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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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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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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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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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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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

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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

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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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)

Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

John Van Deusen, As Long as I am in the Tent of this Body I Will Make a Joyful Noise. I normally can’t get into Christian music but this find via W David O Taylor is so good. Think Sufjan Stevens meets Andrew Petersen (especially on the track Jesus of Nazareth). By Gracious Powers is also a beautiful one, both lyrically and musically. And bonus surprise, if you grew up like me listening to every album Tooth and Nail records put out, Van Deusen is on their label!

The Shaggs, Philosophy of the World. I don’t know where we came across this first (maybe a theory professor in Isaac’s grad school) but for almost 10 years the tradition in our family has been to put this on as background music every Halloween. The track “It’s Halloween” is both brilliant and utterly mystifying. Most of the songs are in the same key and the drummer, singer, and guitar player are rarely in sync and often in different meters. I can’t quite tell if this album is brilliant or insane (wikipedia describes it this way: It has been described as both among the worst records of all time and a work of “accidental genius”)1. But with deep songs like “Things I Wonder” and “Why do I Feel?” along with songs about childhood such as “Who Are Parents?” and “My Pal Foot Foot,” there is truly something here for everyone. My children are obsessed.

Current Reading

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. All the trigger and content warnings in the world for this, but I loved this book. The main character and narrator is a twenty-something girl in 2000 NYC doing what everyone her age is expected to do, and yet is overcome with grief, depression, and the banality of pre-9/11 American optimism. Her solution is to sleep for a year, thanks to a cocktail of psychotropic drugs administered by a quack psychologist. The main conflict is her relationship with her only friend, Reta, who is handling grief in her own way. This is a work about hard things, but the beauty of living and loving, and how sadness makes the goodness of life brighter. And how being awake for it all is truly a gift.

On Contraception, Tradition, and the Wise(r) Use of Christian History by Andrew Koperski, Mere Orthodoxy. Bear with me as I get back on the Catholic Theology of Sex soapbox again for a minute. I am so thankful for this piece because it highlights a tension I find in Catholic thinking about sex and contraception. Besides NFP technically falling into the category of contraception (even if it is everyone’s preferred method), Koperski hits on a not so very often discussed tension between theology and church history.

He traces the idea that sex is primarily (and maybe only) for childbearing back to Augustine. I love Augustine, but man, I hope the guy was able to experience unbridled holy pleasure at LEAST ONCE in his life without feeling bad. So we all like to think this is a primarily a biblical argument for the main purpose of sex, but I think weighing it against what the early church fathers believed about men and women and embodiment (and all their hang-ups from the Greeks about the ickiness of the body and primarily women’s bodies…) is worth parking in mentally for a while. Help me out!

Rethinking Complementarity: From Stereotypes to Icons by Abigail Favale. I will always read anything Favale writes. Her book The Genesis of Gender was immensely helpful to me when I first started learning about the ways that Catholics understand sex, the body, and gender. And she really does represents the best form of “complementarity” in this latest piece.

A question that still remains in my mind is how do Catholics (or Catholic feminists, which I have immense respect for!) deal with the inconsistencies in this model (mostly based on the exceptional work of JPII) and church history? I am thinking mostly here of the Lateran Councils and later the Council of Trent. Priest celibacy is mainly based on the logic that contact with a woman’s body in an intimate way (even for JUST the purpose of creating life) cannot be mixed with handling the body of Christ (the eucharist). This seems really contrary to the beautific vision of JPII’s integral complementarity. More Aristotle than Bible. I will take any and all thoughts on this!

Men into the Breach, Leah Libresco Sargeant, Fairer Disputations.

“For men, just as for women, the world begins with the unasked-for and unearned gift of another’s body and love.”

“Family life is made up of the intimacy of mutual dependence, and trust built by seeing beyond our best and most polished selves”

The Dignity of Dependence has been a wonderful read and this second to last chapter of the book was one of the best. I’ll write a fuller review of the whole book next time.

