Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

Girls: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, .

If you are Gen Z or want to understand the last 15 years (and didn’t read Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl) this is a great place to start. Freya maps the effects of AI, social media, dating apps, beauty influencers, and therapeutic culture on “the most anxious generation.” Whereas Millennials were sold commodities online at rates never before seen, Gen Z has learned how to commodify themselves (and were promised empowerment as a result).

We are insatiable consumers shopping for the perfect person, seeing others people as disposable and advertising ourselves as objects too.

Billion dollar industries depend on us being lonely dispatches, consumers. Liberation is their marketing pitch and we are the lonely unhappy consumers.

[We were] being made to feel broken so we can become a life long consumer… the purpose of our lives is to become better products, not better people. Objectifying ourselves became empowerment.

The part of the book I was most interested in was how in rejecting the girl boss script Millennials threw themselves headlong into, Gen Z has created a parallel world of girl boss online influencer.

Yet as girl boss feminism faded, the pressure to work hard kept growing. Now many young women no longer want to work for corporations but to become the corporation. Success isn’t so much about climbing the corporate ladder as becoming a brand- a product. Even the trad wives on Tik-Tok are busy building audiences, monetizing their private lives, and selling products. The girl boss didn’t die- she became an influencer.

Now success demands even more of us, it means selling ourselves and competing in the market for clicks. Every moment of our lives can be monetized, every ambition commodified. Our ambition today is simply to have an audience.

The result of pursuing all of this, is of course rapid rates of depression, body dysmorphia, anxiety, social paralysis. What’s the alternative? Freya touches a bit on faith (as she has dabbled in on her substack ) and concludes that a life not focused on self but of “trying to do good and help other people” may be the antidote to existing only online. She recognizes the immense value of family and love, and how pursuing these things, although risky, is worth the vulnerability and self-gift. True empowerment comes in being free to give yourself away.

We have been taught that putting other people first is a weakness, that depending on someone is a deficiency rather than the beautiful thing that it is. You are not needy for having human needs…

The lie we have been told is that we need less commitment, not more, that the problem is other people and the constraints they put on us. But this is a tragic way to think; tragic because it is putting young people on the trajectory to miss out on what really matters. There is no love without vulnerability. There is no life without risk. Loneliness is not empowerment.

Current Reading

A Truce That Is Not Peace, Miriam Toews.

“remember the dead without being haunted by them,

give to our lives a coherence that is not ‘closure,’

and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves

amid a truce that is not peace.” - Christian Wiman

Phew man, this is how you write a memoir. Toews (of Women Talking fame) weaves together past and present in this grief-driven look at the question, “Why do you write?” The subjects she covers range from heavy heavy to musing on the mundane or ordinary graces. Poetry (mostly Christian Wiman) and quotes are sprinkled throughout and interweave with memories to create a Commonplace book on grief and finding joy and healing in the silence.

My friend told me she’d never felt more alone and sealed off in her coffin of grief than when people told her, even lovingly, even with tender hugs, that they couldn’t imagine her sadness. Try! Stay! Stay with me!

“Life must be conceived as tragedy in order to live it.” - Yeats, paraphrased. But what if we don’t conceive of life as a tragedy? Can we live it?

She taught me how to stay alive. Silence and words: both are good, both are failures, both are efforts, and in that effort is where life lies-not lies, or maybe it does-but where it exists. And the fragments in between are the spaces where she and I meet.

But being alive is worth something. Why do you write? Why do you live?

The Revolt Against the Girl Bosses Has Finally Come, . If you read Yesteryear, or my review, and need more, this is the perfect follow-up. The girl boss script has been followed to a tee and it’s blowing up in real time. AI has certainly sped this along, as did COVID, but we stand now at a crossroads for the American working woman. The corporate American dream actually isn’t achievable for most people and there is no real way to climb to the top anymore (as AI threatens to cut out middle managers). Cheers to the end of the world. Or perhaps, we will figure out how to humanize work and turn the ship around.1

So how are you going to climb to the top of the pyramid if there is no middle?

The elusive quest for balance was always a fantasy. Now it is a nightmare.

I wouldn’t ask the influencer. They aren’t paid to solve the riddle, only to make the riddle seem solvable.

Tim Keller: New York’s Pastor, . It has been three years since Tim Keller left this world. This article was published two years ago around the first year anniversary of Tim Keller’s death. Roberts reflects on Keller’s impact not only in the lives of evangelicals in NYC, but the countless secular folks who came to know Jesus as a result of his ministry at Redeemer and commitment to the city. As my sister, an NYC resident, said recently, “The Kellers came and stuck it out. And people noticed that.”

I loved the juxtaposition here between striving for all New York has to offer, and Keller’s message to his congregants to yes, pursue excellence and beauty (“goodness aimed at something”), but to slow down enough to savor not only the beauty this world has to offer, but the whispers of hope coming in the new City. The Resurrection of Jesus transforms both our hope and our ambitions.

If Christ had not been raised, beauty would be merely a defiant flame in the eternal dark. The end would simply be the end of the song, the end of the Broadway run, the dirty dishes at the end of the meal.

Evangelicals leaving home for New York needed something like Keller’s ministry to prevent them from leaving the faith. Secular New Yorkers needed a word from outside their city – from the New Jerusalem – to give them life.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, Belle Burden. Another viral book making its rounds, Strangers, which started as a Modern Love essay during COVID, tells the story of Burden, her hedge-fund manager husband, and the spectacular unraveling, of what was from her perspective, a normal and healthy elite NYC marriage. Burden has come under fire recently, and has been criticized for whining about the results of her divorce (her husband is worth hundreds of millions, she is the heir to $40 million in trust funds) but I do feel for her emotional turmoil, the betrayal, and heartbreak, not just the financial loss her prenup cut her out of.

This story is modern day Mad Men- two people build overlapping but completely different lives but are both anxiously obsessed with money (although swimming in it). And one day, you finally get the promotion you have worked 20 years for, and are still not happy. You really can have it all, strive your entire life to build something, and it is never enough. And sometimes it takes losing everything to find true freedom and joy.

“Slowly, over many months, as my head came out of the sand, a form of joy set in —joy born of replacing the not knowing with knowing, the nub of worry with clarity, the lack of control with control...I thought, 'this is better than everything I lost. This is better than the life I thought I wanted.”

Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us, . I’ve written before about how myth gives me a category, not only to understand the Bible more fully, but as a way of understanding the nature of the world. As I further develop thoughts on sacramental living, enter Martin Shaw, acclaimed British mythologist and former neo-pagan (now Orthodox Church convert). This part faith memoir, part devotional (?) on the nature of Sacred Story and how it brings us into a deeper understanding of the world and our place in it is exactly what I was hoping it would be. A more detailed review coming eventually along with further thoughts on myth/disenchantment. Raise your hand if you want a Commonplace edition devoted entirely to resources surrounding that topic!

Mythic awareness is always moving us from seeing to beholding life, in its multidimensional, irrational, providential, tragic, and glorious dimensions. It is the royal road to the deepest depths of the psyche…Myths hold together heaven and earth, they are crossroads between the timeless and the time bound. Myths are connecting tissue between us and the universe.

On going to the Underworld and coming back: You are going to get stretched, deepened, walloped by the ghastly, redeemed by the holy. There will be moments when it appears all hope is lost, and you have to experience what it feels like to continue to exist within that hopelessness. This is the time of Threshold. It can be baffling, depressing, a wasteland or a sea storm, but you will be rewired in some fashion. And you will likely bring two things back. Things that may seem very different but are completely entwined. A limp and a gift. Threshold marks you, can even seem like a diminishment in the eyes of the world— hence the limp—but only within its deepening can you articulate the gift.

Current Watching

The Devil Wears Prada 2. Ok, this was about what you would expect. A friend described this film as “a beach read, but a movie” and that’s it. But what I loved was the meeting of the 2006 girl boss mindset with the current 2026 girl boss fallout. Towards the end, Miranda encourages Andy to finally write her tell-all book. “And tell it all- tell them that there is a cost. But don’t you love the work?!”

Here we are, twenty years out from the bright eyed corporate girl ambition of 2006, and Miranda admits there was a price to pay for her choice to work at the pace she did. She couldn’t have it all, but had to choose. She chose what she loved and is happy to admit that. This is far from a satisfying solution to our current work/life crisis. But it is a start in admitting Lean In was never going to actually deliver the goods. Bravo, Miranda.

Current Resources

Taking Kids to Art Museums . The key is: just take them. Even if the disgruntled old guards threaten to “take away that Woody doll if I see it get anywhere near that Wyeth!”2 Some great practical tips here on how to cultivate not only an appreciation for in-person art in kids, but for helping them become happy museum goers. Good luck!

So You’re Reading Malcolm Guite… . A round up of “five contemporary poets of faith” to expand your poetry horizons! Some new to me suggestions here as well as yet another tantalizing MFA program recommendation. “If it helps, I think Malcolm would want you to read these—each an ace of spades in its own right—too. So if you’re re-reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for the 28th time, perhaps consider a fresh addition. (You get a pass from me if its Till We Have Faces…lol)” Same.

Secret History of Pink, . A new edition in this series (see also, Blue, Red, and Yellow), I love the look here at how a color has influenced art, culture, and fashion throughout history. Some great insights and historical facts, as well as lovely paintings, including some O’Keeffe and the artist who most feels like summer to me, Helen Frankenthaler.3

In Summary:

It’s ok to depend on someone. It’s ok to take a risk to be with someone, to give up some of yourself to belong to something bigger. And that is genuine independence—feeling loved and backed and becoming resilient because of it. It is not a weakness to want to feel at home. We weren’t designed to do this alone. - Freya India

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Yesteryear centers around the story of Natalie Heller Mills, an influencer who lives with her husband Caleb and five children on a farm in Idaho. Her account @Yesteryearfarm has gone viral and Natalie spends her days making sourdough and supposedly doing farm chores for the camera. Behind the scenes is a team of nannies and hired farm hands. Her Shaker-style kitchen cabinets hide her modern appliances and her husband’s failing cattle farm and “organic” vegetable garden hardly produces enough food to feed a family.

With Natalie as our narrator, the timelines of the book fluctuate between the supposed present where she is losing control of the online empire, her past upbringing, her education at Harvard (where she discovers all the “angry women,” and vows to live a life different than that of her peers) and her engagement and marriage to Caleb (the youngest son of a GOP career politician). As they build their family, they set out with a plan. Backed by this father-in-law’s enormous fortune, the Mills intend to cosplay homesteading in Idaho. Natalie is driven—by keeping up appearances, by avoiding suffering, by finding acceptance from an online following, by anything that keeps her from actually settling into the reality of herself and her own life. She is delusional and infuriating because deep down, we are all a little like Natalie.

And who was I? A flawless Christian woman. The manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies. The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to…My name is Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.1

The book’s plot twist occurs when present Natalie wakes up to find herself actually living in the same Idaho farmhouse, but in 1855. She is disoriented and desperate to find her way back to the old present. The labyrinth of appearances she has built becomes a trap she can’t escape from.

Although the book currently sits at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, it has caused a serious stir. I think some of the most controversial aspects of the story (its portrayal of religion and women) are actually its greatest strengths. As Burke said recently in an interview, “We were all sold a bill of false goods, and that’s true for conservative women and it’s true for liberal women. … The point of the book is that no one wins.” Every culture script described falls short and the way Burke paints Natalie and her world serves as a cautionary tale for us all.

The Game of Pretend

Two competing cultural scripts emerge early on in Yesteryear. Natalie is confronted with a world of girl-boss inspired, driven, feminist peers during her time at Harvard. She hates these women, but also is obsessed with them. Driven by her hate, she decides to take a hard right turn for herself. Happiness, she decides, is to build a kingdom of motherhood. She strives just as hard as her liberal feminist peers and her job of keeping up the performance has more in common with her corporate climbing former roommate than she cares to admit.

I have long been fascinated by the confluence of influencer tradwife content and liberal feminism. What is billed as a return to God’s plan for women in being a traditional wife and mother (while capturing it as content and making money doing it), is ironically only possible because of the contributions of second and third wave feminism. We all recognize the failures of post-enlightenment modernity and long for a return to simpler times. Tradwife content provides the escape out of the rat race we long for. But it turns out, most of the time the influencers making the content driving this desire are pretending. Or are backed by enormous fortunes and are privileged enough to take the risk.

Some of the magic has worn off recently in tradwife influencer culture as scandals emerge. Last year, a disorienting interview of Hannah Neelman of Ballerina Farm, one of the most successful tradwife influencers to date, showed that all may not be as it seems, or at least not as effortless and shiny. In Yesteryear, Burke pulls the psychological and physical curtain back to reveal where this promise of a simpler life falls short. In fact, it’s all a game of pretend that requires an enormous amount of effort.

Online Natalie was merely posturing herself as a homesteader and Offline Natalie was never actually homesteading. Natalie makes a fantasy world so her husband can feel useful, her father-in-law can feel justified, and so she herself can feel validated and accepted:

I wanted the whole entire world to see itself through my eyes.2

Natalie’s entire life is pretend. All of it. Her marriage is a sham, she doesn’t really like being a mother, and as she discovers, the thing that kept her own mom going was “pretending someone was watching.” So Natalie embarks on her own version of this—she lives for her online following. Natalie is well aware of this and she also knows that her online audience only needs the appearance of authenticity to be satisfied. Because tradwife content is an escape, it only has to have the appearance of cottage cozy comfort because actual pioneer life was honestly brutal and not at all cozy.

These women wanted their content to be every bit as mindless and pleasurable as their lives were not. These women wanted—no they needed—perfection from me. After all, the tighter the stitching, the more soothing it is to pick apart at the seams.3

The life Online Natalie presents as one of not striving but simply and effortlessly keeping house and raising children, is in fact a mirage. The product of Offline Natalie’s intense performance looks simple but is just the result of her tireless efforts. The tradwife influencer life isn’t anymore an escape than the girl-boss corporate grind.

The Authentic Self and Religious Realism

Some recent reviews have criticized Burke for constructing a main character that doesn’t seem like a real person. Natalie doesn’t feel very realistic, I think, because she never truly learned how to be a person. This is most evident in all her relationships—with God and with virtually everyone else in her life. One minute she is praising God for “the Inheritance,” the next she is cursing out some woman in Target. She seemingly has no idea how to have a real friendship, or how to to really connect with her children or her dopey husband. Her mother is constantly reminding her to exhibit basic human traits, like kindness. Natalie’s personality shifts and changes at Burke’s whim to fit the narrative because she is a hollow shell of a fully grown woman.

Some readers are rightfully frustrated with this. But I think as Serena Siglitto argues in her recent review, Natalie “has no stable sense of self, only a series of personas that she inhabits in order to get what she wants in any given situation. As a result, Natalie is unable to truly encounter any of the people around her, including her husband. She cannot see them as persons. She cannot even see herself as a single integrated person. Instead, she treats herself as a product that exists for the entertainment and consumption of others.”

She is a commodity, and she exists in order to commodify others. In our moment, we live in a culture of narcissism. We are all tempted to lose the plot, seeing only ourselves and living for only ourselves. Natalie fails to see anyone around her as a person, because she doesn’t know herself. Her inner emptiness leads her to objectify others and see the world as a place where her only worth is in her own performance, self-objectification, and self-love. Again, Siglitto:

“Even those who eschew social media may unconsciously begin to view themselves through the dehumanizing lens of performative commodification. If women do not possess a stable sense of their own personhood, lovability, and inherent worth, they can easily fall into the trap of believing that they must construct one.”

Not only is Natalie’s personhood self-constructed, but her Christianity is as well. Natalie feels like a satire of a woman raised in fundamentalism because she is. And I will admit, in the beginning of the novel, I found the descriptions of religion off-putting. It all felt so generic and ambiguous. Is this a CREC cult, or Mormonism, or some kind of IFB holdout? But as I read, I wondered if the author intentionally left the particular sect of Christianity ambiguous on purpose.

Bits and pieces of the brand of Christianity Natalie practices are familiar to most of us. It is conservative, yes, but beyond this, it is a tightly controlled Gospel of hierarchy. Everyone in this system knows their place and their roles and doesn’t stray from them. This is God and Country faith at its finest. And as the novel goes on, we find how these ideas of God, country, and family are ultimately all interchangeable with one thing: politics (and behind that: power).

In a recent interview with The Rumpus, Burke said that “whether it’s Mormonism or evangelicalism or Jehovah’s Witness, it’s really all the same in terms of how women are treated and what the expectations are for them.”

I don’t think the point of Yesteryear was to accurately sketch the complex inner workings of a woman in a high control form of Christianity or to mine the depths of its theological or social impacts. Natalie feels like a paper doll version of a good Christian wife and mother because the cultural script she has been handed literally is that—she is to play house. Real women in fundamentalism are much more nuanced and their lives contain both beauty and hardship. The strength of a generic Jesus and John Wayne flavor of Christianity in the novel is that it becomes a striking contrast to the secular feminist script. In fact, from the strictest fundamentalism to Evangelicalism, women are often told that their worth and value are in God’s plan for them as wives and mothers and this supposedly stands in direct opposition to what “the culture” expects of them.

The Maze

The ultimate brilliance of Yesteryear is that it shows how these two seemingly rival cultural scripts for women actually have much more in common than we have been led to believe. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. What the cult of biblical womanhood and the secular girl-boss script have in common is that they both place immense burdens on women and the results they promise come up short.

One of my absolute favorite moments in the book is when Natalie is interviewing Shannon, a 19 year old east coast cultural elite college drop out who is not only interested in coming alongside Natalie as a producer, but is a huge fan of her account.

“Everyone at my school loves you, you know. They think you’re a feminist icon.”

For a moment my guard dropped. I leaned back and snorted. “Really?”

She laughed. “Hell yeah! I mean, no one I know wants to go spend their one wild and magical life being a shill for some billionaire tech a**hole, just so they can get access to s****y healthcare and put away like five dollars a month for their retirement.”

“Just so they can breastfeed in a broom closet someday,” I added quickly. I was familiar with this game.

Shannon pointed a finger at my chest, dead-on, like a pistol. “Exactly. What they want is what you have, Natalie.”

“Which is what?” She smiled and said softly, “Freedom, of course.”

“So I’m—what?” I said. “Some kind of catharsis for girls your age?”

“It’s not catharsis,” Shannon said. “It’s more like a road map.” She was speaking with the kind of urgent self-seriousness that only a twenty-year-old can have. “What you’re doing on your farm, with the homesteading and the farm-to-table and the keeping your kids away from technology? Building a business with your husband, and owning all the means of production, and running it from the comfort of your house? That’s the future, Natalie. That’s the way out.”

“The way out of what?” “Oh,” she said, like it was obvious. “The maze.”4

Gen Z Shannon is disillusioned with the girl-boss empowerment 90’s feminism has made possible for her. And Natalie has seemingly found a way out of the maze: freedom in a self-made life. The only problem is, Natalie’s life is actually all pretend (except for the very real Inheritance funding her pursuits). There is no cultural script that offers a way out of the maze. Natalie has just created a new variation of the maze, one still based on striving and performing.

Natalie’s faith isn’t even an antidote to the maze she has found herself in. Jesus is around, but more as someone who is ready to reward and bless only when properly obeyed. Her constant scrutiny of herself is a reflection of God’s supposed constant scrutiny of her. There is no good news, no grace, for herself or anyone else. Her entire life as a woman is a test; she can either pull herself up by her bootstraps or fail. The future of her soul is entirely dependent on her success as a Christian woman. Natalie’s perfectionism couldn’t secure for her the outcome she desired.

