Cedar Monroe just released their first book: Trash: A Poor White Journey. The book draws from their experience as a co-founder of Chaplains on the Harbor, where they served as a chaplain to people experiencing homelessness, incarceration, and addiction in rural Washington state, in the community in which they had grown up. The book grapples with the realities of poverty in a majority white rural community, addressing entrenched white supremacy, the dispossession of Indigenous people, and rising inequality and homelessness. The book walks with the community as they experience extraordinary violence, but also as poor people in the community build leadership and power in a cross-racial movement to end poverty.
Cedar was ordained in the Episcopal church for a decade, but resigned their orders in 2023, as they felt spirit and land calling them to pagan ministry. As young people leave the church, as the number of non-affiliated (“nones”) increase in the U.S., and as more and more people are searching for earth based spiritual traditions, Cedar felt called to find new paths as chaplain to new and developing spiritualities. They are currently studying for a ThM in Indigenous and Interreligious Studies at Vancouver School of Theology. They hope to develop new ways of doing ministry and study ways of decolonizing spirituality in the United States.
“My time at EDS was critical in forming my ministry,” shared Cedar. “I did field education with Ecclesia Ministries, where I was trained in chaplaincy and found my ministry affirmed by the many leaders there. EDS grounded me in liberation theology, in a God on the side of the poor, and taught me to listen for theology through the resistance of oppressed communities. My professors introduced me to the many theologies coming from oppressed communities around the world, most especially those from the Global South.”