In Summary:

“If we seek to remove all trouble or risk from our lives; if we opt for convenience, efficiency, and ease- if, in other words, we aim indiscriminately at the frictionless life- then we simultaneously rob ourselves of the real satisfactions and pleasures that enhance and enrich our lives” -L M Sacasas

Current Resource

Food Banks- if you or someone you know struggles with food insecurity and is anxious about the loss of SNAP benefits this month, here are a few resources that can connect you to help. Or if you are like me and swing weekly back and forth between anarchy (forget the government! we should just all pitch in and care for people) and American Solidarity party style socialism (we should still care for people, but the government should first and foremost prioritize caring for people), now is a great time to put political theory into action and donate!

Feeding America

United Way

No Kid Hungry

Miracle Hill- local to Greenville, SC

Harvest Hope- local to Greenville, SC

Happy Halloween! (a day late)

Churches all over the nation will be throwing harvest festivals as a Christian alternative to Halloween, the Christian alternative to harvest festivals.2

Flannery O’Connor and Lent

I have written before here about how O’Connor’s writings are such a beautiful Advent pairing. However, recently I have been attending a “literature and faith” book club at church (which honestly is a dream come true) and reading a Flannery O short story every week during Lent has been so life giving.

We started with Revelation and are ending with Parker’s Back. Every story contains characters we all despise and yet identify deeply with. We are convicted by their pride, prejudice, self-centeredness, and inability to love and see others for who they are. Flannery exposes the darkness of the world, but she also helps us peer into the darkness of our own souls.

She is complex. Was she merely critiquing the racist, Christ-haunted South she knew so intimately or was she able to create characters so prideful and blind because she herself knew what this pride and blindness felt like? We all need an action or moment of grace to draw us into a deeper understanding of our own sin yes, but more so, to the depths of God’s mercy and love. Flannery points us so well to the questions of Lent and the hope of the resurrection.

Parenting and the Way of Jesus

I had never read a parenting book of any kind in earnest until last year. I figured this year would be a good one to start. And good grief, what a world. I am fairly familiar with the Evangelical Christian Parenting industrial complex but returning to some of these books this year with a different perspective has been hard, but also really helpful.

I think most authors and parents who read these books have the same goals. We all want to raise emotionally healthy and mature kids who are competent at life and love Jesus. But as I have explored more of who God is and what grace is, I have found these books often times at odds with what the nature of the Gospel is.

Finer discussions could be had about how these book view things such as the sufficiency of scripture, how depraved is totally depraved, and whether or not biblical counseling techniques work on small children. Not to mention methods of consequences. But I have been thinking a lot about the place of mercy and grace in parenting.

One book I recently read boldly stated that the main point of Jesus’ interactions with people in the Gospels was to show them their sin. And in a way this is true. But reading through the Gospels, I see far more people coming to Jesus in their brokenness and desperation (and yes, like the woman of John 8, sin) and Jesus doesn't respond with a wagging finger, but grace and forgiveness. He is unbelievably patient with the disciples, who just can’t see that he isn’t going to lead them to victory over Rome and yet, he saves his harshest critiques for the hypocritical, legalistic religious leaders.

My biggest fear as a parent is that my kids would walk away from their childhood missing the Gospel, that they would only know God as an angry cosmic judge waiting around with a checklist to see if they can get it right and not like the good father in the Prodigal Son parable who weeps over them in joy when they come to him. Consequences and boundaries are necessary. Sin is real, yes, and so is grace and mercy. And it is possible to create good behavior and yet miss the Gospel completely.

PS- I found a beautiful article by one of my favorites, Gretchen Ronnevik, that tackles this exact question of balancing law and gospel in parenting.