The Way Out is the Way Back

How boring. How deeply and utterly unfair. I did everything I was supposed to. I had the children and married the man and created a universe for all of us to live in, and what was I going to get for it?5

In the end, it’s too late for Natalie. She loses the plot and she loses not only herself but everything she has tried to build. But there is one character who gets out and pulls others out along with her. The end of the novel wraps up almost a bit too quickly, but the sudden emergence of Natalie’s oldest daughter, Clementine, shines a light into the darkness. Clementine has spent her life in the internet’s spotlight, crafted in the image of her mother. At 16 she leaves home to find herself. And in doing so, returns to bring her younger siblings out of the chaos her mother has constructed.

Clementine has nothing to prove but her court order. She has no justification for her return except a concern for the welfare of those left behind. Whether she is driven by justice, love, or spite, she does what her mother could never do: she sees others as full persons in need of love and care.

Regardless of the cultural script we adhere to, what gives us the freedom to act in this kind of self-denying love? We all ultimately just want a script; we want to be told what to do. If we can do it well enough, maybe then we can secure for ourselves the kind of real stability, acceptance, and rest from the constant striving we truly desire.

But real acceptance and rest isn’t something we can manufacture for ourselves. It has to come from outside of us. Apart from grace breaking in and re-orienting us, we will never have know the freedom it is to take our gaze off of ourselves and give ourselves as a gift to others. The way out of the maze isn’t in disappearing or running as fast or as hard as we can. It’s in finding our true selves rooted in Love and surrendering to the grace of God already at work in us. True freedom comes in being rooted in this love and grace, and having nothing to lose in giving ourselves up for others.

When Jesus said he offers rest for the weary and that his yoke is easy and burden light, do we believe he really meant it? Striving or grasping for power won’t bring us the outcomes we can only find in resting in the abundant life he has secured for us and offers freely. You don’t have to run anymore.

In Summary:

I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway…6

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Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, Kristi Coulter. Found another book about a wildly demanding job and someone who discovers how to be human again! In the past I have read books that look at the publishing industry or the tech world, but this combines them. Coulter started at Amazon in 2006, a time when they were still sending out weekly marketing emails, and worked her way up to oversee several divisions of Amazon publishing house. Working for Amazon at this level feels less like a meritocracy and more like a gambling addiction. There is a kind of rush I can imagine from working as hard as you possibly can, only to be caught in a famous Bezos “re-org,” a company wide Bogle that would happen frequently without warning and reset everyone’s positions. There are some beautiful moments when Coulter rediscovers what it means to be a person who enjoys or feels things, and her ever patient husband who works from home and lacks her driving ambition is a great foil to her voice.

“This entire company is built on the fear of being exposed as merely human.”

“You try so hard to be good at things you don’t actually want to do. You never ask yourself if maybe you should just stop doing them.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve felt as if Amazon were daring me to do my job. But I no longer believe there’s any reward for winning the dare. Amazon’s going to cram as many bodies into as little space as possible, and the prize for doing good work under lousy conditions will be getting to do more work under lousy conditions.”

You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and How That Is Good News, Kelly M. Kapic. Last year, I heard this interview with Kapic. It is a great conversation on this topic of resting in limitations and not having to do it all. A friend at Bible study brought this book up recently and I decided to finally read it! The first part is a lovely theology of “creatureliness” and other chapters focus on things like healthy interdependance, humility, time, anxiety, gratitude and even the importance of being connected to community and the local church.

“Many of us fail to understand that our limitations are a gift from God, and therefore good. This produces in us the burden of trying to be something we are not and cannot be.”

“Part of the goodness of creation is we were made to be dependent on God, on our neighbor, and on the earth. That is not a result of sin. Dependence isn’t a result of sin. Sin just distorts those dependencies.”

“God is calling us to be human, not superhuman. The Christian life is not superhuman life. It is just human life.”

Gift & Longing- The Gender Accompaniment Project. I have been loving this series from . The first three episodes are a must listen, but this latest one drew out similar themes of what it means to follow God and image him fully. Abigail features stories of believers who experience same-sex attraction or gender discordance and how they have sought to follow Jesus. I was thrilled to learn more about Eden Invitation in this episode (the Catholic version of Revoice?!) and the ways it seeks to bring healing and encourage others in discipleship.

If anything, the last 4.5 minutes of this is incredible- on “coping with the tension” and how Jesus himself embodies these tensions and paradoxes. There is immense consolation in thinking about this. Mercy/judgment, truth/love- paradoxes in the Christian faith are “natural to our faith,” not foreign or unique.

Our struggles don’t just help us “grow in virtue,” but allow us to be a gift to others.

Stepping into the longing…means not repressing or ignoring desires but orienting them towards God.

When we follow Christ in discipleship, we follow the call to holiness. And when we do this, we become more of who God made us to be.

With every desire is the desire for good, and therefore, the potential for an encounter with God.

A cross can become a gift…a source of sanctification. That is the Christian paradox. And the invitation to enter into that paradox is…for all of us.

Current Reading

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. I finally finished this book. This truly is an “encyclopedic novel.” Somehow in 1996, he describes 2021 Zoom fatigue, and conceptualizes streaming and the death of cable TV. I was hoping the various story lines converged at the end1 and I see now how this book in particular was a huge influence on Zadie Smith. Her exceptional novel, White Teeth, has many parallels not only in structure, but characterization and timeline. Every sentence in this 1100 page work is exquisite- there are no wasted words or trite metaphors.

This book is many things, but at its core, it asks the question “What do we do with our shame and our terrible memories?” Numb it? Hide from it? No one in this book figures it out. But as Christians, can our hope allow us to embrace all of the beauty and difficulty of life under the sun, in light of the resurrection and redemption that is to come? Yes, but easier said than done.

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

From Genesis to Junia: An Honest Search for What the Bible Really Says About Women in Leadership, Preston Sprinkle. Preston has been immensely helpful to me over the years when it comes to theology and issues of the body and gender. He is a serious scholar and models what it means to engage ideas with curiosity, discernment, and an open hand. This book is a lot like Phillip Payne’s work on the same topic, but is much more accessible to the average church goer. He handles the biblical text with care and I more or less agree with his interpretations (his chapter on 1 Cor. 11 is astonishingly good!). I am still chewing on his final chapter and will probably write more at some point about ordination/leadership/authority and why I am a bit unsatisfied with his conclusion. I even think if you value women as visible leaders and spiritual mothers in the church, his conclusion can still jive within a healthy complementation framework.

This is My Body: A Call to Eucharistic Revival, Bishop Robert Barron. I found this at a thrift store for 25 cents and since I only hope to ever read ONE book on the Catholic view of the Eucharist, why not? It was written in response to a Pew Study which found that 69% of professing Catholics surveyed deny the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This represents an utter doctrinal catastrophe for the Catholic Church and Barron seeks to set the record straight.

The first third is an unbelievably good biblical theology of the sacred supper, which I was not at all prepared for. The last third plays on Flannery O’Connor’s famous dinner party response to the Eucharist being called merely a symbol (“If it’s a symbol, to hell with it!”) and I anticipate a nice survey of the history of theological thought on the nature of Eucharist there. It also occurred to me recently that Calvin was as close to the Fourth Lateran Council and the conception of transubstantiation as we are to the advent of dispensationalism. I'll give you that idea for free!

Human beings were intended to be the means by which the whole earth would give praise to God, returning in love what God had given in love, uniting all things in a great act of worship. This is why it is no accident that Adam is represented in the tradition of rabbinic interpretation as a priest, the one who effects union between God and creation. As he walks with Yahweh in easy friendship in the cool of the evening, Adam is humanity-and by extension, the whole of the cosmos-as it is meant to be, caught up in a loop of grace, creaturely love answering divine love.

[God] instructed them, in short, to participate in his life through the joy of eating and drinking. The ranginess and abandon in the Garden of Eden is evocative of God's desire that his creatures flourish to the utmost. The Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons commented that "the glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

This poem by . Just thank you.

Out there where holiness seems most like madness,

where I have nothing, not even a boat,

naked, bereft of every sorrow and gladness,

and it is terrifying just to float

remembering, soundlessly, how someone wrote

all shall be well,

all manner of thing be well,

and even if it won’t, all shall be well.

Places I’ve Taken My Body: Essays, Molly McCully Brown. My sister-in-law is currently studying with Molly for an MFA so her work has been on my radar for a while! Last year, I wept ugly tears when I read Bent Body, Lamb- an essay from this book. So time to continue weeping my way through the whole book. Part memoir, part travelogue, Molly writes so beautifully about disability, faith, doubt, dependance, and accepting the challenge of limitations as a gift. Very on theme for this month’s reading, apparently.

God finds ways to answer my questions. I can’t believe I’ve become the kind of person who can write such a sentence, but there it is. One week, Father Joe gives an entire homily on the importance of Christ’s bodily suffering, and the ways in which our own bodies often bear the marks of our struggles, and our sacrifices, and our striving. What looks most like a blemish, he says, is often a reminder of holiness and of the Lord.

vignettes from a voyage, . Haley places three recent works in conversation with one another to highlight the need for an embodied anthropology in the church and beyond. I love how she tied in Ian Harber’s book on deconstruction to highlight how being a “non-anxious presence” can encourage someone who is disillusioned or discouraged. Part of working towards a robust Christian ethic is to tell a better story and point to the glory of God, in our bodies here and now. It’s not winning the culture war that is at stake; it is our very souls.

I desire a reverently charged experience of the world, where God’s grandeur is felt in all things. It seems a fitting match: an ordered Christian moral vision met with the poetic density of the richness of “deep down things.” That mysterious melding seems to be at stake, as a way to show the glory of God.

We are not our own, and our fallen bodies still speak. They hold the ways in which we were made to image and find respite in our Lord, who has promised to be with us in suffering. Our relation to our physical selves, our imagination about married sexuality, our choices about procreation do not get a pass as having nothing to do with the collective witness of Christianity or our own formation.

The Unmistakable Freedom of Ben Sasse, . A lovely reflection on the recent Ben Sasse interview with Ross Douthat. Sasse is on a speaking tour in his final days and what all of these conversations have in common is his deep sense of hope, even when facing his very imminent death. He doesn’t sugar coat the brutality of the world or his own suffering. But he calls his cancer “a gift”- something that has stripped away his pride, ambition, striving, but has left what matters most: “Ben Sasse is not teaching us how to die well, but instead, how to truly live.”

Then a dying man tells me he wouldn’t trade the prayers that cancer taught him, and I realize the distance between where I am and where I could be isn’t about effort. It’s about surrender. The very thing I’m most resistant to.

That’s what the Gospel does when it takes root and blossoms. It doesn’t make you stoic. It doesn’t make you numb. It makes you the kind of person who can feel everything, the grief and the anger and the hope and the gratitude, all at once, and not be destroyed by any of it. It makes you free.

Current Watching

Train Dreams, Netflix. I am a sucker for Terrence Malick or anything that whispers of Terrence Malick. This film (only the second one by film maker Clint Bentley) is based on the Pulitzer Prize nominated novella of the same title. Themes of the beauty and the brutality of the world dominate the story, which is set in the turn of the 20th century as the world is progressing but loosing a bit of its former magic. What do you do with your guilt, shame, and grief? How do we hold both the utter beauty and devastation of the world in tandem? Isaac wrote a lovely review here. As the credits rolled, this poem also came to my mind:

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

by Adam Zagajewki. Trans. Clare Kavanagh

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June’s long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.

The nettles that methodically overgrow

the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You watched the stylish yachts and ships;

one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

while salty oblivion awaited others.

You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,

you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

Current Resources

Brown Sugar Vanilla simple syrup. Boil 2 cups of water, 2 cups of brown sugar, and 1 TBSP of vanilla as long as you fancy and pour this bad boy on everything from iced coffee to pancakes. Happy Spring!

Catherine Project, . A family member was telling me about this recently and it’s amazing. This liberal arts core/great books project offers both virtual and in-person reading intensive clubs that cover everything from Dante to Shakespeare to Faulkner. There is also a core program designed to introduce or reintroduce readers to the “Life of the Mind.” It appears to be free, but you do have to apply! Lots of summer courses open now.

In Summary:

Second Coming, Kate Baer

I stand at the mouth of my

second coming. All the time I’d spent worried

over what was ending, too blind

by grief and fear

to see this new horizon:

bright and blue and

beautiful. I take off my clothes, dive

into the clear water.

I know I was meant for living.

I know it’s not too late.

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A few years ago, someone asked me if I would recommend Tim and Kathy Keller’s book on marriage, The Meaning of Marriage. I hadn't read it in a decade, but could remember how helpful it was. Not so much on a practical level, but I remember saying, “If you want to read one ‘theology of marriage’ book, this is a great one.” Fast forward to this year, and I read a note pointing out that although, yes, The Meaning of Marriage is a great book, it is missing something. In the Kellers’ chapter on the marriage union, they fail to mention that one of the purposes of the marriage union is to bear children. At first I was a bit astonished. But then remembered that, yes, this basic fact was lacking.

Maybe it is just too obvious? Of course the by-product of the marriage union may include children. And the eighth chapter in Keller’s book offered a kind of freedom I hadn’t seen in a Christian marriage book up to the point I first read it years ago. In a world of marriage books that remind us what we owe one another physically and make marital sex out to be a kind of burden women must bear with a smile or a necessity to keep a partner from seeking pleasure elsewhere, Keller’s vision of reciprocal giving and receiving was a welcome paradigm. But even this vision of giving ourselves to one another falls short when procreation is not also a part of this vision (hold on to this fact, I’ll circle back to it).2

I point out this example as a kind of microcosm of most Protestant thinking on the theology of the body. Others have done extraordinary work calling attention to the deficiencies in Protestant teaching on this topic,3 and there is far more work to be done. I don’t think I am offering anything new here, but hope to condense my observations down to some concise and helpful thoughts for consideration. And maybe offer a kind of solution (or at least, an additional angle to consider).

In Hope in Times of Fear, another book of Keller’s I can heartily recommend, he describes the marriage union in much the same way.4 He argues that sex, at its core, is about vulnerability and union. The New Testament takes sexual sin so seriously for this very reason. A night with a prostitute isn’t a casual affair, Paul argues. It’s so serious that Paul writes that the result is being made “one with” the other’s body.5 This is a bit mind-bending to our modern ears. But this is so serious because it is all designed to point us to something.

Paul goes on to say that our bodies as believers are “members with Christ himself” and that our bodies house the Holy Spirit.6 We experience this rich union with God in Christ, because he gave himself up for us. Jesus saved us through “sacrifice and resurrection.”7 This pattern of self-giving and vulnerability is mirrored in the marriage relationship and points us to the self-giving of Christ.

That’s lovely and true. But I couldn’t help finishing the chapter with a weird “Sex is the greatest thing in all the world!” vibe. Especially after this quote:

“Christianity says that sex is a way for the individual to connect your life to the self-giving divine love that is at the heart of the universe and the meaning of history.”8

A huge part of the marriage relationship is this mutual giving and receiving. And in it, we catch a glimpse of the reality of how the Godhead operates. But what if you don’t ever experience sexual union with a spouse? Do you miss out on some kind of insider spiritual experience? Are there other ways one comes to participate in this self-giving and receiving in this life, apart from sex? Help!

Never fear, John Paul II is here to help! Years ago in the fever dream that is postpartum, I read through John Paul II’s seminal work on the body, Theology of the Body. Delivered as a series of lectures at the monthly Cardinal luncheon, the work attempts to shed light on what the body is for after a backlash to the Catholic Church’s revised stance on contraceptives in the late 1960’s. As the years have gone on, bits and pieces of this book have come to my mind as I read and think through how this can apply to our Protestant understanding.

A lot of people misunderstand Theology of the Body as a kind of Catholic sex-ed book. It is not that, however. What Theology of the Body gives us is a comprehensive look at what the body is, what it is for, and the spiritual realities it points us to. What stuck out to me the most was not only how John Paul II elevates marriage, but how he also elevates and dignifies singleness. Constructing a theology of the body not only through the lense of the marriage union, but also through one of celibacy, gives us a complete picture of how our bodies are made to point to greater realities. There are two concepts in general I think would greatly assist Protestants in how we think about the body: spousal meaning and generative potential.

First up, spousal meaning. This term is found over 100 times in Theology of the Body. According to John Paul II, the basic job of the body is to express the person, to make us visible in the world. This visibility also makes us vulnerable. But instead of masking this vulnerability, we are called to love and give. Our bodies aren’t meant to exist in isolation, but in relation with other bodies.

Thus, the spousal meaning of the body means that through this giving and welcoming, accepting and finding, our bodies proclaim to us the eternal truth that “happiness is being rooted in Love” (TOB 16:2).9

Because God himself is self-gift, we are made for self-gifting. We are created to give ourselves generously to God and to other people. Angela Franks points out that the main way the body does this is as a sexed body and as a result, is how human generation works:

“The reproductive system is the only bodily system that needs another person to successfully complete it. I don’t need anyone else to digest or breathe in air, but I need another person to generate a new human being.”10

The body is incomplete when it comes to generation and this points us to the truth that God himself is ordered towards relationship and self-gift. Again, Angela Franks reminds us that “we are only made happy when we are ordered to something beyond ourselves.”11 This reflects the very nature of God, that the Trinity is ordered in this same way.

This idea that we are designed to reflect the character of God in our bodies and how we relate to one another leads John Paul II to describe the body as “sacramental,” visible symbols of an invisible reality. Our bodies are for revealing an invisible reality. They speak of a larger story about who we are and who we are made to be: image bearers in relationship with God.

The second idea is that of generative potential. Because God is self-gift and love, the Trinity has eternally enjoyed relationship with one another. This relationship leads God to bring forth life—to create in order to share this love with a universe called to know and respond to him in love. We, as sexed male and female humans, have the potential within our bodies to bring forth others who can participate in this gift of life. But we need one another to do so (back to spousal meaning).

This concept of “generative potential” is hugely important. And because we Protestants don’t speak of it often, we find ourselves in a bind when talking about the body.12 If our bodies are sacramental, if they point to some greater truth or reality, then the way we are made as sexed men and women has a point. Whether we are married or single, our bodies are designed to be generative and we are made to live out this pattern of self-giving and receiving. How so?

In the marriage relationship, the one flesh union may result in children. The legitimacy of marriage itself isn’t dependent on giving birth to children, but it is one potential result. This tells the story that apart from this dependance, vulnerability, and self-giving that we can’t as humans bring life into the world. We image how God loved us in Christ when we as husbands and wives submit to one another in Christ and love and care for one another as our own bodies, just as the Godhead has been eternally loving and preferring one another.

And here is the beautiful thing: single men and women embody these realities as well. As a woman, your body tells the world something about who God is. He made you to image him, to love and care for others, to give yourself for others, to depend on others. And you do this in a unique way as a woman. As a man, your body tells the world something about who God is. He made you to image him, to love and care for others, to give yourself for others, to depend on others. And you do this in a unique way as a man.

