Julie Barnes

Julie is a chaplain, spiritual director, and ordained UCC minister who chooses to practice in interfaith and secular settings. She has two degrees from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley CA, a Masters in Divinity and a Master in the Art of Spirituality focused on the ways that spiritual practice can help and hinder our capacity to transform trauma. She did her interfaith chaplaincy training with Stanford’s CPE program housed in Providence Hospital in Anchorage, Alaska. Julie's work is grounded in and buoyed by the silent solo retreats in the natural world that she has engaged every season of every year for the last 20 years.  

Julie's life experience and academic training have grown her passion for weaving the gifts of community and the more-than-human world together to create space to hold all that life can bring, from the beautiful, to the tragic, to the mundane. She has had the chance to do this work in a variety of contexts:  acting as chaplain at Ghost Ranch Education and Retreat Center in New Mexico, guiding wilderness rites of passage and teaching comparative religion at Marin Academy, and serving as a director and chaplain at Chewonki's Maine Coast Semester School.   She can’t wait to work with all corners of the Bowdoin community to find ways to explore and deepen our spiritual and religious lives so that they can be a vibrant part of the weave that holds us all, here at Bowdoin and beyond. 

 Julie is mother to three daughters, Indigo, Finley and Ruah. If you don’t meet them on campus, look for them walking the labyrinth they are building on their land, exploring the coast on their inflatable dragon “fate speaker,” or somewhere between giggling, bickering, and snuggling at home.