Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is the author of Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion (Due from Beacon Press, in August, but it’s available now for preorder). It’s about the trials, tribulations and political implications of taking on a religious practice–how taking on a spiritual discipline complicates one’s life, but in a really good way, and how contemporary America makes an an ancient process even more complicated than it’s ever been. Before receiving her rabbinic ordination from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles, Danya Ruttenberg grew up in the Chicago area, received her B.A. in Religious Studies from Brown University and worked in San Francisco as a freelance writer. She’s the editor of Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism (Seal Press), and has been published in many books and periodicals over the years. She’s also a contributing editor to Lilith and the academic journal Women and Judaism, and is on the editorial board of (and blogs at) Jewschool.com. Rabbi Ruttenberg is currently in the process of editing an anthology on Judaism and sex, due from NYU Press in 2009, and co-editing a series of books on Jewish ethics with Rabbi Elliot Dorff for the Jewish Publication Society’s Jewish Choices/Jewish Voices series. She lives in the Boston area with her husband, Nir.