Jennifer Houston McNeel is a core faculty member at St. Mary's Ecumenical Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Her research and writing interests focus on the social world of the New Testament in general and women in the New Testament in particular. She is the author of Paul as Infant and Nursing Mother: Metaphor, Rhetoric, and Identity in 1 Thessalonians 2:5–8 and Under Her Wings: Mothers and Motherhood in the New Testament.

Her writing provides an analysis of the stories of mothers in the Gospels and Acts, mothers referred to in New Testament letters and Revelation, and metaphorical uses of motherhood through the New Testament. "Under Her Wings" draws together the motherhood-related themes such as new life, suffering, identity, caregiving, and influence, and offers reflections on why the study of mothers in the New Testament matters.