story in a spirit of resistance, warning, and solidarity with 'souls at risk' in our present day." See less