BOB ABERNETHY: On a cold, spring morning near the mountains of north Georgia, down an unfinished road, the Reverend Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, begins to write a sermon. She studies the text and invites God's inspiration, and then, she says, she lets it all percolate while she does her chores. Taylor and her husband keep a garden, sell hay, and look after three dogs, [plus] two cats, two horses, and three llamas.

REVEREND BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR: When I talk to seminary students and they say, "What do you do for your preaching?" I usually tell them, I hang my laundry out on the line. It's humbling work. I -- it's work in the service of life, in a way. It keeps me in touch with basic realities: sickness and wellness and seasons and temperature, and being mindful of whether it's raining and the horses need to be in, and how cold it'll get tonight. It's -- I get -- grounded, very grounded.

ABERNETHY: Taylor's blend of scholarship, imagery, and everyday experience keeps her booked years ahead as a guest preacher and lecturer. In Enid, Oklahoma, she preached about humanity's mixed parentage.

REV. TAYLOR: (To congregation) We're children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We're also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad.

ABERNETHY: Taylor says, she's both terrified of preaching and loves it.

REV. TAYLOR: I never want to sound too religious, but I also -- the experience of the Holy Spirit is the best thing there is, and I feel that when I preach.

ABERNETHY: In 1995, Taylor was still the rector of this small Episcopal Church in Clarkesville, Georgia, but then, out of 1,500 nominees, Baylor University named her one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world.

REV. TAYLOR: The Baylor study ruined things for me in the parish. Busloads of people started arriving in a church that seats 82, and regular church members couldn't get seats. And pretty soon, I was involved in celebrity preaching instead of parish ministry.

ABERNETHY: So, she resigned. She wanted to stay with her neighbors in the country, not move to a big-city church. She wanted more time to write. Meanwhile, her beliefs were changing.

REV. TAYLOR: Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.

ABERNETHY: Taylor is now a professor at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, where she teaches, among other courses, world religions. This day, a review of some of the facts of Judaism.

REV. TAYLOR: (To class) True or false? The Holocaust was the first wholesale slaughter of Jews. False. You can hardly, after 1000 C.E., find a century that didn't have some kind of slaughter or expulsion of the Jews.

ABERNETHY: Most of Taylor's students are Christians, but she says it's her job to give them knowledge of all religions, not to insist on the superiority of any one.

REV. TAYLOR: I am on the edge of Christianity, and I expect to get a letter telling me I've been kicked out any day. But my choice, at this point in my life, is to practice the religion of Jesus, instead of the religion about Jesus. When I listen to Jesus preach, I hear him telling stories about people outside of Israel whom God loves as much as people in Israel. That's Jesus religion.

ABERNETHY: Taylor has written or contributed to eight books, many of them collections of her sermons. This year, a new departure for her, THE LUMINOUS WEB, her examination of modern science. Did she find evidence of God?

REV. TAYLOR: There is this interpretation and that interpretation, and this religious tradition and that, and you choose. You choose, and you stake your life on your choices. But there's no evidence your choice is right, except your life.