Patricia Ann Wilson was born on September 18, 1944, in New York City to Woodrow and Mary Wilson. She grew up, however, in Dallas, Texas. Patty, as the family called her, was the oldest of four children. Wilson-Kastner graduated from Our Lady of Good Counsel High School in 1962. She was voted Most Likely to Succeed by her peers. She joined the Order of Sisters of St. Mary Namur in Dallas Texas in 1962. She was named Sister Jeremy after the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, an agitator, who was thrown into a cistern by his enemies. During her six years in the Order, Sister Jeremy became an English and Religion teacher at Nolan High School in Dallas, Texas. The nuns encouraged her to be better educated in philosophy and theology, but as her education progressed she found that her doubts made it impossible to continue in that part of the church. She was forced from the Order of St. Mary because of her political activity in 1968 when she led a rump convention for Eugene McCarthy in Fort Worth. When she made the front page of the papers in her religious habit, the Mother Superior said she was not to show her face at the motherhouse again. Later that same year, she was gassed in Grant Park, in Chicago during the demonstrations surrounding the Democratic National Convention at which Hubert Humphrey was nominated for President. Wilson graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1967 and received a Master of Arts in Theology in 1969, both from the University of Dallas. She moved to Iowa City, Iowa to pursue a doctoral degree in world religions at the University of Iowa. In 1975 she became the first woman faculty member of United Theological Seminary in New Brighton, Minnesota. Wilson-Kastner first became Assistant for three years, then Associate Professor for four years of Historical and Constructive Theology. During this time she also was a visiting faculty member at Luther-Northwestern Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.