Doreen M. McFarlane
About Doreen M. McFarlane, Ph. D.
Doreen M McFarlane has eight published books; academic and pastoral. She writes out of a vast and varied life experience! She began as an opera and concert singer with a career that took her throughout the world and almost every state of the U.S.A. She entered seminary and earned both a Master of Divinity (Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago) and Ph.D. in Bible (Chicago Theological Seminary). She served full time as an ordained pastor for the United Church of Christ in three states (Illinois, Florida, and Connecticut) for fifteen years while also teaching both college and seminary courses (in the classroom and online) to a widely diverse student body! She came home to Canada after four years in China, where she was professor of Hebrew and Greek at Nanjing Union Theological Seminary and then professor of American Religion and Culture at Shanghai University. She is currently serving four churches, preaching and presiding every Sunday in one or two churches!
Doreen M McFarlane has eight published books; academic and pastoral. She writes out of a vast and varied life experience! She began as an opera and concert singer with a career that took her throughout the world and almost every state of the U.S.A. She entered seminary and earned both a Master of Divinity (Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago) and Ph.D. in Bible (Chicago Theological Seminary). She served full time as an ordained pastor for the United Church of Christ in three states (Illinois, Florida, and Connecticut) for fifteen years while also teaching both college and seminary courses (in the classroom and online) to a widely diverse student body! She came home to Canada after four years in China, where she was professor of Hebrew and Greek at Nanjing Union Theological Seminary and then professor of American Religion and Culture at Shanghai University. She is currently serving four churches, preaching and presiding every Sunday in one or two churches!
Doreen M McFarlane has eight published books; academic and pastoral. She writes out of a vast and varied life experience! She began as an opera and concert singer with a career that took her throughout the world and almost every state of the U.S.A. She entered seminary and earned both a Master of Divinity (Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago) and Ph.D. in Bible (Chicago Theological Seminary). She served full time as an ordained pastor for the United Church of Christ in three states (Illinois, Florida, and Connecticut) for fifteen years while also teaching both college and seminary courses (in the classroom and online) to a widely diverse student body! She came home to Canada after four years in China, where she was professor of Hebrew and Greek at Nanjing Union Theological Seminary and then professor of American Religion and Culture at Shanghai University. She is currently serving four churches, preaching and presiding every Sunday in one or two churches!
Recent News
An Icelandic Ghost Crosses the Atlantic
An Interview Written By Katrin Nielsdottir
For Doreen M. McFarlane, becoming an author wasn’t part of a lifelong plan, it was something that emerged later, almost unexpectedly, and then all at once.
“I keep telling everybody I’ve written eleven books,” she says with a laugh. “Eight are published—but still, eleven!” Her work spans theology, leadership, and pastoral care, with titles like God in Translation and Leadership Lessons from Jesus. But among these academic publications sits something entirely different: a novel about an Icelandic ghost who follows a family across generations—and across the ocean to Canada. It’s a story McFarlane insists she never intended to write.
“I never believed in ghosts in my life,” she says. “And then this book just… came. I sat down, and it practically wrote itself.”
The story began, as many good Icelandic stories do, with a name. On a whim, McFarlane typed her grandmother’s name—Guðrún—into the internet. She expected little more than a cemetery record. Instead, she stumbled across a lecture on Icelandic immigrant ghosts, delivered decades after her grandmother’s death.
What caught her attention was startling: a ghost, known in Icelandic folklore, said to have followed her family line—and to have chosen her grandmother as its companion. From there, McFarlane did what any seasoned researcher would do. She dug deeper. “I started researching like a good researcher,” she says. “And I didn’t find much at first—but enough.”
“She’s more of a troublemaker,” McFarlane explains. “Hiding pies, scaring animals—not really hurting anyone.”
Over generations, the ghost travels with one branch of the family after another, eventually crossing the Atlantic with Icelandic settlers to Canada. There, she encounters a new world—and new loneliness.
“She’s used to being part of a family,” McFarlane says. “But in Canada, she starts looking for something more.”
That search leads her—tentatively and imperfectly—toward the spiritual traditions of others, including Indigenous beliefs. McFarlane acknowledges that this part of the story is imaginative rather than authoritative, but it reflects an attempt to situate the Icelandic immigrant experience within a broader cultural landscape.
What makes the novel especially compelling is its voice. The ghost narrates her own story, something McFarlane says she never consciously planned.
“She starts right at the beginning saying, ‘Let me make this perfectly clear—I am an Icelandic ghost. I’m not an elf,’” McFarlane recalls. “She’s very direct.”
That voice carries the story through centuries, following the family line right down to McFarlane herself. Along the way, the novel blends documented history with imagination: real ancestors, real migration patterns, and carefully researched folklore.
“It has 112 footnotes,” McFarlane notes, half amused.
McFarlane’s path to writing has been anything but conventional. She began her academic career later in life, entering seminary in her forties with what she describes as an unremarkable academic record. “I had an average of 53% in high school,” she says. “And then I got straight A’s all the way through seminary.”
That transformation shaped her approach to both scholarship and storytelling. Whether editing a volume of essays by leading scholars or writing a practical guide for modern families, she approaches each project with curiosity—and persistence. “You have to be interested in what you’re doing,” she says. “That makes all the difference.”
Now, with multiple books behind her—including several published in just the past year and a half—McFarlane is considering her next step. She’s drawn to stories that connect Iceland and North America, past and present. “If this is even relatively successful,” she says of her ghost novel, “I should do something that brings Iceland and Canada together again.”
For Western Icelandic readers, that connection is already at the heart of her work. Through one unlikely narrator—a restless spirit with a long memory—McFarlane has found a way to tell a migration story that is at once personal, historical, and quietly imaginative.
And perhaps, just a little bit haunted.
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