Kujawa-Holbrook, a 1983 graduate of EDS, has been a member of the faculty since 1998. In September 2004 she became the first holder of the Suzanne Radley Hiatt Professorship in Feminist Pastoral Theology.

Kujawa-Holbrook said the Suzanne Radley Hiatt Chair was a special chair that was instituted after Professor Hiatt -- who was one of the Philadelphia 11 women first 'irregularly' ordained to the priesthood in 1974 -- had taught at EDS for close to 30 years.

"Her friends, donors and a lot of the alums of the school put the Chair together to make sure there was always a witness on the faculty for some of the values that Sue Hiatt's ministry was about," Kujawa-Holbrook said, noting that Hiatt's ministry emphasized "the importance of justice, the importance of leadership, particularly women's leadership, but also leadership of people of color, and anti-racism."

Kujawa-Holbrook said she first knew Hiatt as her teacher and they became colleagues for a semester when she returned to EDS to teach.

"I am very, very lucky that we overlapped a little bit and I did know her and I visited and talked with her several times," she said. "And now I have the benefit of having met with and now know her sister Jean Kramer who is in contact with me about any activities around the Hiatt Chair and how we're going to use some of Sue's legacy and keep it going."

In her new role, Kujawa-Holbrook said she will continue to teach in the fields of pastoral theology and church history "certainly from a feminist perspective." She also said she has been giving thought to writing a book on different forms of women's leadership and there has been discussion around publishing Hiatt's sermons.

In addition to teaching, Kujawa-Holbrook is a published author. She attributes the inspiration for her latest book "Deeper Joy: Lay Women and Vocation in the 20th Century Episcopal Church" to Dr. Fredrica Harris Thompsett, who co-edited the book with her.

"Being a lay woman, [Fredrica] had done some work with the graduates of Windham House, which was one of the training centers for women that closed in the 60s," said Kujawa-Holbrook.

She said that when women started attending seminaries, the graduate students of Windham House were concerned because these were very important women in the Episcopal Church.

"They had lots of leadership roles, many of them went into Christian education, or into college chaplaincies, and we were concerned as we started to talk about this [that] the contribution of lay women in a variety of fields...that various things were being eclipsed, at least in the literature for women's ordination," said Kujawa-Holbrook.

She said they sensed that women's ordination was and still is a very important issue throughout the world. However, it is not to suggest that only ordained women have a vocation.

"Most of the women in the church are lay women and have been exercising their ministries for hundreds of years," she said. "So we put this book together with a collection of people who could document that, because we wanted to make sure those voices were raised up and were illustrated."

According to Kujawa-Holbrook, some of the material is archival, and some based on interviews, but overall it's "from people who were justifiably concerned that their work would not be forgotten."

Kujawa-Holbrook is also a member of the Episcopal Church Executive Council's Anti-Racism Committee.

"I started doing anti-racism work in the Episcopal Church when I was the youth ministries coordinator and for 10 years we worked on institutional racism and how we could make what we offered at the church more inclusive of the needs of young people of color," she said. "That grew into the larger work that we are doing now across age lines."

Kujawa-Holbrook said it is also an important part of the work of EDS. "Our seminary is committed to anti-racism which is one of the reasons I came here to teach and be available in that area. So the two ministries really mesh."