A single man or woman may never parent children, but each still has a kind of generative potential to nurture life. John Paul II adds to this that in the same way a husband and wife fulfill the purpose of spousal meaning in a marriage union, in giving themselves to the mission of the church, single Christians can experience both spousal union and generative potential spiritually:

Christ revealed to man and woman, over and above the vocation to marriage, another vocation namely, that of renouncing marriage, in view of the kingdom of heaven. With this vocation, he highlighted the same truth about the human person. If a man or a woman is capable of making a gift of himself for the kingdom of heaven, this proves in its turn (and perhaps even more) that there is the freedom of the gift in the human body. It means that this body possesses a full nuptial meaning.13

Jesus himself reminds us of this in the Great Commission. Jesus, a single, celibate man who never had physical progeny is said to “look to his offspring”14 —a host of spiritual progeny who would come to be made one with God through him. Jesus’ command to “go and make disciples of all nations” mirrors the Genesis 1 command to be “fruitful and multiply.”15 Embodying the Gospel story with our lives and drawing others into this life of spiritual fruitfulness is every believer’s calling, married or single.

So the marriage relationship is about vulnerability and union. It points us to a greater reality, because our bodies are meant to point us to a greater reality. But the additional ideas of the body as a kind of sacrament, spousal giving, and generative potential expand this understanding. If Jesus has risen from the dead, and inaugurated a new reality, and a coming resurrected world, then the way we exist in the world here and now as embodied humans in relationship with one another points to this story.

The mystery of our bodies here and now is that the way we give of ourselves points to the Wedding that is coming. The marriage relationship uniquely points to the relationship of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church. But every believer (as the Bride, a part of the church) lives out the reality that anticipates the return of the Bridegroom. The world is the potential guest list and we are called to beckon others to come to the great Marriage Supper of the Lamb, in a new, restored heaven and earth.

In Summary:

“For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch the rhythm not only of all creation, but of all being.” - C.S. Lewis, from The Problem of Pain

For more on this topic:

-Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, John Paul II

-the [female] body and the [desecrated] body,

-The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory,

-Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith,

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The God of love is kneeling at our feet.

Though we betray Him, though it is the night.

He meets us here and loves us into light.

-from Maundy Thursday, Malcolm Guite

I remember it was several years back in a church that was trying out something new. The COVID-era self-serve melt-away paper wafers and cough syrup-like juice were thankfully a thing of the past. However, communion in a gym family-style was a new attempt to rethink the Eucharist in the church I was attending. Sitting at a table with several other adults while trying to wrangle my own 18 month old, I was passed a styrofoam cup of grape juice and a cracker. Celebrating the Lord’s Supper as a communal meal is by no means wrong. But in my heart that day, it felt so off. I gulped down the juice and left the gym before munching on the crackers (mostly due to the toddler’s deteriorating behavior) and spent the rest of the afternoon stomping with said toddler through rainy puddles behind our row house trying to discern why I felt so uncomfortable.

A few weeks later, on Maundy Thursday, I would join some friends and attend an Anglican Church. I had been to Episcopal services before, but this would be my first time in an Anglican high church setting. First up was the procession and acclamation. The ministers walked in behind a female celebrant carrying a cross. Once at the front, she led us in the Collect:

Almighty Father, whose most dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it in thankful remembrance of Jesus Christ our Savior, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.1

She then read the Old Testament passage for the day. I had never felt seen and known by God in the way I did in the pew that night seeing a female congregant, just like the rest of us, read Scripture out loud. But the most impactful part of the night was the observance of Communion. Towards the end of the service, the priest called us to come forward. We knelt, extended our hands, and received the bread and wine as he placed it in our mouths. He spoke over us, reminding us of God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf, and prayed that we would receive the grace offered to us.

I knelt there holding back tears. The walking to the front, the posture of humility and utter need, the priest reminding us of what we already knew but needed to hear again- it all undid me in a way I hadn’t experienced before in an observance of the Lord’s Supper. I tasted and saw that atonement and grace was something I could only receive at my very weakest.

My whole life up until this point, had been spent in churches where church and faith were more about what I could bring to the table than what God could give me. Growing up in Baptist fundamentalism meant that I learned early on what kinds of acts of service would be most rewarded. As I grew older, even though I loved the Lord and loved the church, serving became a way to hide, to avoid scrutiny. If I was a quiet, obedient, teenager who accompanied the choir every week, who was to question my life outside the walls of the church building? While my fellow youth group friends skateboarded on church property and had public MySpace profiles, I too skateboarded and had a secret online life, but did it all on my own time. My worst nightmare would have been being found out or exposed and I did everything I could to divert others from looking too closely at my life outside of the three weekly church services.

For years, I was constantly torn between my earnest dedication to the Lord and my unwillingness to accept that I was unable to work or perform for grace. I was confronted with the wrath of God reserved for sinners every week, but figured if I kept it up long enough, the shame and guilt could be outweighed by acts of service and God would be placated. Atonement was something I knew Jesus had secured for me, and yet, it felt like something elusive. Something that could be lost if I wasn’t careful enough to cover my tracks.

The pinnacle of this performative faith was the monthly observance of Communion. It was the ultimate test of my worthiness to receive grace. The sacrament was never dared called a sacrament, but was merely a remembrance. But even the term remembrance doesn’t quite capture the event. What it was was a somber time of reflection and confession. We were to plumb the depths of our souls, leave no sin or errant deed unidentified. Only then would we be worthy of coming to the table. Judgement would fall on us if we held anything back. This was the way to find peace with God: my own efforts and spiritual pride that I had cleansed my heart and become worthy of receiving his sacrifice afresh.

It would take time and suffering for grace to finally break through. Abruptly moving away from this childhood church when I was 17 caused me to come to terms with my own frailty and inability to secure my standing with the Lord on my own. But somehow spiritual pride always has a way of coming back to the forefront. It wasn’t until that moment on a weekday evening in that Anglican church in Baltimore that atonement would finally make sense to me as something I could only receive at my lowest point.

And I was finally at my lowest point. The church we had been a part of planting for nearly eight years was drastically changing and everything I thought was sure up until then had come undone. My relationships with some church leaders were strained as pressure mounted and our differences became apparent. My efforts had failed and my preconceived notions about what God wanted from me had come up short. Like the woman who caught the hem of Jesus’s robe in the crowd as he passed by, this night in this church felt like a desperate attempt to grasp at spiritual straws. Would I come up short again? Or would I finally know rest and wholeness?

Sitting in the pew, the grace of God broke into my dismay. I saw Christ’s strength in weakness in the liturgy- a Savior who strips down to wash his hypocritical disciples’ feet as his last unexpected act of love before dying for them. My faith was battered but as I dragged myself to the altar that evening, knelt down on my knees and opened my hands, the priest placed the bread into my mouth like I was a helpless baby. All I could do was receive this sacrament of grace, and I wept at the picture of God meeting my faltering faith that this was. I finally understood atonement in a way I had never seen it before.

A state of humility and desperation is the very point at which God meets us and fills us. Atonement, being at one with God, isn’t something I could conjure up for myself. It was only in my utter need that I could receive what He has done for me on my behalf. My hiding was over and my soul had been laid bare. But there He was, faithfully ready to receive me. Shame and guilt are no match for this God who poured himself out and continues to give us himself again and again.

In Summary:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

- from Holy Sonnet XIV, John Donne

*parts of this essay are adapted from a previous post.

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Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse, Miroslav Volf. One more for the imaginary syllabus on cultural disillusionment. On the spectrum of destructive ambition, I have more in common with George Costanza1 on the one hand than the college admissions scandal parents on the other, but I am nonetheless fascinated by this kind of driving desire to be the best, regardless of the cost. Volf reminds us by way of Kierkegaard, Milton, and the Apostle Paul of the deep cost of ambition and that this pursuit of winning in every area of life is antithetical to the Christian faith. The American dream and the way of Jesus are contradictory, and that is actually good news.

For most people, striving for superiority regulated by meritocracy, that is the ideal.

Living before God, I don’t accrue credit or merit, and therefore I can’t justifiably think of myself as inferior or superior to anyone else…There is only one true loftiness, one true earthly glory: a human being living Coram Deo in response to God’s call and resting transparently in this way.

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Karen Hao. Speaking of ambition, I started this 18 hour audiobook and then shelved it for now. It is an extremely detailed and fascinating look at the history of OpenAI and the unmatched drive of Sam Altman. Hao spent almost 10 years writing on the tech industry and conducted hundreds of interviews with OpenAI employees. If you have any interest in this topic and want to read only one book, this is the one. Oh, and also have 18 hours to devote to it.

"Each of these puzzle pieces--Sam's ascendance, his character and relationships, the divisiveness he left in his wake, the flows of money and power--speaks to the path that led to his sudden and fleeting ouster. For a brief moment, the rest of the world caught a glimpse into the struggles happening at the highest levels to dictate the future of artificial intelligence. It would reveal just how much the quest for dominance of that technology--already restructuring society and terraforming our earth--ultimately rests on the polarize values, clashing egos, and messy humanity of a small handful of fallible people.”

Current Reading

Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible, Stanley Hauerwas. This has been an unintentional but surprisingly good pairing to Volf. I like Hauerwas because he is hard to pin down. Part Anabaptist, part anti-capitalist, part pacifist, he is always surprising and not afraid to challenge what we love and remind us how the Kingdom of God clashes with our earthly ambitions and values. This book focuses specifically on the radical nature of the Kingdom of God, how it should effect the church, and how we interact with broader culture. Someone on Substack asked a few weeks ago what a good alternative to Christian Nationalism is. In one word, Jesus. But also, Hauerwas.

Charity is not about removing all injustice in the world, but about meeting the need of our neighbors right where we find them. And Christ shows us who our neighbors are. He expects us to bind up the wounds of those right before us.

The way of the kingdom, as manifest in Jesus, is quite simply extended training in being dispossessed, of becoming liberated by God from all that we think gives us power over our own lives and the lives of others. Jesus changes everything.

On Pentecost: Christ’s disciples have a story to tell in which God in Christ is the main character. They cannot tell that story without becoming part of the tale. For God’s story in Christ is not just another possible story about the way the world is; it is the story of the world as created and redeemed by God…We don’t just have an alternative story, but insofar as we are the church, we are the alternative. We are Gods new language.

Theology of Home: Finding the Eternal in the Everyday, Carrie Gress. This is probably one of the most Catholic books I have read to date but I enjoyed every page of it. Anything that quotes Teresa of Avila, John Paul II, and Thomas Merton I am all about. Similar to Thomas Howard’s Hallowed Be This House, this book is a look at home and hospitality as a Christian practice. I appreciated how “biblical womanhood” took a major backseat in this work on homemaking (it was barely mentioned- there was one whole section on the need of fathers to prioritize home over work, however- very much in the vein of Leah Libresco Sargeant’s piece here), but the primary focus was on sacramental living and cultivating all of our homes as spaces meant for others to encounter the love of Jesus in (while on the other hand, not down playing the contribution of women in this area). This is a very Holy Ordinary kind of book!

On the Christ centered life: Whatever it is that we’re doing, dull or glamorous, in doing it for love of Christ, it becomes an extension of our prayer life and a vehicle for sanctification. If we cannot find Christ in our work where we are now, we will have a hard time finding him anywhere else.

On hospitality: We do not love God if we do not love the stranger he sets before us. But because we cannot love what we do not know, love for the stranger can only be rooted in love for God, the one whom we do know. Rarely in modern times are we confronted with a stranger at our doorstep seeking shelter, but for most of us, we are out in the world daily interacting with and encountering strangers. Each encounter is an opportunity to "receive" them in kindness in the spirit of hospitality. Even with those whom we do know, their inherent dignity can become obscured at times. Whether we are hosting a party or sheltering a family in crisis, each of these encounters is an opportunity to receive another, naturally and without performance, greeting the image of God in them.

How About Now: Poems, Kate Baer. Another stellar collection from Kate Baer on motherhood, middle age, and embracing the life you have right in front of you. The poems are packed with humor and curiosity. These poems aren’t as striking as I found the And Yet collection to be, but are still fun to read.

How About Now?

We are born dying, which is one way to look at it.

Another is to wake up knowing

we are made of impossible things:

crystal caves, singing dunes,

dark matter held in mortal hope.

It’s true, time has a way

of making lists and ledgers.

You say you want a garden,

beds of lavender and daffodils.

You say we have a lifetime.

Love, we’re in our lifetime.

How about now?

Remembering Dr. John Perkins, . I loved the reflection here about the impression of meeting John Perkins in an elevator at ETS. Perkins embodied what it means to be free in Christ to love others and to allow the Gospel to bring reconciliation and renewal2. He was a voice in the black church who called out to white evangelicals that “opposition to racism was not a supplemental or optional activity but was core to living out the truth that would bring renewal and restoration to “the places long devastated” (Isa. 61:4).” CT’s obituary here is also a beautiful tribute.

Our encounter was arresting. Here was a man who’d been invited to address thousands of mostly white participants. He was neither cocky nor self-centered. He wasn’t offended that we didn’t recognize him. He had no chip on his shoulder about being a minority. He simply exuded joy. In our brief conversation he celebrated our presence at a conference that was planned, led, and addressed by only men. He saw us.

In a matter of moments he extended his enthusiastic welcome to a space where he likely felt like an outsider himself.

Everyone is Eventually a Burden, Plough, Matthew Burdette. This was a beautiful piece on how being a burden is an essential element of being human. In our post-Christian world where bodily autonomy is just standard thinking, it’s no wonder things like medically assisted suicide have gained traction. No one wants to burden anyone else and our bodily weakness is the thing we despise the most. This is a fundamentally human reaction, but Jesus makes a way for us to allow the uncomfortable friction we feel to be transformed into love, vulnerability, and care for one another. “In this way, the persistent presence of our ailing, suicide-eligible bodies will be, in God’s ironic providence, the means by which he will offer salvation for souls.” See also, The Dignity of Dependance by for an entire book on this topic.

the pastoral caregiver must deal with real life, in complete truthfulness, with precise attention to those aspects of life where there is resistance, which is to say, where there is friction. That is the only way to touch the soul. The polite easing of friction is antithetical to pastoral work.

the element of Christianity that has been lost is not necessarily kindness or compassion, but the biblical recognition that to be human is to be a burden, and that human flourishing therefore requires that we learn to be burdens and learn to bear burdens.

Knowing What Time It Is, , Plough. OK this is a lot to process, but the ideas here on where we are with a post-religious right on our hands are fascinating. I am mostly interested in how this relates to the ideas of the pursuit of common good (a historically American ideal, albeit with a checkered past), ethics, and how the post-religious right has abandoned it for pursuit of a “privileged few who escape the limits of the body.” Throw in Big Tech and we are left with post-humanism and atavism.3 What does this mean for embodiment? The project of post-consciousness is at odds with living here and now in flesh and blood. Is the work of the Kingdom to transcend this consciousness or is it duty to love and care for the bodies we have been gifted (both our own and of those who are in need around us?). “There is one battlefield upon which a traditional Christian ethic must finally collide, unavoidably and utterly, with the post-Christian right: bioethical questions of dependence and care.” Whether it’s our neighbor, unborn infants, children, the elderly, immigrants, or anyone who can’t transcend their bodies or by might or strength claw to the top. The post-religious right is a deceptive alternative to a true Christian social ethic (however much it appeals to “natural law”).

Thiel’s vision of Christianity locates the classic Christian promise of resurrection and eternal life through God’s grace – of the sharing in God’s nature known as theosis – to the place where Bacon, Condorcet, and Fedorov looked for it: radical, species-altering technological progress. This is, in Thiel’s view, the kind of cooperation with God to which humans are called – rather than the traditional Christian vision of a modest technological meliorism and the charge to tend the living world to bring it into greater fruitfulness in accord with its own nature and the sustaining will of God.

How will this technology affect human beings? A technological future only becomes “inconceivable” when the basic reference point – human nature itself – becomes contestable. If our technological future is truly “inconceivable,” it is only so because we have ceased to be recognizably human.

In a bitter irony, the progressive logic of absolute autonomy, and the post-Christian rightist logic of biological determinism, end up in the very same grave.

from Nicaea to America, . Snuck this in right as I was finishing the draft because it connects to so many topics here! Haley dives into a wild historical fact: one of the first orders of business at the Council of Nicaea was regarding the practice of castration as a means of by-passing virtue (not as a mark of piety). What does this have to do with us? A lot. We evangelicals struggle with the same disregard for the created good of the body and/or struggle to have a set of ethics that accounts for it beyond either despising it or falling into the trap of bodily autonomy. “Ontological violence” is such a good term for where we are now, beyond just the obvious in reproductive ethics. As Hauerwas said, if we as Christians do well, we will be “known as ‘those peculiar people who don’t kill their babies or their old people.’” Or will we?

Abhorrence at creation’s goodness will leave a bland, unbearable lightness. It breeds spiritual apathy, sadness, ontological unease, and a perplexing witness. Yet Christianity doesn’t leave us to the lightness of our whims. In love, we are tethered to the weight of a created order. There we find a boundaried delight. There we suffer with our Lord. There we become the flavorful salt of the earth.

Hopefully, as with the literature we have on the case of castration in the early church and Williams’ on abortion in America’s churches (to speak nothing of all the other topics that could be listed) we will have more books written. They might show with similarly honest documentation the ways in which Christians deliberated, clarified convictions, and changed course on other matters…We are in our own particular moment, filled with numerous shades of “ontological violence.” When historians look back, how will Christians have been shown to handle current assisted reproductive practices and other ways in which we have become complicit in modern medicine’s penchant for a “bleaching out of the density of things”?

Current Watching

How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, Another brilliant show brought to us by Lisa McGee on Netflix. This one is part murder mystery, part dark comedy, part manifesto on adult female friendship. There is also a UNESCO literary trail planned for Northern Ireland so we can all go walk through the world of McGee, Swift, Beckett, and Heaney!

I kept coming back to the show instead for its bleakly funny portrait of middle-aged friendship. “We’re dying now? That’s it, is it? That’s the latest?” Robyn says, outraged, when she hears the news about Greta. “We should not be dying. We’re thirty-four years of age!” “We’re thirty-eight,” Dara corrects her. These are women who know one another too well. They have heard every anecdote, every gripe, hundreds of times. It’s an intimacy that is both infuriating and joyful, and deeply satisfying to watch. - Anna Russell, for The New Yorker

Current Resources

Overnight Oats. I aspire to be the kind of person who can make cute breakfasts in a jar the night before but rarely am I thinking about breakfast after cleaning up supper. However, a friend made the best overnight oats for a trip a few weeks back and has inspired me. Now to get the tiny jars…

Qobuz. As musicians and concerned citizens, we have officially left Spotify after they announced their new pay-out model for artists (no money until any song hits 1000 plays…a new strategy for Spotify to funnel money into their own curated playlists and incentivize AI music- which doesn't receive royalties). So on to something new! Terrible name, but Qobuz has everything Spotify has and allows you to purchase albums for your own library (and bonus, it pays out much better royalties to musicians). You can even import your previous Spotify library and playlists to simplify the transition. Fight the Machine in any small way you can.

In Summary:

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing. - This is Water, David Foster Wallace4

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But there are only two stories that make any difference-God’s story and the human story. We all are living out different versions of those two stories with an infinite number of variations. God’s story, or the story of God and man, is simple-God made the world and loved the world, the world got lost, and God has spent the rest of human history trying somehow to bring the world back to himself. That is the story of God and man as I think each one of us has experienced it. It’s really as simple as that and as complex as that.

In the process of living out our own stories, God’s story intersects with ours.1

Last time, I explored the idea that the Bible is not meant to be seen as just a collection of facts or moral guidelines, but is first and foremost, a story. God gave us a story because it is what we most need. We need a meta-narrative to tune us to the reality of things and to in turn, help us see ourselves as participants in this story of redemption.