Snapshots of Life Lately

husband got a new camera

twins turned two, miraculously

we had a stray rooster for a night and day until a cat carried it off

Current Listening

Theology in the Raw, episode 1266, Understanding Christian Universalism with Robin Parry. I am not a universalist. But this was an amazing interview and a great example of how to approach eschatology and how to hold a theological position with humility and a somewhat loose grip.

Theology in the Raw, episode 1268, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife with Beth Allison Barr. I kind of rolled my eyes when I saw this book was coming out and now I repent. Beth had some great things to say here about church cultures that rely heavily on the role of pastor’s wife, the unspoken expectations, and the tradition of unpaid women’s work in church in general. It’s a fascinating topic, regardless of what you think about women’s ordination. Wendy Alsup gave a generous review of the book from a healthy complementarian perspective here.

Current Reading

This article on the OG Christian Gentle parents. I kind of love the Quakers’ approach to setting and holding boundaries and also seeing their children as their neighbors and pointing them to lavish grace.

This article on the state of being a young woman in today’s world and the not so great Conservative response. I am not always a First Things fan, but I am always a Freya India fan.

Harmonium by Wallace Stevens- I always find poetry hard to get started, but am so glad I made the effort. Le Monocle de Mon Oncle is so far my favorite poem.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch- motherhood, political upheaval. Need I say more? Also it won the 2023 Booker Prize.

The Marriage You Want by Sheila Wray Gregoire and Keith Gregoire - I am so glad a marriage book this good exists now. Just so practical and makes the amazing point that regardless of what you believe about gender roles or marriage on a theological level, the most successful marriages all operate the same way: with high level of partnership and mutuality.

Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter- I just love Plough and everything they ever publish. A great little collection from a broad selection of Christian writers and thinkers.

Happy Holy Week!

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

-John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

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Goodreads tells me I read 46 books in 2024, so I'll just get right to it! Here are some of my favorites:

Fiction:

• The Posionwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Having previously read Demon Copperfield, I wanted to read another Kingsolver that had been on my list. This book was incredible, especially if you have any background in fundamentalism or know anything about 20th century missionary culture and philosophy. Christianity, capitalism, colonialism, and the effects of foolhardy foreign church planting all in one book!

• Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle (re-read) by Kurt Vonnegut

Just read Vonnegut, any Vonnegut. He plays to my most cynical sensibilities but I always enjoy his work. 

• ‘Til We Have Faces by CS Lewis

I have read this book 3-4 times now and it’s a work I try to return to every few years. I have found it reads differently each time I come back. This time, I was much less moved by all the neo-platonism than the first time I read it, but the contrast between the cult religion and the god Psyche and Orual finally encounter stood out to me. I also read it with this article in my mind and highly recommend the pair. 

• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

These works bookended my reading year and belong together because they overlap in many ways. Each book focuses on a faithful priest in Mexico- one a real, committed, archbishop, the other a “whiskey priest” who is the last one of his kind standing and may or may not turn himself in. Both books touch on the nature of faith, doubt, hardship, and failed expectations in ministry and life. 

• White Teeth by Zadie Smith

It had been almost ten years since my original read through of this book and I am still convinced it is entirely unfair that a 25 year old Zadie Smith produced a work of fiction this good on her first try. Having spent time in the west side of London this spring where the novel is set, I enjoyed the familiarity of the world of her characters. The author’s wit and characterization rivals Dickens. Because it had been so long since my initial reading, I was completely surprised by the brilliant ending that magically ties all the themes and characters together.

• NW by Zadie Smith

I wasn’t enjoying this one very much until I realized this book is Zadie Smith doing The Sound and the Fury and now I love it.

• Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar

A few of Akbar’s quotes and poems had appeared in sermons and liturgies this year at my church and since I try to read the most interesting looking books on the National Book Award short-list, I decided to give this one a try. I really love when poets write fiction and nail it. The story was beautiful and the poems featured throughout the book were equally as enjoyable. The end of the book features this beautiful quote on grace that I have thought about frequently since finishing:

What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you've moved through the world in such a way as to feel you've earned cosmic compensation, then what you've earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct.

