Phyllis Natalie Tickle (née Alexander; March 12, 1934 – September 22, 2015) was an American author and lecturer whose work focuses on spirituality and religion issues.

[1] It has been said that "Over the past generation, no one has written more deeply and spoken more widely about the contours of American faith and spirituality than Phyllis Tickle.

On June 17, 1955, she married Samuel Milton Tickle Sr., a prominent pulmonologist, who died in January 2015 after a long illness.

During her tenure at Publishers Weekly, Tickle was famous for such bon mots as referring to religion books as "portable pastors".

"[8] In 2007, in honor of their friendship and in recognition of Tickle's on-going interest in the interface between religion and the rapidly expanding neuro-science of the 21st century, the Italian painter, Mario Donizetti, a leading figure in contemporary realism, published "Lettera a Phyllis",[9] to honor their friendship by presenting some of his more recent theories of aesthetics and argues the groundlessness, for him, of artistic informalism, in view of the most recent discoveries about the human brain.

In 2013 and in honor of retirement from public life, Tony Jones edited a book that contains a series of essays in tribute to Tickle; contributors include Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Jon M. Sweeney, Lauren Winner, and Diana Butler Bass.

[12] In fall 2015, Logos Bookstores, the largest nationwide association of Christian book sellers, declared Tickle as their author of the year 2015.