One idea I have been thinking about for a long time is the tension between the Bible as story (myth) and the Bible as ultimate reality (fact). These things are both true, but how? Ross Byrd captured this quite well in an article from January 2025. He bases his observations in the famous Joe Rogan/Wesley Huff interview. A theme that emerged in that conversation was the tension between Jesus as fact and Jesus as myth. C.S. Lewis had a lot to say about the nature of myth and how we as humans are wired for it. He also concluded that there is no tension. In fact, truth flows from the myth and the myth is the means by which we come to know the truth. Ross writes:

Lewis then suggests that, just as myth is the partial solution to the problem of knowing, Christ, in his incarnation, is the ultimate solution to the problem of myth, the means by which the truest imagined story becomes actual, real-life fact:

Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth that is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens at a particular date in a particular place. By becoming fact, it does not cease to be myth. That is the miracle.- C.S. Lewis2

From myth flows reality, from reality flows truth. This is the way in which the Biblical story permeates our world and shapes our faith and our participation in the world. This is not just an abstract activity or an intellectual exercise. It is an embodied, everyday participation in the life of the Crucified and Risen Christ. And the way the biblical story and the Person of Jesus crashes into our reality is through our own stories.

How then is the Biblical story the lens by which we view reality and our own stories? God is a God of consistent action. He is a God who does the same things over and over again. Part of the reason for the “rhyming” of the biblical stories is for us to make these connections, to compare and contrast similar stories and draw out meaning from the themes and types. But the Biblical story is cyclical also because history, and therefore our own lives, are cyclical. If this is true, we can look to the details in our own stories that occur again and again as a way to see God at work and to find meaning in his purposes for us.

Our stories call our attention to the love and grace of God alive and at work in the world. Frederick Buechner summarizes the importance of paying attention to our own lives for our spiritual benefit the following way:

It is well to remember because it keeps our eyes on the central fact that the Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space that day by day we are all of us involved with, stub our toes on, flounder around in trying to look as if we have good sense…If the God you believe in as an idea doesn’t start showing up in what happens to you in your own life, you have as much cause for concern as if the God you don’t believe in as an idea does start showing up.

It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life’s story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others’ lives. If God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then you might as well give up the whole business3

Studying Colossians this past semester helped me come to realize how Paul is an amazing example of this. Paul’s whole deal is that he sees himself as a participant in God’s story of redemption. In fact, this truth is what grounds him in his work and gives him confidence in God’s purposes as he risks his life to bring the Gospel to the Gentiles. The times in his epistles that Paul lists his credentials and recounts his life story aren’t just Paul flashing his apostleship badge to silence his critics. He recounts the details of his life as a way of showing how God has always been at work in his story and has now made him a part of a bigger story. This reality is what frees and propels Paul forward: he has seen grace at work in his life and is convinced that it will keep showing up as God’s plan of redemption continues on.

Jesus himself, as the fulfillment of all the Biblical stories, was grounded in the story of redemption as well. Jesus came not only to fulfill the promises of God made to his people, but to actually embody the story of the Scriptures, which all pointed to him. The more I think about this, the wilder it is. Jesus is the true Israel, and his life re-enacted the story of Israel. He is born into obscurity (like Israel is not chosen because of status), his family is forced to flee to Egypt, then returns to Israel. He is circumcised, baptized and sojourns 40 days in the wilderness. His encounter with the Samaritan woman is at the well of Jacob, which is also where Jacob had first encountered Rachel (a recapitulation of a prior event in the life of Isaac). Time and time again, the insignificant details of Jesus’s life are recapitulations of past stories, and yet, he is the fulfillment of each of these events. And unlike the original people involved, he enters through them perfectly.

The road to Emmaus may be the pinnacle of this theme. Jesus recounts the stories of the Old Testament and how they point to him. But even after this history lesson, the disciples he walks with fail to recognize him. Finally in the breaking of bread, something he must have done countless times in their presence before his death, they see who he is. It is not just in the story of the Bible and in the sacraments that we encounter God, but in the common everyday cycles of our lives that we recognize his work and presence.

An embodied faith doesn't just exist in the realm of facts and ideas. It is flesh and blood, true experienced reality. It’s no wonder then, that the Biblical story is meant to be the thing that grounds us, that interprets reality and our own particular stories for us. The Bible gives us access not to some pretend world, but to how the world actually is. The Bible, in some ways, is the truest version of a pattern that fills everything, a tuning fork for all of life.4

But paying attention is hard. We are often moving too quickly to settle down and assess where God may be at work or how he is showing up in the mundane or the frenzied chaos. It takes conscious effort to rest, reflect, and discover how God is revealing himself or has offered us grace in the day to day. And to be honest, sometimes like Job, we don’t always get the answers right away. We may never understand everything, but we can be confident in the master Storyteller who has entered our world, made us a part of his ongoing story of redemption and promises to bring it all to a grand conclusion when the cosmos are remade and restored.

As Jordan Peterson admitted, “Sometimes…the objective world and the narrative world…touch.” This is either the greatest miracle we have known or it is the most terrifying fact imaginable. Peterson, through tears, goes on to say “It’s too terrifying a reality to fully believe. I don’t know what would happen to you if you fully believed this, that these realities touch.”5

What would happen to us if we fully believed that both fact and myth coincide in the person of Jesus? That God entered our world and continues to break in. That he has not only made a way for us to know him and be loved by him, but has made us participants in a story bigger than ourselves, one that contains all of our own stories and is in itself, the culmination of every story?

Someone who asked this same question in her art and life was Flannery O’Connor. In dozens of short stories and two novels, she constructed hard-hearted and self-absorbed characters who thrive on the assumption that they are the best interpreters of their realities. But the subterranean grace of God breaks in by way of ordinary means: a prosthetic leg, a book thrown across the room, a tattooed back, a visit to the doctor’s office, a bus ride, a sunset. These events shock her characters into seeing reality as it really is and their place in it.

What if, like Flannery O’Connor’s characters, we allowed grace to break in, sometimes subtly, sometimes like a violent blow? What if we were to interpret the details of our lives as God breaking in, stripping us of our pride and self-centeredness, and reorienting our understanding of reality? Our story, like the Biblical story, is just that. He is kind enough not to leave us as we are, but he continually meets us in our need, leading us back to himself and reminding us of what is true and real: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

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“Are you an out-doorsy kind of gal? I had one of those once.” I looked over to see that the question had been asked by a tall, elderly man. He had long white hair, a kind face, and eyes that were deep pools of blue. Somehow, miraculously, he was balancing a Tower of Babel worth of mixing bowls and assorted kitchen utensils in his spindly arms. I stood clutching my found paperback copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude and a kids-sized cowboy hat I knew the five year old would be delighted with. “Umm, not really.” I hesitantly reply. “This is kind of just what I wear everyday.” I divert my eyes to some baking pans, hoping he will let me be now that I have given my halting answer.

My default when approached by strangers in public hasn’t changed much since childhood. Growing up, kid’s shows on PBS were always reminding us of the dangers of strangers, hot on the heels of the ‘80’s Milk Carton Kids and ‘90’s Satanic Panic. But it’s not fear that keeps me from interacting with strangers on the regular. It is a sense that interruptions of any kind are unwelcome. My default mode of operation is that I am not prepared to take a moment out of my very scheduled day to entertain unwanted questions or unwanted needs, for that matter.

There is a sense of self-preservation that accompanies this, if I am really honest. Straight from undergrad, I moved with my husband to Baltimore, MD, a city I love deeply but where I had to learn to keep my guard up. We always lived on the very edge of a decent neighborhood. In Baltimore, one block from the next can alternate between half a million dollar row homes and neighborhoods crippled by systemic and generational poverty and addiction. A few times a month I would tramp through the discarded remains of chicken box lunches and crushed cans of Natty-Boh beer to get to our closest grocery store. Along the way I would pass a bus stop and without fail, every time, was met with cat-calling and a haze of curse words. I quickly learned how to keep my head down.

So self-preservation, yes. But there was something about this older man in that Goodwill in Easley on the edge of polite civilization that Thursday morning that brought my guard down. Maybe it was just the town itself. My experiences in Easley previously had left me curious and open to any human encounters I could experience. The Publix in Easley is somehow the most haphazard shopping experience you will ever have. Much like a Chick-Fil-A in Brooklyn, the locals have overpowered any corporate attempts at decency and order. People of Easley: 1, Publix: 0.

The DMV in Easley is also a fascinating study, as most DMVs are. I spent an afternoon here, sitting across from a one armed man who never took his eyes off the wall in front of him, and I couldn’t decide if the experience was more akin to a Flannery O’Connor short story or a David Lynch film.

This Goodwill has a certain aura, though. One must be ready to talk about Jesus or Donald Trump (which in some shoppers opinions, are one in the same) when you darken the door to browse. Today was no exception. But somehow, I was more curious than normal. What did I have to loose?

“Are you an out-doorsy kind of gal? I had one of those once.”

“Umm, not really…This is kind of just what I wear everyday.”

“Ah, well my outdoorsy girl died in a car crash in 1987. Left me with four children, ages 10, 8, 6, and 4. That was time!”

Somehow I was not expecting this to take such a morbid turn. Should I ask more about the dead wife? Should I offer my sympathies? Should I just nod and head for the door? No, let’s keep this dialogue going for a while.

“That is terrible! I am so sorry for your loss. That must have been so hard.”

“Ahh it was. But we made it! Jesus has never failed me yet! In fact, I am a walking miracle.”

He then proceeded to tell me about his heart condition. I glazed over for bit while he went on, but something about an enlarged heart, “the worst the doctors had seen!” and when it was time to operate, a scan showed his problems had miraculously disappeared. “My son, who is a surgeon, says medical journals are going to be written about me! Jesus did a miracle on my heart.”

Jesus did a miracle on my heart. The words ring in my ears as I shift back and forth on my feet and marvel that his leaning tower of Tupperware is still, somehow, standing.

He continued on like this for a while. I finally managed to say that I was glad to hear that he had been healed and had found Jesus to be such a comfort and a caring Savior. Slowly, I moved on, pretending that a crumpled pile of Halloween trick or treat bins had caught my eye. He nonetheless, followed me.

“Are you a student?”

“In a sense, but no, I finished school a long time ago.”

“Well let me tell you, you never stop learning. I was a park ranger for many years, and my current wife is an outdoorsy gal - in fact we are going camping this weekend, thus all this,” (he gestured at his load of bowls) “We have been married for 20 years and I am still learning her. You never can know everything there is to know about a woman.”

“True. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Enjoy your camping trip!”

“Oh I will! Remember, Jesus never fails. He gave me a whole new heart.”

And with that, he at last headed to check out, where he began to strike up a conversation with the tired looking employee who was manning the cash register. What word would he have for her? I wondered.

Jesus did a miracle on my heart. Sometimes I forget this. Sometimes I forget that the miracle is not just that I have been declared guilt-free, but that this new status frees me to love. The miracle is that my cold and disinterested heart has been set free to love and offer grace, because I have been loved and given grace. This old man reminded me that this miracle isn’t one and done. In fact, it’s an ongoing work that never ceases to be any less miraculous than the first time I let down my guard and opened myself up to someone else. Interruptions are often the means by which grace breaks through my stony heart when I am willing and able to see that this unwanted disruption may be more than meets the eye. May I have eyes to see and ears to hear the grace that lurks even at the Goodwill.

Current Snapshots

What is Lent?

Here we are again, 40 days from Easter, in the part of the church calendar known as Lent. And no, you don’t have to be Catholic to observe Lent, even though for most of my life, it was only Catholic school kids and Mark Wahlberg that I had seen with ashes on Ash Wednesday. Lent goes back to the earliest days of the church and was initially a season when adult converts to Christianity would reflect and seek the Lord in the 40 days leading up to Easter (at which point, traditionally they would have been baptized into the church). As time went on, Lent came to include not only baptismal candidates, but became a necessary time of repentance and renewal for all of the church.

It is a season of reflection, much like Advent. We peer into the darkness of our own hearts and consider the darkness of the world. But like Advent, we don’t stop in the darkness. We look to the light of Christ, in his death and resurrection. Lent includes repentance, confession, fasting, and renewal. Like John the Baptist’s call to repent for the coming kingdom during Advent, we once again look at our own hearts and ask the Lord to renew a right spirit within us as we look to the hope of the resurrection.

Lent is one of the many ways our stories interact and intercept with the Biblical story of redemption. In this season, we walk through the story of the life and death of Jesus in our own lives, much like we walk through the story of his birth during Advent. The tension between death and life and sin and grace in this season calls us back once more to the God who came to not only break the chains of sin and death but who calls us back to himself time and time again.

Current Listening

The Way Home: Tish Warren on the Rhythms of Lent. This is an oldie but a goodie! It was in the writing of Tish Warren that I was first exposed to a liturgical Christianity of any kind. And long before I attended a liturgical church, her words made me long for this kind of repetition in living my own life within the church calendar.

Jesus, Jon Guerra. Sorry not sorry for more Jon Guerra here. This latest album is a beautiful journey through the life and words of Jesus. Perfect for Lent and Easter. Musically it is really refreshing. Some of my favorite tracks are In the Beginning Was Love, The Lord is My Shepherd, and I See the Birds.

I see the birds up in the air

I know you feed them

I know you care

So won’t you teach me

How I mean more to you than them

In times of trouble

Be my help again- I See the Birds

Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal, Esau McCaulley. This is a lovely book but also a lovely audiobook if you want a short introduction to the Lenten season or just want to brush up on it. It’s been three years since I have read this work and it is just as helpful the second time around! McCaulley walks the reader through the history of Lent, its place in the life of the Christian, the prayers and scripture of Lent, and special days such as Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday.

This season dedicated to repentance and renewal should not leads us to despair; it should cause us to praise God for his grace. Central to Lent is the idea that we need this kind of renewal consistently throughout our lives. We do not receive God’s grace only when we turn to him at the beginning of our spiritual journey. God’s grace meets us again and again.

Days of Ashes EP, U2. A bit like when Songs of Innocence dropped magically into everyone’s Apple Music Library in 2014, this EP came out on Ash Wednesday as a surprise release. This taste of their forthcoming album has classic U2 politically charged vibes. But instead of The Troubles, it’s about our current political moment. Treat yourself to some real music (or as we define it in my household, a four-piece band). Unless you have given up music for Lent, that is.

Theology in the Raw: Jesus Friend of Sinners, with Elyse Fitzpatrick. In recent years, Elyse Fitzpatrick has been a reminder to me that growth and changing your mind is a good thing, especially as you age. Having distanced herself a bit from some more extreme forms of biblical counseling, she remains a voice of wisdom and grace. Her book, Because He Loves Me, was maybe the first time I had encountered a grace-centered faith and it felt scandalous. Even a bit dangerous. And she continues to be a “patron of grace.” This conversation is centered around Lent and her new book on the topic, but also focused on the way the Gospel frees us to love and be loved by God.

Justification isn’t just forgiveness: “just as if I had never sinned.” Justification is, “just as if I had always obeyed.” What would your life be like if you were guilt free? How would you love your neighbor then? The church has been captivated by the love of political power because we are hoping somehow, somebody is going to make us okay.

If I have the king of the universe who is fond of me, I don’t have to fight for my rights or reputation.

Current Reading

The Master Soil-Tiller, . This is a very Lent-style look at the life and ministry of Jesus and his method of teaching and storytelling. Our hearts are hard and even when the light has come, we love the darkness rather than the light. Jesus comes to break into the darkness and till the hard, fallow ground of my heart until I can again receive the truths he has for me. Lent is the time when we recognize our bent towards brokenness and selfishness and our need of this great Gardener to come and turn the soil anew. It is also a good time to remember that it is actually a good thing that Jesus never quite goes about doing anything the way I think he should. That’s the whole point- God is always playing the long game and I am often too short sighted and impatient to see it.

Jesus came to till the soil of our hearts, to play the long game with his disciples, not just giving them the truth, but making sure the truth he wanted them to receive could, in fact, go in. The kingdom of God is a patient kingdom.

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Lent through Easter, Phyllis Tickle. I love me some Phyllis Tickle! Like her other seasonal prayer collections, this book walks through Lent with selections from the BCP, hymns, poems, psalms, and other Scripture readings. I love how it is broken down into a daily morning, afternoon, evening, and compline reading. Depending on the day, I can jump in wherever and not feel bad about missing anything.

The Undoing of Death, Fleming Rutledge. Along with Warren, reading Rutledge’s Advent work years ago awakened my soul to a whole new (albeit, extremely old) version of my faith. This collection contains sermons and lectures on Holy Week and is similar to the Advent book. I am amazed at the way she writes concise, relevant, and insightful homilies. And how she unapologetically argues for not only the necessity of the resurrection, but the reality of it within her denomination.

Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter, Plough. This is a wonderful collection of 96 readings written by everyone from Dorothy Sayers, to C.S. Lewis, Hildegard, Hauerwas, Julian of Norwich, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. As a mix of prose, poetry, short stories and sermons, this is a lovely edition to any other reading you are doing this season from a broad variety of traditions and perspectives. A great recent review of the book by Nadya Williams can be found here.

Reading along with these voices of other saints should never replace our Bible reading but can deeply enrich our spiritual life in the Lenten season, giving us additional encouragement and glimpses of beauty.- Nadya Williams

Living Lent, Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. This is a selection from the Plough Bread and Wine collection that I am still thinking about a year later. Lent, like Advent, is a time when we are reminded to turn from our capitalistic/consumerist/self-centered bent and run to the Savior who offers grace. The way of Jesus and the American Dream don’t usually mesh well, and that is okay. What Jesus offers is far better.

When did the collision between our appetites and the needs of our souls happen? Was there a heart attack? Did we get laid off from work, one of the thousands certified as extraneous? Did a beloved child become a bored stranger, a marriage fall silent and cold? Or, by some exquisite working of God’s grace, did we just find the courage to look the truth in the eye and, for once, not blink? How did we come to know that we were dying a slow and unacknowledged death? And that the only way back to life was to set all our packages down and begin again, carrying with us only what we really needed?

Four Quartets, East Coker. TS Eliot. I usually pull out Part IV of East Coker around this time of year to meditate on. But this year, I am spending time in the other parts of this poem I haven’t really committed to previously. All of East Coker has a great Ecclesiastes vibe and overlaps well with Lenten themes of darkness, light, waiting, hope, death.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. - Pt 3

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.- Pt 4

Dostoyevsky Lent Reading- I am currently not reading The Brother’s Karamazov because I have read it an embarrassing amount of times. However, Isaac is finally reading it. Reading any Dostoyevsky is, in its own way, an act of literary penance. But in all seriousness, the themes of this novel are very much in line with Lent. This article has some great resources and reading plans to help you chart your course. That is, if you need some Russian literature to enhance your Lent experience.

The Prophetic Practice of Joy, . This is an excerpt from Hannah’s new book and is a lovely reflection on not only the feast of the Eucharist, but of juxtaposition of fasting and feasting in the Christian life, particularly during Lent.

In his first miracle, Jesus modeled something very similar. By providing wine at a wedding feast, he began his own ministry with the end in mind. Before turning his face toward Jerusalem to stare down the challenge of the cross, Jesus sponsored a party. In his sermon “Lord of the Wine,” Tim Keller said, “By turning water to wine Jesus reveals the whole purpose of his ministry. It’s as if Jesus is telling us, ‘Yes, I’ve come to do self-denial and to suffer and to be humbled, and you will too if you follow me; but those things are means to an end. The end is the feast.’”

And in case we forget this truth in the long dark of Lent, every Sunday leading up to Easter is a feast day, a whisper of the resurrection that waits just around the corner…Authentic Christianity forbids us from diminishing sin’s gravity or its effects. We are compelled to grieve and cry out for rescue. But even more so, we have reason to rejoice because that rescue has come.

