The Back Forty

Domesticated into fear and scarcity, Lent is our opportunity to recondition our hearts for the wild.

Giving Up the Freeze

How I found my cynicism and why I'm losing it for Lent

Creed and Crawdads | Race and Empire

I don’t set out each year with a reading “Focus.” For one, I’m terrible at focus. For two, I need freedom throughout the year to ebb and flow, to follow attractions to unexpected genres or titles. But when I see a year in books in reverse, I find

Nostalgia's Curse and the Art of Letting Go

Awards Season Media Roundup A Warning: This is all vaguely spoiler-y. I've been working on a summary of 2019 media—multitudinous as it was—for almost a month. For the past 10 years having small kids and a job with lots of travel sent me far afield from

A Place for Us

Discussing Disgust, the Problem of Roots, and Why We Keep Pushing Each Other Away The Short Version: Though we work hard to ignore it, we live in a constant state of Threat Alert. Our radars highly attuned to stuff that doesn’t belong or places where we feel unwelcome. The

The Wild Goat: Intro

In Mark 5, the Gospel tells a strange story, often glossed over by sermons. A demon-possessed man, living among tombs and showing signs of self-mutilation is liberated by Jesus. Cast out by his family and neighbors to live in the wild, the story rings of the Jewish rite of the

Wisdom and Light for All

A Poetic Restating of the First Chapter of the Gospel According to John In the beginning was WISDOM: WISDOM was alongside God and WISDOM was God. The One was alongside God in the beginning. ALL came into being because of The One, and NONE came into being independently. In The

Grace for the Demolition

“I’ve gone to church all my life, but so much of it doesn’t feel right anymore.” I drove west on the once rural road that stretches across the frontage of my home. The threat of progress had been brewing for a while, this time in the form of

Lent is a Rebellion

I didn’t know what Lent was until I was an adult. It just wasn’t a part of our tradition. For nearly 20 years the concepts of Mass, liturgy and Ash Wednesday were as foreign to me as a Muslim call to prayer, and just as frightening. Everyone I

No Why in Pain

The invitation of pain is to widen the circle. To radically include all that we’ve wished to ignore.