Healing and Wholeness

Patricia Adams Farmer is an American writer, process theologian, and retired minister. Public sources do not record her exact birth date or birthplace, but they show a life shaped by study in philosophy, theology, and education, leading to graduate degrees (M.Div., M.A., and M.Ed.). She has taught philosophy at the university level, served as an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and worked with at-risk high school students. Across these roles, Patricia Adams Farmer has held together intellectual work, pastoral care, and concern for people who live with real struggle.

As a graduate student, Patricia Adams Farmer was deeply influenced by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, especially his description of God as the “poet of the world.” This process vision of God as relational and responsive shaped her central themes of beauty, divine compassion, and a world in motion. Her books include Embracing a Beautiful God (2003), the novels The Metaphor Maker (2009) and Fat Soul Fridays (2013), Fat Soul: A Philosophy of S-I-Z-E (2016), and Beauty and Process Theology: A Journey of Transformation (2020). She also co-edited Replanting Ourselves in Beauty: Toward an Ecological Civilization (2015), bringing questions of beauty into dialogue with ecology and public life.

Geography has also shaped Patricia Adams Farmer’s perspective. She spent five years living on the coast of Ecuador, near an old fishing village and in the dry tropical forest, an experience that deepened her appreciation for cultural and ecological diversity and fed her reflection on “Beauty with a capital B” and “Fat Soul Philosophy.” She later returned to the United States and now lives in Missouri with her husband, biblical scholar and minister Ron Farmer, and their ginger cat, Alfie. Her essays appear on Open Horizons and in the “Process Musings” blog at Spirituality & Practice, as well as in other online platforms. Throughout this work, she links beauty, process theology, and care for the Earth with a steady concern for the healing and widening of the human soul.