The Bright Sadness of Ben Sasse, . If you missed Ben Sasse’s heartbreaking but beautifully grace-filled advent announcement about his terminal cancer diagnosis, it’s worth reading. Sasse was a breath of fresh air in the political realm pre-MAGA and was seemingly one of the last Christians to enter politics unencumbered by the kind of cynicism, hate, or blame shifting we are trapped in now. There has always been a positivity but realness to his approach to politics and higher-ed and now his own mortality is faced with the same kind of grace and truth.

The course of life is dependency and then a period of independence and then back to dependency.

To borrow a phrase I heard Leah Sargeant use recently, Tim made a gift of his dying. When you put it that way, there’s something that should stop you in your tracks if you know your Bible: For when Jesus was dying, what was on his mind most? It was the world he was dying to save; it was the cruel men who had just been beating and mocking him, who he then forgave; it was his mother, Mary… Because of Jesus, Tim went to his death in the same way Jesus did, concerned over the world and wishing to provide final expressions of love, care, and concern for the people he loved. If Tim made a gift of his dying, it was because Jesus did it first.

Current Resources

The Ultimate Lent and Easter Kid’s Book List, . I am familiar with maybe three of these books, but love a good list of seasonal kid’s books, especially those tied to the church calendar. Discover something new!

Lent Resource Guide, Calvin University. A nice round-up of devotional material, books, and visual art to kick start Lent.

The Liturgical Home Lent Family Ideas, . Blog posts featured here with some great Lent ideas from an Anglican perspective including crafts and recipes.

The Lent Project 2026, Biola Center for Christianity, Culture, and the Arts. We have enjoyed Biola’s Advent and Lent devotionals for years now. They come to your inbox every morning and feature artwork, poetry, music, a scripture reading, and brief reflection. This year’s Lent Project will walk through the Gospel of Mark and started February 17.

Lenten Paper Chain craft. If you like a visual, this is a fun way to count down the days of Lent, including all the feast days between Ash Wednesday and Easter.

Five Films for Lent, . A nice round up of American and foreign Lent themed film suggestions. I am in and out of reading The Diary of a Country Priest (when I get tired of Infinite Jest…) and am intrigued by the film, Calgary now. What else would you add to this list?

In Summary:

Soul of Christ, sanctify me,

Body of Christ, save me,

Blood of Christ refresh me,

Water from the side of Christ, wash me,

Passion of Christ, strengthen me,

O good Jesus, hear me,

Within your wounds, hide me,

Let me never be separated from you,

From the powers of darkness, defend me,

In the hour of my death call me,

And bid me come with you,

That with your saints I may praise you forever and ever. Amen.

-Brother Roger of Taize

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From my time in KJV only fundamentalism when I read my NIV cover to cover out of spite (because, after all, we were supposed to read thorough the whole Bible every year) to my time in churches that placed a high value on expository teaching and spent years preaching through a single four chapter epistle leaving no Greek word unturned,1 I have had many different understandings of what the Bible is for. My younger self was desperate to have certain doctrinal questions answered: the problem of evil, election, salvation, the nature of God’s character. Sometimes I found those answers. But spaces that treated the Bible like an instruction manual or science textbook always confused me. This didn’t seem to fit with my experience of Scripture. The Bible is the final word on things pertaining to salvation and faith, but even the WCF admits there are some things we won’t have clear answers for, but need to use “the light of nature” and “prudence” to figure out.2 So what is the point? Are we to see the Scriptures as just a guide for living or is it partly that and yet also something more?

The Bible is first and foremost a book, a story. Why, if God meant for us to have all the answers, would he give us a book of stories and poems? Why a book at all? Approaching the Bible as what it is- a work of literature that contains several different genres that all require their own means of interpretation and understanding- has changed my perspective dramatically. What if what we need most isn’t an operations manual, but a story? Humans seek meaning and meta-narrative and this is what the story of Scripture offers. God speaks to us at the very level at which we all desperately want to be spoken to. If anything, the main questions Scripture seeks to answer are:

who is God?

how does he relates to the world?

and how do we fit into this story?

The way the Scripture is laid out if you are approaching it as an answer key is endlessly frustrating. How do we make sense of two creation accounts and four Gospel accounts? Why are timelines often jumbled? Why do some books like Judges and Jonah end without resolution? Why does Job ask questions for 35 chapters only for God to answer with a poem about how he delights in creation? Why can Jesus never answer a question directly and instead loves to respond with a seemingly unrelated parable? What on earth is the book of Revelation? Because the way the Bible lays out narratives is meant to cause us to compare and contrast them with surrounding stories, revealing deeper meaning. We are meant to trace threads and motifs throughout the entire biblical story. The typology and symbolism woven throughout the Bible over thousands of years and dozens of authors is one of the greatest achievements in all of literature and it is unlike any other book.

The stories and poems offered in response to some of life’s hardest questions actually do more for us than a straight answer would. They cause us to confront our questions and probe our deepest desires. The parables Jesus the Master Storyteller told get to the heart of the question far better than any other kind of response would. Jesus’ parables endlessly frustrated the Pharisees. They were baffled by his actions and missed the point of the Incarnation. But for those who are humble enough to see their need and the great feast of grace offered by God Incarnate, the stories are an invitation to a greater reality. They are exactly what we are looking for and the answer to our deepest longings. Maybe it turns out, that what we most need isn’t a cosmic Q&A, but a story.

What if instead of having all the answers, we are meant to see ourselves in this great story that is unfolding and has been unfolding for thousands of years, starting with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God entered into the world and in acting upon it, brought something where there was nothing and gave meaning where there wasn’t. And he continued to act. Throughout the Biblical narrative are accounts of ordinary people that God accomplished his purposes through. Their very lives became a part of the grand story and they themselves came to embody the story of redemption.

One of my favorite current ways this is demonstrated is in the latest installment in the Knives Out film series, Wake Up Dead Man. I won’t offer my review beyond pointing out that the film encapsulates tensions I have felt in my own life in the church.3 It also focuses on the tension between longing to have all of our questions answered and instead being given a faith that is a call to embody a story.

When Detective Blanc shows up in Father Jud’s church to crack the case, he postures himself as a man of reason, a fact gatherer who comes to conclusions about truth based on his own reasoning power. What he comes to learn though is that in being a detective, he isn’t so much a fact finder but is in fact a master storyteller. In gathering clues, he constructs a narrative. The story he discovers is the means by which he comes to know the truth. In offering grace, he himself becomes a participant in the story of redemption. He has much more in common with Jud the Priest than he realizes.

Fr. Jud initially thinks he will best serve his congregation by finding the answers to every question regarding the case. What he realizes though is that the work of the church is slow and personal. He rushes through a conversation with a lady who has information he desperately needs only to be stopped in his tracks when confronted with her grief and need of grace. His work as priest must be unhurried- he must not use people as a means to an end. Monsignor Wicks, on the other hand, pursues power in radicalizing a small group of people and going viral online for his angry, fear-based tirades. Living out the story of Christianity is about being a means of grace in the lives of others, not attainting wealth and power in this life.

Blanc: “I kneel at the altar of the rational.”

Fr Jud: “It’s storytelling. This church building isn’t medieval. We’re in New York. It has more in common with Disneyland than Notre Dame. And the rites and the rituals and the costumes… all of it. It’s storytelling.

I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside us that is profoundly true… that we can’t express any other way except storytelling?”

There is truth in scripture, the stories are true, but the kind of answers we crave aren’t always so tidy. Or maybe tidy answers aren’t the point. Maybe the point is getting to know this God of Scripture who offers us His very self and all along has been longing for relationship with us. And the way we come to know him best in this world, is to come to know the story of how he is at work in the world and has called us into his grand narrative of redemption. Our deepest questions and all of our longing for resolution culminate in Jesus, God’s yes and amen, the One to whom all the stories in Scripture point.

It is not just that the Bible is a book about things that happened once in a far off place. God entered our world and continues to break in. This God became flesh and blood and conquered death so that we could be caught up in his redeeming work in the world. And now it’s the followers of Christ, the church, who embody the story. The Word is living and active and our lives are in a continual conversation with it. As Christians, we gather every week to rehearse the story of redemption to ourselves and to one another, and to re-encounter the grace of Jesus again and again. Hymns, Scripture readings, creeds, the word and sacraments, all of these things are reminders of the story of salvation and our place in it. We go out then every week to serve all of creation with the truths of this story ringing in our ears, drawing others into this work of grace.

Next time, I will continue on with more thoughts about the Bible as a story and how we encounter God in our own stories (with a little help from Frederick Buechner, C.S. Lewis, and Flannery O’Connor).

In Summary:

It is well to remember what the ancient creeds of the Christian faith declare credence in: God of God, Light of Light... for us and for our salvation came down from heaven... born of the Virgin Mary. Suffered. Crucified. Dead. Buried. Rose again. Seated at the right hand of God. Shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead. That is not a theological idea of a religious system. It is a series of largely flesh and blood events that happened, are happening, will happen, in time and space. For better or worse, it is a story. - Frederick Buechner

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Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

Mere Fidelity: Paul and the Resurrection of Israel with Dr. Jason Staples

Yay biblical studies! This conversation goes beyond the normal dispensationalism versus covenant theology discussion. Dr. Staples is focused on the broader questions of “how did second temple Judaism understand itself?” and “how then did Paul understand the idea of Israel?” So many dots connected here in what Paul means when he says that all Israel will be saved, why the Gospel writers focus in on certain details, and how the Pharisees hoped that in a strict keeping of the Law, the covenant curses Israel was under would be lifted and Messiah would arrive. The deep irony is that Jesus disrupted all of this- even down to his breaking of the Sabbath repeatedly and arriving on the scene before the Jews were able to obey well enough for him to come. Restoration eschatology fills in the gaps in a serious way and leads to a deeper understanding of how the inclusion of the Gentiles leads to not only the salvation of the nations but the fulfillment of God’s promises to His people.

Paul doesn’t abandon his prior eschatology but comes to see Jesus as the fulfillment of it.

Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir, Amil Niazi. Niazi writes the parenting column for The Cut and I have anticipated the release of her memoir. Those of us in our thirties were raised in the height of the “Girl Boss” era. We were promised if we wanted anything enough and worked hard enough, we could have it all- education, family, career. Most of us have found this to not be as simple a guarantee as promised. Or a bit like Ecclesiastes puts it, “hevel”- something that is real, but is illusive and impossible to actually hold on to. Niazi’s book “frames her gradual disillusionment as a larger meditation on the limits of ambition as a guiding ethic.”1 Chapters 4-6 deal with domestic violence and substance abuse, so some heavy topics there. I hope to pair this with Miroslav Wolf’s The Cost of Ambition for my pretend course on Millennial Cultural Disenchantment.

We all have crutches that help us fake it…ambition and hard work won’t free you from your past.

Keeper of Days, Jon Guerra. Citizens is one of those tracks that deserves it’s own post but is a song I have come back to regularly now for the past 5 years. I returned to this album on the first weekend of snow. Later that day, Alex Pretti would be brutally murdered by ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis and the lyrics would keep going around and around in my head.

Coming to you 'cause I'm angry
Coming to you 'cause I'm guilty
Coming to you 'cause you promised
To leave the flock for the one

I need to know there is justice
That it will roll in abundance
And that you're building a city
Where we arrive as immigrants
And you call us citizens
And you welcome us as children home- Citizens

Current Reading

God is Present, I have to Believe this, . This is an incredible compilation of quotes, poems, scripture and thoughts on God’s presence in the midst of tragedy and loss. The past few weeks, on a political scale, have been devastating. But suffering comes in all shapes and sizes. Whether it’s the injustice in Minneapolis or our own sickness or sorrow, Jesus comes to us in it because He himself came and identified with our deepest sufferings.

Jesus hung there on that cross to suffer and die with every other human who has been hung, burned, shot, gassed, or starved. That, I believe, is the ultimate act of presence and the only reason I can believe that the truth of Christianity is God’s presence with us, all of us.

Growing up, the cross was what saved me from my sins and nothing more. That is still true; I believe that. But in the face of suffering—of deportation, of murder, of suicide—a cross that only saves us from sins doesn’t feel helpful. But the cross is so much more. It is the great bulwark of suffering solidarity, proving that Jesus is acquainted with your suffering and, therefore, with you in your moment of suffering.

Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris. I enjoyed The Quotidian Mysteries last year (a short volume based on a lecture she gave and a very “holy ordinary” kind of book, similar to Liturgy of the Ordinary) and happened to find a copy of this book at a local thrift store. As someone who grew up in the faith, left, and then came back, Norris’s writing is rich and insightful. The book is laid out in a series of short chapters, each an essay on a particular vocabulary word in the Christian faith. It makes for a quick and enjoyable read.

On Conversion: “Conversion is partly seeing ourselves, and the ordinary people in our families, our classrooms, and on the job, in a new light. Can it be that these very people—even the difficult, unbearable ones—are the ones God has given us, so that together we might find salvation?”

On Prayer: “From him I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been.”

On Perfection: “To “be perfect,” in the sense that Jesus means it, is to make room for growth, for the changes that bring us to maturity, to ripeness. To mature is to lose adolescent self-consciousness so as to be able to make a gift of oneself, as a parent, as teacher, friend, spouse…

Perfection, in a Christian sense, means becoming mature enough to give ourselves to others. Whatever we have, no matter how little it seems, is something that can be shared with those who are poorer. This sort of perfection demands that we become fully ourselves as God would have us: mature, ripe, full, ready for what befalls us, for whatever is to come.”

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. 2026 is the 30th anniversary of the release of this massive novel. It has been a long time since I have read something over 1000 pages and this has long been on my TBR list. Wallace’s 2006 commencement speech, This is Water, is something that I wish I could hear again for the first time. Instead, I just return to it on a regular basis. Infinite Jest is famously long, sparking a cultural trend of “performative reading” (but at least the bros were reading?!). The New Yorker sums up the value of the novel aptly in its recent review, “The infamous length of “Infinite Jest” is, in this sense, a central feature of its ethic: not bigness as brag but duration as discipline. In a distractible age, Wallace made an argument for the long novel that is won simply by being heard.”

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

Marked by Ashes, Tish Harrison Warren. This may have been the first piece of Warren’s I read years ago. I was unfamiliar with the concept of Ash Wednesday for protestants but was intrigued by her reflection. This piece is still one of the most beautiful takes on Ash Wednesday (which is coming up next Wednesday) and how it causes us to stop and consider uncomfortable truths. Last year, when my then four year old son was marked with ashes, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the vulnerability of his mortality and my own. This truth, along with the truth that Jesus came to take on the same vulnerability to conquer death is something we need reminded of more than once a year. But once a year is a good start.

Into my false reality of invulnerability, control, and easy amusement, Ash Wednesday proclaims the truth from which I daily flee: suffering children, dying loved ones, the grave. We look squarely at the brutal reality of mortal vulnerability that shadows every day we live, every happy moment.

And the mystery of the gospel is that if Jesus was next to me in the Ash Wednesday service, he would kneel and be marked by ashes as well. He too was marked for death, even from his birth. God himself took on vulnerability. He knew loss. He stared squarely at death. He raged. He wept. He died.

Constance, Jane Kenyon. I had read some of Kenyon’s poetry previously but was reminded of how amazing her poems are this past week.2 These poems feel like a mix of Sylvia Plath and Christian Wiman. Kenyon suffered deeply from depression and would die at the age of 47 of leukemia. (She was also married to Donald Hall, poet and author of several children’s books such as The Ox-Cart Man!) The themes are heavy, but redemption and grace abound in her words. If you are walking alongside someone who is suffering, are suffering yourself, or want to just gear up for Lent, this is the perfect collection. I really appreciate her poems on depression. I have yet to find a cycle like Having it Out with Melancholy that really captures the experience of depression and the hardships of trying to find relief. Notes From the Other Side, the final poem in the collection, is also a tear jerker.

Like a crow who smells hot blood 
you came flying to pull me out 
of the glowing stream.
“I’ll hold you up. 
I never let my dear ones drown!” After that, I wept for days.
 - from Once There Was Light

tilled with suffering & beauty, . This piece is only a few days old and fits perfectly in with the themes of this week’s Commonplace. Similar to Tim’s piece linked below, it’s a reflection on suffering, sickness, the life of Jesus, and how God speaks comfort to us through everyday beauty and gestures of hospitality and kindness.

Perhaps the most compelling parts of Christianity are the most absurdly stunning. They don’t make initial sense. They are not sensible to the material eye. They don’t factor as meaningful uses of time or effort.

But souls, eyes, ears, and bodies that contain it all—they still respond to beauty…

Deep sorrow is receptive ground for seeing eternity touch down. For feeling the weight, the utter mercy of this life. For understanding the language of subtle beauty that points the way.

Current Watching

Derry Girls. Back on Netflix for the month so we picked this show up again. It is even funnier the second time around. If you loved Gretta Gerwig’s Lady Bird and enjoy Irish vocabulary and film depictions of The Troubles, this is a great watch (albeit not for everyone- language warnings abound). Based on the Lisa McGee’s own upbringing in a working class Catholic family in Derry, what I love most about the show is how it portrays the girls coming of age in the middle of a brutal civil conflict and their relationships with each other and the adults in their lives. Adolescence is often about having to come to grips with the brokenness of the world and the fact that the adults in our lives are real people with real problems, struggling to navigate the world’s brokenness as well. Sister Michael is also my spirit animal.

Father Peter: What is something Catholics and Protestants have in common?

Student: Catholics are always getting a buzz from statues, like

Sister Michael: I do love a good statue!

The Enchanted World of Brambly Hedge. You may have encountered the book series by Jill Barklem since it has made a come back in the last few years, but did you know there was a British stop-motion animation version of the show made in the mid-90’s?! I did not and it’s the coziest show ever.3

Current Resources

The Ultimate Resource Guide for Christians with OCD, . OCD is not something I suffer from, but I have lived my whole life with one foot in Christian spaces where religious scrupulosity not only thrives, but is encouraged. OCD is a real thing and can be devastating to live with. This is an incredible round up of books, articles, courses, music, podcasts, and all manner of tools to understand OCD or to seek help and healing. Thankful that this is all in one place here to share!

MUBI for 3 months @ $1. Ends today! “Remind yourself what great cinema feels like” is how this streaming service is advertised and truly, it’s a fun streaming platform. Most of the films I am unfamiliar with, but there is a lot to be discovered in MUBI’s line up of classic, foreign and indie films. And bonus, all of Kelly Reichardt’s films are currently available here.

Board Game Round Up, . We have just entered the stage where all three kids understand basic board game etiquette and logistics. I love this list of best games broken down by age groups. Here’s to more family game nights in the future.

In Summary:

Let it come, as it will, and don’t

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

-from Let Evening Come, Jane Kenyon

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2

Thank you , by way of !

The Immensity of Existing Things

Waiting Greedily

Last week I found myself sitting in a hospital waiting room. I gazed around at the huddled groups of families and friends in the nooks and corners of this familiar space, and was flooded with memories…

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4 months ago · 11 likes · 4 comments · Tim Udouj

3

Thanks to for featuring this in her latest newsletter and turning us onto it!

