Select Publications

The Geography of the Soul Sapientia Music

In Dulci Jubilo
Celestial Harmonies

Rosa Mystica
Celestial Harmonies

The Queen's Minstrel
Windham Hill

Celebrant Historical Harp
Lady Reason

Transitus: A Blessed Death in the Modern World St. Dunsan's Press

The Chalice of Repose: A Contemplative Musician's Approach to Death and Dying a Fetzer-funded Paul & Jennifer Kaufman Production, Palm Springs International Film Festival 1997 1st place video award, available in video format

The Gift the ABC, 1996, Christopher Award winning Laura Palmer Production for Ted Koppel's Nightline, available in video format

Forthcoming 2004 scholarly works and releases: Cambridge University Press, Spring Publications, Wind Over the Earth Music and more.

Musician - Clinician - Educator - Oblate

Therese Schroeder-Sheker has delivered concerts and plenary or keynote addresses at over one-hundred and twenty-five national and international congresses, conferences and institutes in the fields of palliative medicine and palliative nursing, pastoral theology and care, medieval studies, musicology, religious studies and women's studies. She has performed concerts for or delivered intensive residencies at universities, colleges, monasteries, cathedrals and centers for performing arts throughout the United States and Europe, and occasionally directs Benedictine annual retreats for religious communities, musicians, composers and lay contemplatives. For information or inquiries, please contact the office through phone or email:

Phone: 503-845-6089
Email: phoebe51@centric.net
Website: chaliceofrepose.org
P0 Box 169, Mt. Angel, OR 97362 USA

Therese Schroeder-Sheker: Vox Feminae

Founder and Director, Chalice of Repose Project Mt.Angel, Oregon

Visiting Professor of Pastoral Theology and Music, Duke University Divinity School

Artist and Clinician in Residence,The Catholic University of America, School of Nursing and Benjamin T. Rome School of Music

Therese Schroeder-Sheker Harpist & Soprano Vox feminae

In a career integrating music, medicine, and theology, her work has touched millions. Dedicating both harp and voice to the loving care of the dying in Benedictine patoral practices of monastic medicine, she has championed prescriptive music deliveries in response to human suffering. During thirty years continual work, she founded the palliative medical and pastoral modality of music-thanatology as well as the premiere music-thanatology organization, The Chalice of Repose Project. Through this organization and its School of Music-Thanatology, many thousands of patients and their loved ones have received effective, supportive, intimate and loving physical and spiritual end-of-life care.

During three decades of continual artistic, clinical, pedagogical and scholarly work, the harpist, singer and composer Therese Schroeder Sheker has chaired four American music-thanatology graduate and undergraduate programs while contributing a highly original voice to the international classical music world.

She studied composition with the Nadia Boulanger protégé, Normand Lockwood, made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1980, has five CD recordings, and guest-artist performances on eleven additional productions. Her solo concerts and recordings of harp and voice (as well as performances for film scores and television documentaries) have reached scores of millions of listeners and viewers in American, European and Asian audiences. This unusually creative life, distinguished internationally in music, education and palliative medicine/pastoral care also reflects the love of the written word and the living page. Her resume includes over 100 publications in eight languages in four categories: discography, bibliography, filmography and performing edition scores for chamber music and a cappella choirs.

Ultimately, as a contemplative, an artist, a scholar and a clinician, she has published and sustained an abiding interest in a number of closely related and, at times, overlapping fields: contemplative musicianship, the late medieval Benedictine and Cistercian women mystics Hildegard of Bingen and Mechtild of Hackeborn, the twentieth century Swiss mystic Joa Bolendas, monastic medicine, palliative medicine, musicthanatology, the literature of metanoia and the theology of beauty. Her artistic and clinical work have been distinguished with numerous cultural, media and humanitarian awards a shared Enimy, a shared gold record, a Christopher, a Gabriel, a Jerome, etc. and she has been featured on prime-time television documentaries for ABC Nightline, NBC Dateline, PBS, CNN and cable station broadcasts. Her work has been distinguished with over three million dollars in foundation grants.

In 2002, she relocated the Chalice of Repose Project to Mt. Angel, Oregon and continues her dual collaborations with Duke University Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina (teaching pastoral theology and music) and The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC (teaching in the School of Nursing and the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music.)