The Reverend Gail Collins-Ranadive
by TIO Staff
Earlier this month the Rev. Gail Collins-Ranadive accepted an invitation to edit Southern Nevada’s Interfaith Connection, a special edition of the monthly internet journal, The Interfaith Observer (TIO), for the coming year.
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Rev. Gail Collins-Ranadive, MA (Peace Studies), MFA (Creative Writing), MDiv, is the author of four books plus workshops, poems, essays, and pieces of literary non-fiction. An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, Gail recently retired from a career in Interim Ministry that began in Las Vegas in 2000 and took her to positions in southern Vermont, Colorado Springs, Flagstaff, Arizona, Charleston, South Carolina, and Yarmouth, Maine, before returning to Southern Nevada in 2007.
Her interfaith involvement began when she was 19 and, as a student nurse, she met an intern from India. Upon marrying him, she began studying world religions as presented by Huston Smith in The Religions of Man, in particular the Hinduism of her in-laws in India. Her own religious path has been deeply informed by the insights of Joseph Campbell in Myths to Live By, especially with his references to the psychology of Carl Jung.
Gail’s spirituality is grounded in the natural world, as reflected in the writings of the Unitarian transcendentalists, especially Emerson. Although raised in the verdant east of Emerson, Thoreau, Robert Frost, and Mary Oliver, her spirit is best fed by the deep time of the desert southwest, and thus she winters in Las Vegas and summers with her partner in Denver.