Withyweather Farm & School

January '26 Homestead Happenings

Hello everyone, and welcome to the January 2026 edition of Homestead Happenings here at Withyweather Farm and School. I write to you from a little hobby farm amidst the Midwest plains, awash in wintry blue light and feather-light snow. That sounds nice, doesn’t it? But really, I like this time of year because it’s so cold that there’s no allergies, no p…

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4 months ago · 6 likes · Emily Phillips

1. I would get a deeper understanding of how women functioned in the western church before the Gregorian reforms

2. I would continue to uncover how Aristotle influenced the medieval mind (and church leaders and councils)

If these are things that keep you up at night, read on, because I found some answers!

I have seen it hinted elsewhere that before the Gregorian and Lateran council reforms of the 1200 and 1300’s, the western church was a very different institution. 1200 years is a long time! We are only 700 years past these reforms so for the majority of church history, things looked very different.

Macy takes a lot of time to carefully define “ordination.” Most modern theologians (and some historians) make the mistake of using our current working definitions of ordination and forcing it on the church before 1200. The modern Catholic understanding of ordination is tied to a granting of special power linked to liturgy at the altar.1 In Protestant churches it is more of a formal recognition of qualification to serve as a pastor or elder. Before the Gregorian reforms, ordination was not so much about this supernatural power and authority as it was about commissioning a particular person in a particular church community to serve within that community, much more like it is in current Protestant ecclesiology. The theology of transubstantiation would not be fully codified until the 13th century reforms, so ordination had little to do with the Eucharist before then.

However, ordination wasn’t limited just to the offices of bishop, priest, and deacon. Nearly everyone who served in an official capacity in a church was ordained. We also find in documents and books of church rites that prior to the 13th century, the words, “ordination,” “blessing,” “commission,” and “dedication” are used interchangeably. There are rites for the ordination of a door keeper, blessings for the cutting of beards, commissioning of bishops, and dedications of widows. The specific use of ordination as we think of it today was just not used in the same way then.

Churches in Europe in the early middle ages largely functioned on a “family model.” There were several attempts before 1200 to enforce clerical celibacy, but it never really stuck on a large scale until the Gregorian reforms. Most church offices (including deacon and deaconesses) would become celibate positions as the church moved towards a “monastery model” in which the church was more isolated from the community and those in its service represented the “third gender” of celibate, ordained offices.2 The office of nun and abbess would eventually replace the office of widow and deaconess when these reforms were complete.

The Gregorian reforms were the first time widespread reforms actually made an impact. Churches were a part of local communities and if papal reforms or councils made sense for that community, they were adopted. But often they were largely ignored. What was so drastic about the Gregorian reforms is that they restructured the hierarchy of the church so that power was consolidated at the top. No longer would there be churches on land owned by the priest and his family. The lands would all be owned by the church at large (as a part of the ongoing struggle for land between the papal lords and secular lords). Children of priests would no longer inherit the family business of the church or the land it was on but were declared bastards. The wives of priests, similarly, were all considered illegitimate and given the status of concubines.

This resulted in a dramatic change in the daily functioning of the church. It became a church with top down authority, and a specific way to advance in rank from deacon to pope. (Interestingly, between 700 and 900 AD, there were 10 deacons who went straight to the papacy. This would never happen after 1300.)

No longer was ordination just about how one served in a particular church, there was spiritual power allocated to those ordained. According to Macy, now “ordination [was] tied…to power rather than to vocation, to status not to appointment.” This was especially true for priests. Only a priest could perform the miracle of changing the bread and wine into Christ’s body. This further divided the laity from the priesthood. Priests were given the Holy Spirit in ordination and could not lose their spiritual rights as priests (even if excommunicated and later restored, they would not be re-ordained). Ordination stuck for life and had eternal weight as well.

So where do women fit in to all of this history? Before the Gregorian reforms and Lateran councils, we have ample evidence of women being ordained to the role of deaconess. There are a handful of records of women as presbyterae and episcopa but it is inconclusive whether these women were the wives of priests or bishops (and so functioned as ministry partners along with them) or functioned as a separate ordained order. Nonetheless, they were legitimately ordained by the definitions of ordination at the time.3 They helped in preparing and distributing the Eucharist, read aloud the Gospel readings, and assisted in house calls and baptisms. Abesses heard their nuns’ confessions and gave absolution. Deaconesses made things for the parishes (linens, vestments, etc.) and helped maintain the buildings and properties. The ordination rites for female deacons are identical to those of male deacons in several surviving books of church rites.4

We have one example of a woman being ordained a bishop in the 9th century. But it was an accident. I kid you not, the priest was “overcome by the spirit” and administered all the rites of ordination. When he came to and realized what he had done, the rites were honored and Brigid of Kildare served as a bishop within her church community and was apparently highly effective.5 We have one lovely fresco from the Priscilla Catacombs, the fractio panis, of a woman (alongside several men) who appears to be administering the Eucharist (or at least sharing a communion meal). But other than these and a few other scraps of history, evidence for women as priests and bishops is scarce.6

The evidence for ordained deaconesses and widows, however, is ample. From the beginning of the church, women served in these roles and assisted in worship. Whether it was because there weren't enough men around or cultural norms necessitated women serve women in specific ways (such as in baptism, which was done nude), women were deaconesses. And this was an ordained role (by the definition of the time). There is so much evidence for this, that a slash and burn campaign was waged by the church during the Gregorian era to discount the nature and character of women and to erase the history of their service in the church for the 1200 years prior.

Three things fueled the new rhetoric about women:

1. Reinterpretation of a few key biblical passages

2. The revival of Aristotle

3. A return to patriarchal Roman Law

Several theological changes were made regarding women. The Roman church law would became the predominant (canon) church law in Europe at the time. This document was known as Decretum Gratiani. It argued, with a bit of help from Aristotle, that women were not made in the image of God (from 1 Cor. 10:7) and were therefore incapable of receiving church orders. A rediscovery of a 4th century commentary attributed to Ambrose on 1 Timothy also facilitated a retranslation of 1 Tim 3:11. From the 5th-12th century this had been interpreted as Paul’s instructions to female deacons. Now it was only about the wives of deacons.

Prior to the reforms, men and women were educated side by side in educational settings such as the Benedictine order of church.7 After the reforms, women would be cut off from access to the education of the newly formed universities. Along with the founding of the university was a return to the classics, which at this time meant Aristotle, who conveniently had a lot to say about how terrible women are. This revival of Aristotle’s thinking was so influential that even the Protestant Reformers 300 years later (who brought back the “church as family model” in a way) still maintained quite a bit of misogyny and quipped about women being physically and emotionally inferior (but not as spiritually inferior as the Gregorian reforms made women out to be, so a step in the right direction).

When the Decretum became the predominant church law in Europe at the time, there was also a revival of Roman civic codes. Allison Morgan summarizes this in her review of Macy’s book:

Roman law had become interwoven with Church law since Gratian; the second version of the Decretum expanded it further. Canon law chose to follow the parts of Roman law which stressed the control of the paterfamilias over children and spouse (Roman law itself gave women many legal rights including public activity and owning/controlling property). Women were seen as unreliable and intellectually inferior to men; and therefore subject to them.8

The new interpretations of 1 Cor 10, 1 Tim 3, the return to Aristotle, and Roman patriarchal law had vast implications for women in the church. Because women were seen as more prone to lust and deceit, and their minds, character, and natures were weaker, it was argued that they were metaphysically incapable of receiving any kinds of rites of ordination. Maybe they had received them in the past, it was argued, but they were all illegitimate because women, by their nature, can’t receive the spiritual gifts ordination imparts, nor are they fit to touch the consecrated body and blood.9

Women’s bodies were such a liability that clerical celibacy was essential. A male priest was forbidden to have sexual relations with a woman if he was also going to handle the body and blood of Christ. Women weren’t just relegated to the status of laypeople in the church; they were now, in fact, lower than laymen. What was once a beautiful, but imperfect, model of men and women using their gifts to serve alongside one another for the benefit of a particular church community became a top-down hierarchy where only men could serve and women were forced out.

So what does this mean for us? The Catholic church recently concluded a years long study on revising the role of female deacons in the church. The consensus was once again, “no thank you.” But Catholic teaching about the function of the priesthood and their understanding of the Eucharist is directly tied to a male-only priesthood and diaconate. What about protestants? If we want to hold to a high view of the office of elder (as resevered for men only, for whatever biblical or historical reasons we have) would that not open up other roles of service for unordained men and women? Would it be possible to revert to a pre-1200 understanding of ordination or commissioning of qualified men and women to serve and assist in the work and worship of the church?

In our modern evangelical world, the discussion is often a two sided one. Pick egalitarianism with women ordained to the roles of priest and beyond, or pick complementarianism where men are the only ones allowed to occupy church offices. The more I read about church history and the history of church offices, the weirder it is to map our current protestant understanding of ordination and church offices onto the past. This is often demonstrated on X, that cesspool of evangelical talking-heads. But it is a microcosm for the modern American church in a way.

Two examples come to mind. Conservative global Anglicans, who maintain the three-fold ordained offices of the church, and evangelical baptist kinds are always talking past one another on the issue of women in ministry because they have different working definitions of ordination. An ordained deaconess in a conservative Anglican Church may or may not be commissioned to preach, but in the minds of a lot of American Baptist pastors, ordaining a woman to any church role signals the slippery slope to liberalism. A woman simply can’t be “in charge.” But church offices aren’t necessarily about authority as much as they are about service and commissioning qualified people to serve.

A recent exchange between Matthew Barrett (former Southern Baptist professor who became Anglican last year) and Colin Smothers (acting head of CBMW) on church offices also reveals how American evangelicals have muddied the waters on historic church offices. Barrett is arguing for a return to the three-fold offices and Smothers misses the point and posts his Venn diagram that collapses the biblical terms for these offices into a single office of “pastor.”10

In churches where one man at the top is the pastor, male deacons function as ruling elders, and trustees serve as deacons, it’s no wonder we don’t have categories for church offices beyond “the man who preaches for an hour every week and makes the decisions.” By collapsing the biblical terms of deacon, elder, and bishop into one office of pastor, we force women out and also hurt unordained men in the church as well. I think we can do better.

I have seen this modeled so well in my current church, but even within our denomination, it is constantly challenged. Even if we hold to male only elders, there can be a multitude of offices open to women within the scope of “complementarianism.” Women can lead women’s, children’s, and counseling ministries. Women can serve as deaconesses, property managers, staff counselors, church accountants, and lead efforts for poverty alleviation, and community engagement. If an unordained male church member can pass out bulletins, so can a woman. Unordained male and female church members can even assist in the service, by reading scripture or helping distribute communion. This is not an exhaustive list: Anything an unordained man can do, so can an unordained woman. The result of this is men and women serving alongside one another while also holding the office of elder (as the one who administers the word and sacrament) in high regard. Not every church position is a pastoral one. In fact, 98 percent of church roles are not pastoral.

However, if we have a male-centric view of the church that allows any man to fill a role just by nature of being a man, we are actually hurting the office of elder we say we hold in such high regard. Not everyone should be a priest, nor should every role in the church eventually lead to the priesthood. But as a family of believers in community together, where spiritual fathers, mothers, and brothers and sisters serve in love, we would be elevating the role of elder if we opened up more offices of service in support of the church.

We need a vision of complementarity that doesn’t see our bodies as a liability but one that envisions mutuality, reciprocity, and giving. Our differences shouldn’t stack us in hierarchies or set terms about who can best image Christ. Men and women were meant to serve and worship along side one another. The fall disordered our affections but Christ has come to remake us into his Image. Abigail Favale reminds us that, “It is holiness that makes our sexual difference truly iconic, enabling our visible bodies to proclaim what is invisible, to reveal the glory of God—the man and the woman who are fully alive.”11 This vision for the church images the beauty of the Gospel and the God who came to make all things new.

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Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry by Arabelle Sicardi. I always love an audiobook read by the author. This is a fascinating look at the history of the beauty industry in 20th century America and its connections to politics and capitalism. I loved chapters 2-3 on Coco Chanel and her wild and controversial life. Chapter 8 looks at the future of the beauty industry in light of trans-humanism. Written over the span of nine years, the book moves from exposé to the lovely conclusion that at its best, beauty doesn’t have to be about exploitation or power.

The Birthkeepers, Guardian Podcasts. All the trigger warnings here. This was sent to me by a dear friend and sister in law and it’s right in my wheel house. People have a lot of opinions about birth and what kind of birth is best. And women should be able to have the kind of birth they want. But like all medical decisions, this is one best informed by facts. The Free Birth Society podcast showed up in social media feeds and captivated some women who longed for non-medicalized birth. However, unlike traditional doula care or midwifery, the Free Birth Society is radical and has had deadly consequences. Where is the line between women trusting their bodies, along with the tradition of women supporting women in birth, and mothers, inspired by influencers, taking matters into their hands alone?

Forever is a Feeling, Lucy Dacus. I missed the boat on this album last year but I am on it now! It’s a bit Joni Mitchell in the vocals and writing, and there is also a delightful mix of hammered dulcimer, strings, and piano throughout the mostly acoustic sound. Think Julien Baker/boygenius but a little happier?

Tiny Moving Parts. If the 2012 “hey ho” banjo strumming sound of The Head and the Heart and Mumford&Sons is the heart music of millennial young adulthood, punk was the music of our adolescence. And they just don’t make punk music (with people playing real instruments and being angry at something!) like they used to. At least that’s what I thought until Isaac said “I found some music you will like” via Mere O and he was right! Punk, as a genre, best communicates angst and longing. But it can also be a defiance against the status quo and be used as a genre that asks us to seek for more:

That’s why this song is best written as punk rock. It’s defiance against regression and nihilism. It’s defiance against loneliness and stagnancy. It’s a baby step or two in the direction of wholeness and happiness by way of friendship into the unknown.

Current Reading

And Yet: Poems, Kate Baer. I received a copy of this book at a book club holiday swap. As I am trying to get into more poetry this year, it was a wonderful place to start. If you enjoy Rachel Cusk’s essays on womanhood and motherhood, there are a lot of similar sentiments here as well.

I emerge from the doldrums of the holidays hopeful around New Years. But then quickly return to my default state of trying to claw my way to the surface of my daily life. Some weeks my main goal is to leave the library without hauling a crying child behind me. Some days are easy and I move through my day unbothered. My main need is to not be needed. But what kind of life is that? There is stunning glory in the middle of the interruptions and beauty to be found when I settle into quiet trust and just look around.

“Let your life rest on what is already good.”

“Putting away the baby clothes
It’s delicate the edge of horror
I have crossed 1000 rivers
How foolish we are to believe what we love won’t end”

“To witness one life's miserable devastation and see her reach, instead, for joy.”

Why It Is Difficult To Talk About Ethics of the Body,

Infertility is such a hard topic. It’s isolating and often times we don’t learn about someone’s struggle until they are years down the road and grief has compiled. Although none of this struggle is beyond the reach of Jesus, our response as Christians hasn’t always been well thought through, as well meaning as it can be. Haley argues that an embodied sexual ethic is one that we have to learn and teach from the start. Back up- way back- to adolescent sex education. Women don’t know how our bodies work, and men certainly don’t either. Which then leads to all kinds of ethical, moral, and medical implications if we attempt to pursue having children at any cost.

“Our lives are not things we own so much as vocations we receive.” Things like parenthood aren’t guaranteed and whatever vocation we are called to (fertility or infertility) is a path we can walk in holiness and faith, drawing others into the love of Christ. This kind of embodied living goes for many other things as well, not just in desiring children. Mental illness, chronic illness, disability, unwanted singleness. How do Christ-followers embody life when it doesn’t look the way we planned or in bodies that don’t always work the way we hope they would?

I am really interested in the angle that birth control is a kind of gender-affirming care (at least in how we approach the ability to turn fertility on and off). Someone should write that piece. I am also interested in how things like purity culture and teachings on motherhood as the highest calling for women have shaped the church’s response to IVF. I think we have muddied the sexual ethics waters in how evangelicalism portrays the telos of women. Maybe I will write that piece. Then won’t I be fun to have at parties!?

We are catechized by what we believe, but perhaps more so by what we do. What we do in the body catechizes the soul at a deep level. It can catechizes the conscience.

This is the way of the Christian life. We worship the incarnated Christ. He took on flesh in order to pour it out, and so our own bodies and physical laments take on meaning. The body holds the ways in which we were made to know Him, in all the delights and suffering along the way. It is ours to receive, as bought with a price and given in love.

Everything is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness, Bobby Jamieson. I don’t always enjoy Christian living books and I consider this a personal defect. However, this is thankfully not exactly a Christian living book. It is a philosophical look at the book of Ecclesiastes, how it functions within the OT Scriptures as a whole, and how it applies to us late modernity folks. The author (a former pastor from CHBC) is well read and pulls in connections from literature, poetry, and sociology in an engaging way. He even quotes Christian Wiman and Wallace Stevens on the same page!

One way to be unhappy is to lack what you most want. Another is to get all you could possibly want and discover that everything is never enough.

Happiness is not striving for gain from life but receiving life itself as a gift.

Because life comes from God’s hand, and all the good things in life do too, both life itself and its million small good things are a gift. Seeing that and living accordingly makes the crucial difference between despair and delight.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Re-reading this in anticipation of the film release in February. I recall when I read it in high school that my impression was “yikes!” Ten years ago, it was “eeek!” And now I am all about a novel in which every character is a slowing moving train wreck. This is far more visceral and animalistic than I remembered, but in a wonderful Mad Men style where everyone continues to chase their desires despite the fact that it’s killing them. It’s an Ecclesiastes kind of reminder that deep down, we are all this way, and the key to the good life lies outside of ourselves.

“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”

It’s Ok, Settle Down,

Here is what I’m finally learning: the boundless grace of God frees me to settle down without worrying I’m settling for a lesser life. It lets me open my eyes to see the beauty of walking the same, small path over and over again. God’s grace says, it’s okay to settle down, because I can’t love you any more or less than I do at this very moment, so this very moment is infinitely valuable. Don’t wish it away, even if you don’t like the current content.

I am so thankful for the consistent and grace-filled ministry of Tim Udouj, who points us to Christ and His love every week. I am also glad he is actively writing here again! Along with a lot of things this week, there are similar themes here of rest, quietness, and trust. No matter what season we find ourselves in, there is always something we wish were different. Or better or easier. Maybe it’s loneliness we wish to change. Or busyness. We are constantly striving and fearful of the quietness that rest brings. But it’s ok to stop, to rest, to settle in, and trust that God’s grace is indeed enough.

Current Resources

All the soups. My kids still don’t know what to do with soup but we are in the depths of winter and soup is a necessity. Some recent faves:

• Creamy Chicken Gnocchi Soup

• Sweet Potato Chili

• Sausage, Kale, Potato Soup

Egg Storage - for chicken eggs, in the fridge to be exact. Somehow this thing has changed our lives and made mornings more enjoyable as we don’t have to wrestle the dang plastic egg package every day at 8am anymore.

Audible 99 cent New Years deal. I signed up for this last spring to enjoy three audiobooks my local library didn’t have. And a new year means we can all re-up.

NYtimes All Access for $1 a month. This includes Wirecutter (which along with Reddit is my ChatGPT) and Cooking. Treat yoself.

In Summary:

I will enjoy this life. I will open it

Like a peach in season, suck the juice

from every finger, run my tongue over

my chin. I will not worry about clichés

or uninvited guests peering in my windows.

I will love and be loved. Save and be saved

a thousand times. I will let the want into

my body, bless the heat under my skin.

My life, I will not waste it.

I will enjoy this life.

- Idea, Kate Baer

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Fiction:

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Just as wild the second time around. This novel fits in the same “a book that captures the full scope of human experience” category as The Brother’s Karamazov.

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mother gives birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”

“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...”

“Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”

• Florida, The Vaster Wilds, Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Loved returning to Lauren Groff. She was one of the first female novelists I discovered when I started reading contemporary fiction years ago. Contemplating rereading Matrix again this year.

“She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the "Moonlight" Sonata. She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.”

“She's a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one woman card catalogue for useless knowledge.”

• Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

I first read this novel in the fever dream that is first child postpartum (I admitingly planned this and I don’t recommend it). One of my favorite things to do is read a novel and then read earlier short story collections by the same author. You can often trace initial ideas and characters back to their origins and see how things eventually matured. The same goes for Wise Blood.2

“Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

“Jesus died to redeem you,” she said.
“I never ast him,” he muttered.”

• Children of Men by PD James

This is a great Advent read. What if humanity was on the brink of extinction and reproduction was no longer possible? What would our values be if there was no future to live for or anything to leave behind? And how would the rumor of one child being born reshape everything?

“Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.”

“Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.”

PS- Here is a wild real life version of Children of Men- the first child in 30 years born in an Italian village.

Non-Fiction:

• Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What it Means by Hawon Jung

This book is still stuck in my mind. And remains ever-relevant as the crisis South Korea (and increasingly our own country) faces regarding gender, family, and work continues to play out.

• What We Remember Will Be Saved: A Story of Refuges and the Things They Carry by Stephanie Saldana

Read this for the lovely local book club I am a part of this spring. It is primarily accounts of Iraqi and Syrian refugees 10-15 years ago but I couldn’t help but think of Gaza as I was reading it. My biggest take away was a deeper understanding of how important place and land are to identity and culture. It’s hard for us as Americans to imagine just how devastating it is to be uprooted from the place your family has lived in for thousands of years (or to see it destroyed). So it’s easy to say “No big deal, just make a home in the Netherlands or wherever.” But it is a huge deal. How one restarts and continues culture while still longing for home in a new and strange place is a big part of each story recounted here.

• Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert

Still thinking about this one too. This book was similar to Peggy Orenstein’s 2016 work. I first encountered that book as a 24 year old and nothing had quite explained my experience and the experience of women I knew quite like it. Orenstein embeds herself on college campuses and records the stories of 70 girls. Girl on Girl takes the historical angle, goes back even further, and traces trends in art, fashion, and pop culture to show the ways in which all of this has influenced our everyday experiences and how we think about the body, sex, and beauty.

Theology

I didn’t read any large theological works this year. Not because I didn’t have questions I was exploring, but mostly because sometimes you just need a year off of heavy theology.

• The Flourishing Family: A Jesus-Centered Guide to Parenting with Peace and Purpose by David Erickson

I will admit, this was the first parenting book I had ever read (besides No Drama Discipline). I usually avoid Christian parenting books but this one looked promising and was refreshingly grace and gospel centered. It also ended up being a great companion read to No Drama Discipline. So many good things in here about seeing your children as image bearers (and first and foremost, “your neighbor,” as Jen Wilkin says) and the goal of discipline being formative, not merely punitive. If you are going to read one parenting book, this would be a good one.

“Until we are willing to see our children as who God made them to be, we will never treat them the way God calls us to. If our first thought about our children is that they are a hassle or manipulative, we are not seeing them as God does. We can acknowledge the challenges of raising children while still recognizing that they are made in God’s image and profoundly loved by Him.”

• The Remarkable Ordinary and Whistling in the Dark by Frederick Buechner

Buechner reminds me so much of Fleming Rutledge in the way he sees the world and how the church is situated in it. He has an ability to cut through the cultural malaise and bring the gospel front and center to our disillusionment and dismay. His writing is so solid but every page or so there is a sentence that is wildly poetic.

“Knowing that even though you see only through a glass darkly, even though lots of things happen - wars and peacemaking, hunger and homelessness - joy is knowing, even for a moment, that underneath everything are the everlasting arms.”

“If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.”3

“We believe in God when for one reason or another we choose to do so. We believe God when somehow we run into God in a way that by and large leaves us no choice to do otherwise.”

TV/Movies

• Hamnet

I get the critiques that is is perhaps just grief for grief’s sake,4 but seriously, go cry for 2 hours in a theatre with a group of strangers and be a better person because of it. This is a beautifully made film (think Terrance Malick style) and the inclusion of more actual Hamlet quotes in the film fills in for a lot of the ways the characters in the book process grief and loss.

• Pluribus

I’ll sign on for anything involving Vince Gilligan or Vince Gilligan AND Rhea Seehorn. And nothing says Christmas Eve like a series finale.

Looking forward to:

• Wuthering Heights

Look, I know this probably isn’t going to be true to the novel. But we have some very earnest and true to the book film adaptations already. I am hoping this is a fresh take on a weird and wild book that doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. So maybe we should lean into the trashy romance novel aspects of this because perhaps that’s what Emily Bronte would have wanted? Or maybe this will just be garbage filmmaking. We shall see!

• A new Mumford and Sons album!

All the millennials shall rejoice and be glad. The Spotify preview seems to suggest that this is a return to their earlier style. But do we dare to dream?

• Other books on my 2026 to-read list:

  • The Undoing of Death, Fleming Rutledge- this will be my theological book for the year, I feel

  • Land, Maggie O’Farrell- Maggie O’Farrell takes on the potato famine?!

  • Exit Party, Emily St. John Mandel- Feels like it has been longer than four years since the last book but it’s been a long four years!

  • From Genesis to Junia: An Honest Search for What the Bible Really Says About Women in Leadership, Preston Sprinkle- I have been listening to Theology in the Raw interviews for two years now around this topic as Preston has researched and written this forthcoming book and I am so looking forward to reading it.

  • Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir, Amil Niazi. If you haven’t encountered Niazi’s articles on The Cut, here is a good summary of this book. I am super interested in this work (coming 1/6) because it seems to ask the same questions that Ambition Monster and Careless People did. In our post-COVID work at home world, we are finding “leaning in” to actually be impossible. So what does it looks like then to balance ambition, creativity, and motherhood?

Life

For a more “family Christmas letter” style reflection, see Isaac’s blog.

• Being Outside

Our three kids still fit on the bikes so riding all around town is a several times a week occurrence.

• Traveling 

We hit new milestones by taking a week long east coast road trip. We went to PA, NYC, and back to DC. The kids walked and walked and it felt like we entered a new phase of parenting to enjoy exploring cities as a family. We also traveled to the Baltic States (without children) as a part of a study abroad trip with college students and faculty friends. Looking forward to more family road trips and currently brainstorming another trip to get us back to Europe (for educational purposes, of course).

• Homeschooling

I am extremely fortunate to have childcare options at the university and the twins are thriving there. This was a big shift for us, but has allowed a few mornings a week to homeschool E for K5. He is a homebody (COVID baby…) and is loving the quiet and slow days we spend together learning and exploring the world. Some homeschool mom I met at an art class was bewildered when I explained how I teach part-time, homeschool one kid, and have two others in day-care. However, I am so thankful for the gift that this is.

• Settling In, Writing, and Beyond

2025 was a year of settling in, and noticing. And no longer being afraid. After living in the city we always thought we would pour our hearts into for nearly ten years, we moved down south three years ago. 2025 was the first year that I felt ready to open my heart and put down roots. It was also the first year where I had any emotional or spiritual bandwidth to consider what it would look like to lean into this season and place with purpose.

I have always written. My parents both have degrees in mass communication so learning to write well was naturally a part of our education, for which I am very grateful. I spent some years ghost writing a weekly blog for a church but never thought my voice was one that needed to be heard. Maybe I was also a little afraid of my own ideas and questions and how they would be received.

To put ideas out into the void and have them received and shared has been one of the most unexpected and freeing things I have known. It has been a gift to return to writing this year. Not only the process of writing (which I enjoy) but the thinking and noticing that a practice of writing involves. In attempting to notice things in my daily life and themes in my own story, my attention has shifted and my anticipation of how and where God will show up has heightened.

In this season of unknowns, joy, and sadness, I pray this is a year where we can all look ahead with anticipation that God is here among us and will continue to show up, even in the mundane and most unexpected ways. Thank you for going along with me on this journey- for your encouragement in reading, sharing, and commenting.

Here is to more noticing and sharing in 2026.

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

–Frederick Buechner

Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

Family Christmas Album, The Oh Hellos. This has been a staple for almost 15 years around here. Another glorious throwback to the Noisetrade days, this is a lovely set of classic Christmas hymns in that wonderful 2010 style all millennials still dream about. It’s really best taken in from beginning to end, so like Handel’s Messiah, pull up a chair and get some tea ready to enjoy.

El Niño, John Adams. Ok maybe not for everyone, but we are music nerds. My children have grown to tolerate this, so a real win! Maybe just try The Magnificat?

Songs for Christmas, Sufjan Stevens. Just the classics, you know?

Christmas, Sandra McCracken. We had the privilege to see Sandra perform a one man show for this album’s original tour back in December 2019. The rest of her band came down with illness (we should have all seen this coming…) but she played on, alternating between guitar and piano sets like a total boss. It was a true highlight as the gloom of 2020 rolled in.

Mere Fidelity, The World is the Wrong Shape for Women, with . It happened! One of my favorite writers/thinkers came on Mere Fidelity to talk about one of my favorite topics! If you loved Leah’s latest book, The Dignity of Dependance, or if you have yet to read it, this is a great overview and conversation about the topics related to Leah’s work.

Current Reading

For the Time Being, A Christmas Oratorio, WH Auden. It’s been a few years since I have read this (and by *this* I mean the critical edition edited by the one and only Alan Jacobs). Returning to it has been fun. I am finding it not as inscrutable as I did the first time (maybe I have read enough TS Eliot since 2019 to catch all of Auden’s allusions to his poems?) but I do understand why when Benjamin Britten received this when he asked Auden to write a libretto, he was dumbfounded. There are some wonderful moments. Joseph is a kind of 1920’s gentleman on the town, Caesar is Modernity, Herod and the three wisemen and provide much needed comic relief (“The weather has been awful, the countryside is dreary”). This really is a masterpiece.

That after today

The children of men

May be certain that

The Father Abyss

Is affectionate

To all Its creatures,

All, all, all of them

Run to Bethlehem

-from “The Vision of the Shepherds”

Workhorse by Caroline Palmer. Somehow, I am a total sucker for any memoir or novel about some poor woman in early 2000’s trying to make it in NYC publishing or break into the caste system that is NYC hustle culture. In fact, this should just be its own genre (throw Mad Men into the mix and maybe it is!). This work reminds me a lot of Ambition Monster, which I also loved. A friend described this book as “The Devil Wears Prada meets The Talented Mr Ripley” and I could not agree more.1

Children of Men by PD James. This is my Die Hard- Children of Men is a Christmas movie. I heard that the book contains even more explicitly religious images and themes so decided it was the perfect Advent read.

“I don’t think He bargains.”
“Oh yes He does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He’s supposed to he just. If He wants belief He’d better provide some evidence.’
“That He exists?”
“That He cares.”

We are Created for Good- A Wicked Movie Review by Amy Peeler. I wrote about Wicked in the best of 2024 last year, but this was such a refreshing take and really cuts through a lot of evangelical slop reviews of the film. Much like her Barbie Movie review, Peeler exalts the ways in which the film points to us as image bearers, specifically in how we are made for relationship and goodness. The original book is political. The musical, and now the movie also makes political statements (and these are well worth thinking long and hard about). But like the book, the film also makes theological claims. We are created for goodness, love, and community. The main characters grow and change in this year’s sequel and find community and the beauty of love and self-sacrifice as they pursue truth and goodness.

As our Creator, Incarnate redeemer, Advocate, and friend, the Triune God believes the best about us, and not just as a hunch but because this is the truest thing about us. We are created good for good. That truth is made evident to us through worship and the Word, in quiet moments of prayer, and through inexpressible encounters at his table. We often also need to hear this truth from the mouth of another human. This isn’t a design flaw; it is an advantage. God planned for us to need each other, to transform and be transformed by our friends.

Current Resources

Not Another Capitalist Christmas series, . This homemade gift guide in part 3 is lovely. Break the mold and give something to someone you made with your own hands and stick it to Big Commercial Christmas.

Another, more compact, Advent book guide by . Some great resources for devotional literature here as well.

Gifting Plough or mag subscriptions. We enjoy these publications so much every year and have loved sharing them with others.

NYTimes Chocolate Babka. I know the trader joe’s chocolate babka is honestly, really close to this recipe, but why not spend two days dedicated to baking this holiday delight? It has been a tradition my sister and I have shared on and off throughout the years and 2025 may be the Christmas to bring it back.

Knit Santa Beard. My 5 year old has worn this everyday since Thanksgiving. Best 30 minute knitting project to date

Happy Christmas!

In Summary:

The Word become flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not touching. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God….. who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.” Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.2

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Adults are not so different than children. We, too, make meaning and identity out of our lives by shaping circumstances, pain, suffering, joy, and grief into a narrative that makes sense. Politics, religion, relationships- all of these things are built on narratives that attempt to tell us who we are, where we are going, and how we can find meaning along the way.

As Christians, we believe that God also loves stories. So much so that he has given us a book. The past few years I have come back around to reading the Bible, not as a book of commands or systematic doctrine, but like literature- a story. And just like all other stories, this Story is where we find out who we are and specifically, how we fit into God’s grand narrative of redemption. But this year, as I read and reread Christmas books, I can’t help but think what an odd story the Incarnation is. As rote as it can be, it still strikes me as so bizarre. So unexpected. So upside-down.

A young girl is chosen and chooses to bear life1. A union of two people begins in scandal, and a journey to Bethlehem. A savior is born among animals. The first to hear the news are the lowliest of the low, shepherds. All the while, God is appearing to people in dreams, and delivering messages by way of angels. Something new is happening. And God is using the poorest and humblest things of the world to accomplish it.

In her essay, Magnificat, Joelle Chase reminds us that this pattern of using the weak and broken things of the world is actually a thread woven throughout all of Scripture. It is in fact the way God prefers to work:

It seems to be the clearest pattern in Scripture, particularly in Jesus’ life. God is persistently coming to people in slavery, poverty, homelessness, prison, and death, while making foolish and ridiculous the wisdom, strength, and wealth of the upper crust. The mystery of God becoming human through a humble young woman and a baby in a manger is an echo of this truth. Emmanuel-God is with and in our earthy, fully human existence.2

We are at our core, profoundly broken and weak. God coming in the flesh meant that Christ would identify with this very weakness. This thing we think holds us back as humanity, our very embodiment in all its neediness and dependence, is what God himself takes on. He doesn’t come in some angelic or ghostly form. He doesn’t even show up as a fully grown man. He starts as an embryo. In the darkness of a womb, God comes to us as one of us.

And the older I get, the more I am drawn to this detail of the story: Jesus didn’t despise physicality. Birth and embodiment aren’t things sidestepped by the Godhead. Embodiment is central to the story of redemption and unites body and spirit in holy union. Kat Armas puts it this way: “Birth is its own liturgy- wholly material and wholly spiritual, a reminder that flesh and spirit were never meant to be separate.”3

This common human experience is elevated in the Incarnation. As Anne Riddler says so beautifully in her poem, Christmas and the Common Birth, “Christmas declares the glory of the flesh.” And yet, we are so quick to disregard our own embodiment. To downplay the goodness of this flesh and bone. We long to transcend the physical. And yet, God not only calls this body good, but takes it on Himself. Forever. He entered a woman’s body, affirming the beauty and dignity of Mary as mother and woman. She becomes a literal temple, physically bearing the Savior.

So what does this have to do with Advent? Advent is a time of waiting, much like seasons of pregnancy and birth. Pregnancy is a bit of a microcosm for all of life: we enter this world in extreme vulnerability and neediness, and we exit this world the same way. We can pretend that we can disregard this frailty, but birth, like death, puts it front and center.

Pregnancy also puts a woman at enormous risk. Humanity is naturally vulnerable, but carrying life puts us all the more in harm’s way. Even for those who will not bear children, Advent is a reminder of patient waiting and hope, even in uncertainty and darkness. We place ourselves into the story of the Incarnation and wait, as Mary did, in patient hope and expectation. As Mary waited for the fulfillment of her Magnificat in the birth of her Son, so too do we wait:

“Descent into darkness is necessary to all life, to transformation and to fresh, new revelations of God. Even in darkness, something is forming. We recite the promise of Messiah’s coming, remembering the months of gestation preceding Jesus’ birth. We declare, “This is our God—the One who scatters the proud, puts down the mighty, exalts the lowly, fills the hungry, sends the rich away empty, creates beauty and brilliance within our womb, mothers the world with fierce and tender love.”4

Like much our embodied experiences, birth removes self from the center. There are unknowns and details that can’t always be planned perfectly. Birth is effort and pain,5 as is living all of life. Motherhood and parenting are often acts of desperation, an “annihilation of self.”6 But paradoxically, the result is freedom. Freedom from self. Freedom to love and give and give again. Freedom to love and care for those who depend on us and in turn, admit our dependance on others.

Birth makes an inconvenient demand;

Like all holy things

It is frequently a nuisance, and its needs never end;

Freedom it brings: We should welcome release

From its long merciless rehearsal of peace.7

Like all of life, we are free now because this Savior was born to love and serve both neighbors and enemies alike, to become participants in the upside-down kingdom. The humble and the needy are welcomed in. The story of the Incarnation is our story, in all of its topsy turvy ways.

This year, I see that my body is good and is necessary. Just as it was for Christ. I see that somehow apart from an incarnate body, the redemption of the cosmos could not have happened. As much as I want to escape my body, with all of its pain and sadness, Jesus himself came in a body. He came not to rescue me from my body, but to redeem it. Advent is a time when we remember that even now, he comes to walk alongside us. In all of the joys, sorrows, sickness, and brokenness of embodied living, he points us ahead to a time when all will be made well.

We have become partakers of the goodness and grace of God because of this first coming of Christ and wait for the renewal of all things. And just as now, we will not be disembodied spirits serving a spirit savior. No, we will live as embodied and perfected creatures and serve an embodied and forever perfect Lord. By choosing to take on flesh and be born of a woman, Christ dignifies the common human experience of birth and embodiment. It is in our embodiment that we can know Christ and God has made himself known to us in Christ. Eugene Peterson puts it like this:

“When God chose to reveal himself to us completely, he didn’t do it in words or ideas. He became flesh and lived in the neighborhood with us. Which means that our bodies are capable of receiving God and participating in God, not just with our minds or our emotions or our ‘hearts’ as we sometimes say, but with these actual flesh-and-blood, skin-and-muscle bodies”8

During this season of Advent we place ourselves not only in the story of the Nativity and identify with the longing, joys, and fears of Mary, but we rejoice in the Savior who entered our world. He became one of us and elevates our embodied, creaturely state. Advent is about remembering that “by God’s birth, our common birth is holy.”9

In Summary:

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see

Hail the Incarnate Deity

Pleased as man with men to dwell

Jesus, our Emmanuel10

For other posts in the advent series, see here:

Advent and Auden

Advent and John the Baptist

Advent and Flannery O’Connor

Advent and Annunciation

Advent Darkness and Hope

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“ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.”

In this, we identify with those who longed for the initial Advent of Messiah. They awaited a promised King who would destroy their enemies, and rule and reign in a restored creation. They longed for all things to be made right and for the nations to stream into the city of God. A perfect communion with God and conformity to His ways and words, just as Isaiah expresses in Is. 2:1–5, are what we long for as well.

