Catherine Ponder

Catherine Ponder (born February 14, 1927, in Hartsville, South Carolina) is an American minister of the Unity Church, and author of books in the prosperity field.

Catherine Ponder is considered one of America's foremost inspirational authors. She has written more than a dozen books, which include such bestsellers as her Millionaires of the Bible series. She is a minister of the non-denominational Unity faith and has been described as "the Norman Vincent Peale among lady ministers." She has served in Unity Churches since 1956, and heads a global ministry in Palm Desert, California.

After studying business she enrolled in the Unity Ministerial School, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Education in 1956. She was ordained as a Unity Church minister in 1958, with an initial ministry in Birmingham, Alabama (1958–61). She founded ministries in Austin, Texas (1961–69), San Antonio (1969–73) and Palm Desert, California in 1973, where she remains minister.

Ponder wrote her first prosperity book The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity in the early 1960s whilst living in Birmingham, Alabama. Her life expanded dramatically whilst she was in the midst of finishing that book. She married and moved to the southwest, where her husband taught at the University of Texas. Much later, after her husband's death, her life changed again. In the early 1970s, another move took her to San Antonio, Texas. There she remarried and wrote a sequel to that earlier book, entitled Open Your Mind to Prosperity.

She has given lectures on the universal principles of prosperity in most of the major cities of America (and a lot of small ones, too): from Town Hall and the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, to the Phoenix Country Club in Arizona, to the Pioneer Theater Auditorium in Reno, Nevada. From Honolulu to New Orleans she has given interviews on television and radio, as well as numerous interviews by the print media.

Ponder's The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity was included among 50 'success classics' in an eponymous book by personal development scholar Tom Butler-Bowdon. Her Open Your Mind To Prosperity was separately featured in his book 50 Prosperity Classics.