Cynthia Holt, MA
Born and raised a metaphysician, Cynthia attended both Sunday school and services in Religious Science, Unity, and Spiritualist churches in her youth. As an adult, she was a board member, a children’s Sunday School teacher, and children’s program director for several Unity Churches. She holds a Masters’s degree in Bible from the Union Theological Seminary of New York.
If asked, she’ll tell you she’s from a little bit of everywhere. Born in Houston, Texas, she learned to walk on Long Island, learned to talk in San Jose, attended grade school in Salem, Oregon, and graduated from High School in Honolulu.
She moved to Portland, Oregon to attend college when she was 18. On her first Sunday at Unity of Portland, there was a call from the pulpit to teach Sunday school and she’s been teaching ever since. After raising a husband and a daughter, Cynthia decided to try one more time to finish college. She attended Willamette University in Salem, Oregon majoring in Religious Studies with a minor in Classical Studies hoping to understand what all those other people were talking about when it came to religion. Dualists still don’t make sense to her, but she does better understand them.
The original plan had been to get a degree in Religious Studies from Columbia University. However, after she started her classes there, she discovered that the Religion Department had been overtaken by Buddhists. Wanting to further her studies in ancient religions and not focus on just one sect of Buddhism, she transferred to the Christian seminary. Surprised to find herself in seminary, she focused on the Bible, its origins, and early influences on the newly formed Christianity. She took advantage of the situation by exploring the Bible from a metaphysician’s viewpoint. This included taking a class in Philo of Alexandria from the Jewish seminary at Columbia, The Jewish Seminary of American. Her only deviation was to take a sermon class because she had been inspired in her youth by the cadence and patterns of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the biography, Parting the Waters, she learned that he was a studied and practiced method learned in seminary.
Cynthia teaches in a true Socratic method, recognizing the truth lies within each of us and her role as an educator is to assist her pupils in discovering how much they know.