Phyllis Tickle
American writer
Phyllis Natalie Tickle (née Alexander; March 12, 1934 – September 22, 2015) was an American author and lecturer whose work focuses on spirituality and religion issues. After serving as a teacher, professor, and academic dean, Tickle entered the publishing industry, serving as the founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, before then becoming a popular writer. She is well known as a leading voice in the emergence church movement. She is perhaps best known for The Divine Hours series of books, published by Doubleday Press, and her book The Great Emergence- How Christianity Is Changing and Why. Tickle was a member of the Episcopal Church, where she was licensed as both a lector and a lay eucharistic minister. She has been widely quoted by many media outlets, including Newsweek, Time, Life, The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, C-SPAN, PBS, The History Channel, the BBC and VOA. It has been said that "Over the past generation, no one has written more deeply and spoken more widely about the contours of American faith and spirituality than Phyllis Tickle."
Personal life
Phyllis Tickle was born on March 12, 1934, to Philip Wade Alexander, dean of East Tennessee State University, and Katherine Ann Porter Alexander. On June 17, 1955, she married Samuel Milton Tickle Sr., a prominent pulmonologist, who died in January 2015 after a long illness. The couple had seven children, and Tickle continued to make her home near Millington, Tennessee, on The Farm in Lucy, where many of Tickle's stories are set.
Tickle died on September 22, 2015, months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. She was 81.
“Phyllis Tickle” enters the record as american writer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Phyllis, Tickle and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16095898. VIAF identifies the subject as 30853274. The Library of Congress control number is n81012508. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1934, 2015 and 1955.
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This entry incorporates text from “Phyllis Tickle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.