A theme woven throughout this time of Advent is eschatological hope- the tension between the already and not yet, the breaking in of the kingdom and its awaited consummation. We so often look to a future dwelling place called heaven but forget that what we ultimately should long for is the hope of resurrection and the consummation of all things when Jesus returns and puts all things right- in physical bodies, in a physical new heavens and earth. This isn’t just a far off event we hope will happen. Jesus’ first coming- his Incarnation, death, resurrection and current rule-have implications for us here and now. Advent considers all of these things.

There is great darkness and Advent is a time to sit, wait, and consider it. But then the lights come on. We remember that the world is on its way to being set right because Jesus came the first time. It’s finished. We may not see the effects of this fully now, but it is a reality that wasn’t before Christ’s Incarnation and the power to put all things to right has been secured. When he returns, all his enemies will be placed under his feet (even death), and the justice, beauty, restored relationships, and fellowship with God we long for will be made perfect. As we long for perfect communion with God and conformity into the restored Image of God he is remaking in us, we look to this future with hope.

This One who promised and came before, is coming again. And in this time of Advent, he continues to come. Heaven and Earth were made to overlap, and someday they will finally “completely, utterly, and gloriously”1 fit together as one.

“Christiantiy is all about the belief that the living God, in fulfillment of his promises and as the climax of the story of Israel, has accomplished all this–the finding, the saving, the giving of new life–in Jesus. He has done it. With Jesus, God’s rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut.”2

For last year’s advent series, see here:

Advent and Auden

Advent and John the Baptist

Advent and Flannery O’Connor

Advent and Annunciation

And keep reading this month for more!

In Summary:

What is the great lesson of Advent? It’s the many-sided truth of God’s perpetual coming to his creatures in secret and humble ways; the nearness of his saving care and energizing grace. “Have you not heard his silent steps? He comes, comes, ever comes.”

-Evelyn Underhill3

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Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

Peace to All Who Enter Here, Vol 2, Josh Garrels. I always love new Josh Garrels music (going back to the old NoiseTrade days). The reworking of “Oh Love That Will Not Let Me Go” is lovely and honestly so hard to do well. And “Come Ye Sinners” is also perfect.

View Him prostrate in the garden;

On the ground your Maker lies;

On the bloody tree behold Him;

Sinner, will this not suffice?

LUX, Rosalia. I know all the kids are into this (which is a blessed miracle considering this is the farthest thing from the dopamine high inducing pop that has been standard in the year of our Lord 2025). But this album is brilliant. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and sung in 13 languages, Rosalia (a trained flamenco singer from Spain) explores themes of religion, suffering, love, and believe it or not, embodiment! Pitchfork calls it an “operatic lament for a new generation”1 and I can’t help think of Freya India’s writing about how young women are coming to find the limits of sex and pleasure as an end unto itself. It also makes me think of the ways in which a disembodied faith leads to questioning or disillusionment (see Haley Baumeister’s latest here).

Inspired by mystics and poets like Teresa de Jesus, Sun Bu’er, and Hildegard Von Bingen, Rosalia doesn't offer many solutions but is asking some of the right questions and even searching in some of the right places. Lyrically this may not be for everyone (explicit language warning) but I do find her attempts at finding meaning fascinating and quintessential of a younger generation. The way she finds her answers in Catholicism is also a picture of the draw to a more embodied and iconoclastic Christianity younger people worldwide are experiencing2. Lots to think about here.

Who could come from this earth
And enter heaven and return to earth?

Each vertebra reveals a mystery
Pray on my spine, it’s a rosary
Through my body, you can see the light

His love is my love. His blood is my blood. The only way to save us is through divine intervention. The only way I will be saved is through divine intervention.

Understanding Emerging Sexual Identities with Mark Yarhouse, Theology in the Raw. I appreciate the way this conversation modeled grace and curiosity. Yarhouse is particularly interested in helping pastors or youth group workers faithfully engage with kids who are exploring LGBTQ and beyond identities. He is a thoughtful researcher and shows how to engage in conversation with love and interest while also recognizing how many of the + identities Gen Z has latched differ from the standard LGBT identities. The part about the limits our current data on sexual attraction was fascinating (especially how so much of the research has been so male centric and female desire is still a Wild West of research yet to be explored). Just good stuff here all around to consider.

How Do We Change Our Minds? Mere Fidelity. I am very glad Mere Fidelity is back and as much as I love Derek and Alastair, I do miss Matthew Lee Anderson. But this was a great discussion in how to be curious and engage in good faith conversations with people who believe differently. There were also some good thoughts on how to change your mind in a healthy way (as in, change and growth is a good thing, but radicalization is not). I kept thinking back to my senior year of college when the University chancellor told us essentially, “This is it- who you are now is who you will be for the rest of your lives so you better get it right.” Which was honestly terrifying and I am VERY thankful I am not the same person I was at 22. And didn't have to get it right (whatever that means).

Current Reading

The End of the Affair, Graham Greene. Inspired by this wonderful post on novels that go along with the church calendar, I am reading through works listed here that I have yet to explore. I read Greene’s (no relation to me by the way) novel The Power and the Glory last year after putting it off for a while and it absolutely gutted me. This one has some of the same qualities I appreciate about his writing but is a very different work. I love the Til We Have Faces style discourse with God. It is honest and raw. And a great segway into the Advent season.

“It’s strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.”

“You were there teaching me to squander, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for Pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace-he needs it more.”

The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life by Frederick Buechner. I have long enjoyed snippets of Buechner when his quotes appear in our church’s weekly liturgy so thought it was time to read something of his. This book is a compilations of lectures and essays with chapters like, “The Subterranean Grace of God” and “Holy Moments.” It reminds me a lot of The Quotidian Mystery or Liturgy of the Ordinary in its attempt to help us notice the holy in the everyday. Side note: I was excited to see Rachel Joy Welcher announce that she is working on a book in this vein that includes thoughts about motherhood, worship, and the ordinary.

“I did not see anything because I was so caught up in an inner dialogue. So, stop and see. Become more sensitive, more aware, more alive to our own humanness, to the humanness of each other.”

“And it seems to me the world is a manger, the whole bloody mess of it, where God is being born again and again and again and again and again and again. You’ve got your mind on so many other things. You are so busy with this and that, you don’t see it. You don’t notice it.”

Imagining Life Outside of the Machine, Mere Orthodoxy, Jeff Bilbro. The day has finally come when Mere O has arrived on Substack and all my favorite things are in one place. This was a great review of Paul Kingsnorth’s latest splash (which I hope someone will gift me for Christmas this year). Kingsnorth’s recent conversion is a wild story and highlighted in this incredible essay. I don’t know the limits of his thinking on this topic, but I think his take is well worth paying attention to, especially if like me, you love Wendell Berry and also wonder how we can live as faithful, embodied creatures in a world increasingly committed to a rise in dehumanizing technology, capitalism, and nationalism.

In Summary:

“This, in practical terms, is the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particularly little fires—fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true.” - Paul Kingsnorth

Current Resources

Spreadsheets for Christmas gifts. I have left Amazon prime in the dust this year and it’s been a joy to rely more on local stores and obscure sites for fun gift ideas. Maybe 2026 is the year I will come crawling back to the drop shipped from China life, but we will see.

This ultimate children’s Christmas book list from . I enjoyed reading through selections from her children’s picture book directory this year with my 5 year old as well.

This pecan pie recipe. I make it every year and it never disappoints3

Happy Thanksgiving! (a day early)

This week, I want to connect the “feminine vice of wokeness” language that Andrews uses to some current discussions about women in the American Evangelical church. (I won’t attempt a coherent definition of wokeness, since it’s really a word more about the “vibes” than anything else). There are important and interesting overlaps and I think that Sargeant’s solutions can offer the church a way forward as well. So here we go!

We have several thousand years of Greek philosophy-infused views of women and the female body to sort through, even as modern evangelicals. Women have gone from being responsible for the fall of humanity due to their innate lack of morality and ease of manipulation, to the Victorian saviors of mankind and the only virtuous sex. And here we are today, back to woman as manipulative and solely responsible for the leftward drift of the church.1 Historically, there have always been more women in the global church than men so it’s not like the “great feminization”2 of the church is a new, novel thing. But some more recent discussion has placed the blame on women in the evangelical church for wanting more or infecting their inherent vice into the church itself.

Something I am very curious about is how the narrative Andrews portrays about women has crept into the American evangelical church, particularly in conservative Baptist and CREC spaces. For several years now, Joe Rigney (formerly of Bethlehem Seminary and now at New St. Andrews College and Doug Wilson’s flagship CREC church) has written and spoken about “the sin of empathy.” In Rigney’s mind, this is a distinctly feminine vice, a kind of uniquely feminine care and compassion gone off the rails that the women in your church may use to get you as a pastor to sin or sympathize with their concerns (regardless of the concern’s legitimacy).

Or worse, they may manipulate you into joining their supposed feminist, leftist crusade (a slippery slope that will lead to female ordination and beyond!). It creates an us-versus-them style church, with concerned congregants on one side and a pastor who refuses to be “steered” on the other. Hardly a healthy church model, but one of a tight hierarchy being maintained and everyone knowing their place. No problems happen here!

Conservative politics has even co-opted this idea for its own gains. Commentators and journalists Allie Beth Stuckey and Megan Basham have leveraged this same idea of toxic female empathy into book deals and speaking engagements at right-wing conferences. They, as women, routinely blame women for wokeness and the downfall of America. They are some of the only women regularly platformed at these events. One wonders if this is only because they are willing to tell the men in the room exactly what they want to hear.

Side note: Interestingly, Stuckey came under fire a few weeks ago after suggesting at a TPUSA event that young men lay off the porn. This opinion, seemingly uncontroversial at a conference hosted by a conservative organization, caused a mild internet firestorm. Some CREC affiliated pastors even demanded on X, “Where is her husband?!” Being the token lady in this crowd has its drawbacks, apparently.

Wokeness and Abuse in the Church

The idea (implicit or not) that women are a leftward force in the church has consequences down the line. Some in the SBC3 have downplayed the enormous scale of clerical sexual abuse within the convention. They claim that the scores of victims (mostly female) and the loudest voices calling for justice (also mostly women) shouldn’t be heeded because they are manipulating the men in charge and ultimately want to take control of pulpits. The tactic, then, is just to malign victims and deny that abuse has taken place at the scale at which it has been reported. Dealing with abuse would just be surrendering to “wokeness” since women’s voices and influence are a progressive force in the church. And women just want to take over and make you feel bad, right?

This is a wild response to “wokeness.” Thorough and cautious investigation of every allegation would be a reasonable response. It’s quite another to say problems don’t exist and female victims are manipulative liars gunning for control of institutions.

Abuse and racism and injustice are real. Denying or silencing the voices that call them to account won’t help the problem. It’s how we go about enacting change that will ultimately do good.

Of Virtues and Vices

At the core of both the Sargeant/Andrews debate and the recent rhetoric from the church is the idea that men and women have altogether different natures. Rigney portrays men as more “black and white” and “theologically rigid.” Women are the more caring sex. Therefore, they are more easily swayed on matters of morality because they will be tempted to care about others (and care for others never led to moral decisions, clearly).

Andrews also understands men and women similarly. She often cites a book (Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes by psychology professor Joyce Benenson) that lays out an old school evolutionary biology argument that men are warriors and women are worriers. Or put another way, men are good at ideas, debate, and resolving conflict and women are not so they revert to subtle and emotionally manipulative tactics.4

Rigney has a hard time coming up with examples of feminine virtues, or male vices for that matter. Andrews suffers from the same problem but is able to sum up male vice simply as, “testosterone-fueled behavior in the workplace.”5 Rigney likes to talk about how men are really good at protecting and leading but fails to admit that power and authority can be corrupting. Men wouldn’t have to get tough if women would just stay in their place, after all. The world Rigney and Andrews offer is one of men and women at odds with one another, a polarizing world where gender differences are so profound the only way to achieve peace is a strict hierarchy.

Wokeness and Dependence

Whether it’s a workplace, higher-ed institution, or church, wokeness can’t always rightly answer questions like, “What do I do with my grief?” or “How do I make this right?” But the fact that we as a society (and church) even now ask these questions when it comes to abuse or racism is a step in the right direction. Much like Rigney and Wilson, Andrews seems to advocate for a position that says “stop being needy and if you are hurt, we don’t want to hear about it.” But this response really is a masked laziness. Instead of facing the hard realities that people in institutions can and do harm others, it’s easier to place the blame on those who have been hurt, to double down and protect the institution at all costs instead of admitting failure. And even harder, to seek change and do right by those harmed. As Sargeant said in the debate, “How you put it right is not primarily through self-flagellation. It’s through actively doing good.”6

So is the neediness of women really to blame for society’s ills? Will reverting to 1950’s-era gender roles solve issues in the workplace or church? I doubt it. The way forward I think looks a bit more like what Sargeant suggests. It has to do with how we think about weakness and dependence.

What do we do with the weak? Is dependance really a defect or is it common to human experience? So common, in fact, that we shouldn’t just make provisions for it as if it is a back up plan, but should expect it and orient our society in a way that we can care and love well. Both women agree that the world as it is right now isn’t so accommodating to women. Andrews sees this as women’s fault (somehow by our nature we have just brought this on ourselves) but Sargeant sees this as something we as a society can change. In the church and beyond, dealing with abuse and injustice and making changes that allow both men and women to flourish and be heard and seen can go a long way in healing the gender divides we experience.

Instead of writing off empathizing with suffering or abuse as “wokeness,” what if we followed the example of Christ and entered into the suffering of others? As Dani Treweek wrote in her thorough review of Rigney’s latest book:

“If we accept that reason, truth, and justice stand in opposition to joining people in their suffering, what are we to make of the incarnation of Christ? Surely, the Word becoming flesh and making his dwelling amongst us (John 1:15) is the most profound act of empathy the world has ever known?”7

Entering into the suffering of others (or taking it seriously for that matter) doesn’t have to mean we leave truth, reason, or morality at the door. In fact, we follow the example of Christ who became God Incarnate and entered into our suffering, not only to identify with us, but to suffer. Not out of pity or guilt, but out of love.

There are no truly feminine or masculine virtues, just Christlike ones. As Sargeant said, “All men and women are called to faith, hope and charity. They’re all called to fortitude.”8 The way this fortitude expresses itself may change based on our state of life but as men and women (particularly in the church) our call is the same: to live out the love we have been shown. Wokeness in and of itself won’t solve the world’s problems. But incarnational love is a step in the right direction.

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Remember when the pagan philosopher Celcus bemoaned Christianity as the religion of women and slaves?

Word from the Bird

When Christianity was Pro-Woman, Pro-Child, and Pro-Slave

A while back I tweeted this…

Read more

5 years ago · 27 likes · 5 comments · Michael F. Bird

Andrews is a particular kind of conservative who laments the swing to “wokeness” institutions have faced in the last decade. This is to blame, she suggests, primarily because women have entered these spaces in historic numbers and have polluted them with their “feminine vices” of empathy, gossip, and untruthfulness. We women like to complain about and report injustice and discrimination, which has led to a kind of corruption of the courts (who have swung in favor of victims) and now the entire integrity of our legal system is at stake. Thanks, ladies. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent underlying logic here. If there is, the premises are so unpalatable she doesn’t dare state them clearly.

Due to their nature, women aren’t good at truth telling or problem solving, they can only “suggest or persuade.” The culture of wokeness we are steeped in now is entirely because women have entered the chat. Andrews says in her original piece, “All cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” Because of the influence of women, we now experience culture-wide wokeness, a kind of “failure to compartmentalize.” Our biggest problem as a society is that “no civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses.” But, unfortunately, “the problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.”

She does make some interesting points, to be fair. But a lot of the piece reads like a parody, or as a friend pointed out, a stunt. Is she really serious? There are obviously problems with institutions and our faith in them as a society really has shifted in the last decade. But is the nature of women to blame? I think the least satisfying thing about her argument is that it doesn’t really offer a solution. She speaks of going back to separate feminine and masculine work environments, of taking the “thumbs off the scale” and doing away with anti-discrimination laws that “requires that every workplace be feminized.” But what does that even mean? Is placing both genders in an office really the cause of these issues?

In her latest book, The Dignity of Dependence, Sargeant points out that the problem we have with women is their dependency. Because women are biologically life-giving, we are vulnerable. Pregnancy and childbearing place women closer to death than the average man. We cause trouble for employers when we go out on leave to have babies, or need childcare and flexible work hours. Or worse yet, insist that motherhood and career can function alongside each other.

Second wave feminism promised a world in which women could inhabit male spaces just fine, but the price to entry is fitting our bodies as best we can into a world still designed for men. This really isn’t a solution for women but asks that we trade our childbearing and care-giving for a seat at the table. But women aren’t just better men, and equality doesn’t have to mean interchangeability. “A feminism that fears acknowledging differences will be unable to advocate fully for women or children.”2 Because of this, the grand vision of second-wave feminism requires a world where women, children, the weak, and dependent are treated as collateral damage, or baggage we just quietly put away as a society (and not collectively seek to care for). Sargeant advocates for a world where dependence and the unique needs of women aren’t something we pretend aren’t a factor, but that we as a society seek to embrace. As she says, “vulnerability cannot be solved, it can only be shared.”3

Unlike Sargeant, Andrews doesn’t seem to have any positive vision to cast. Her argument against women and their neediness seems to be a slightly revamped version of Aristotle’s “women are deformed men” take. It’s not even as refined as Simone De Beauvoir’s “women should just be better men” solution. Andrews’s proposal of a return to gender segregated work spaces feels like a throw back to a Mad Men style office in which perpetually drunk male executives do whatever they please with the bodies of their female secretaries. And the secretaries don’t rat them out to the Title IX coordinator.

Is welcoming women, then, into previously male-dominated spaces a DEI conspiracy theory or a step in the right direction? As Rachel Darnall pointed out in her latest piece, “We’re all discovering something our grandmothers and great-grandmothers could have told us: even in the most progressive society, people look at men as a constant, and women as a variable.”4 Asking men to change their behavior is out of the question so the best way forward is just to remove the variable of women. Or for women to just be happy we have been given a spot and stop whining.

To conclude this first installment, Andrews seems to believe that women are a corrupting influence on institutions and should perhaps be kept out of them. The actual implications of her argument are very uncomfortable, however. So much so, that she doesn’t dare draw us to its logical conclusions. As Sophia Gilbert observes, “Andrews doesn’t propose any policy suggestions or alternatives to the Great Feminization, presumably because, as Matthew Yglesias has written, the only viable solution would be ‘widespread de-feminization, which would require massive cultural change and the rebirth of an incredibly oppressive and constraining set of social norms. And neither she nor her allies are willing to actually make the case for it, because it would be horrifying.’”5

Sargeant paints a picture of a world where men and women are different (or at least not interchangeable) but equal. The differences should be embraced and the world will be better for it. This would require a kind of social and moral revolution. One in which dependence isn’t demonized and caring for others isn’t seen as a less than dignified task. Only our autonomy, worship of productivity, and inability to see anyone’s worth beyond their utility stands in the way.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for part 2. I’ll write about how the “great feminization” theory has manifest itself in the evangelical church in recent years. And in the meantime, if you have solved feminism, let me know in the comments.

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Try It Again, Without the Women, Rachel Darnall

Rachel’s Substack

"Try it again, without the women."

“Did women ruin the workplace?” the New York Times asked earlier this month. The title (later changed to “did liberal feminism ruin the workplace?”) - framed a debate between Helen Andrews (in the “for” position) and Leah Libresco Sargeant (in …

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7 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Rachel Darnall