Justice is just. There's an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good receive y reward. Grace doesn't work that way. It begins with the reward.

Goodness never enters the equation. 

• The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and Wicked by Gregory Maguire

You have to read these back to back. Preferably after seeing the new film adaptation. I was a bit tired of seeing reactionary tiktoks and TGC articles warning about the dangers of “self-actualization” portrayed in the film, so I decided to see and read it all for myself. The book has very little overlap with the musical/film and the musical/film did an amazing job at taking the main story arc and best bits about the characters and turning it into a compelling story. The first third of the book is a bit dull and focuses on Elphaba’s birth and parents’ backstory. The middle features her time at Shiz. However, it was in the last two sections that I actually started to enjoy the story. 

After discovering the truth that the Wizard of Oz is a complete evil sham, Elphaba becomes an activist for Animal rights. The last part of the book tells the story of Elphaba’s quest to seek forgiveness from the widow of her murdered lover and her grappling with the evils committed by those in power, the injustice of the world, and her own desire for meaning, and another world where wrongs are righted. The storyline of both the musical and the book have more in common with the parables of Jesus1 or the gripes of the minor prophets than any modern tale of “self-actualization” and is ultimately about what you do when you realize those in authority are evil, or white-washed hypocrites. 

“He lingered at the door, and said, "The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?"

"A little peace and quiet."

"No, really."

"She couldn't say forgiveness, not to Liir. ... she caught herself halfway, and in the end what came out of her mouth surprised them both. She said, "A soul -”

Theology

I somehow ended up reading quite a bit of Catholic theology this year, once again. Here are some highlights:

• Genesis of Gender by Abigail Favale

I first encountered Favale via Leah Libresco Sargent and this lovely panel discussion with everyone I hope to be like when I grow up. Favale is an important voice in this space because she has extensive background in gender theory and currently teaches it. Blended with her Catholic conversion, she now brings a deep understanding of the shortcomings of modern gender theory with the best of new catholic feminism. While I am still ambivalent about all aspects of natural theology (which is the main foundation of Catholic and evangelical thinking on gender and sex) I found this work insightful and well worth the read. I haven’t seen a Protestant thinker (besides maybe Matthew Lee Anderson) smart enough or positioned well enough to engage on this topic in such a meaningful way.

• Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

Reality is bathed in a certain kind of consciousness. We live in the continuous possibility of the knowledge of God. The will of God- what he would hope from all of us- is that we would know him.

I usually enjoy Robinson’s non-fiction work more than her fiction (I know, I am a monster) and this was no exception. Robinson is perhaps what some neo-reformed evangelicals would call  a “liberal Christian” but she is well versed in the Scriptures and engages well with the standard interpretations of the authorship and historicity of Genesis. The real magic of this book is the way Robinson lends her literary mind to making connections across stories and characters. She pushes back on an interpretation of the text that sees God as vengeful or reactionary in his dealings with mankind and paints God as an incredibly relational and patient Creator. 

Immutability as an attribute of the “living God” makes him inconstant, neither righteous nor compassionate. It makes him inconceivable as the image in which all of us are made because it places him wholly outside of our experience. It is not impassibility but God’s covenant faithfulness that allows humankind to be what we are, with all that this will entail. What kind of God would bear with us?

• The Crucified God by Jurgen Moltmann 

The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son. The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the death of the Son.  

This book deserves its own essay, but I will briefly write here how impactful this work has been on my thinking. I first encountered Moltmann in a work on classical theism that warned against his model of a “weak and suffering” God. But after moving away from a classical theism model of God myself the last few years, it made sense that the next step would be to just read Moltmann. Moltmann is writing to his German higher critic colleagues after World War II and is confronting two questions: 1. Is the historical Jesus worth defending? 2. What do we do now after the horrors we witnessed and committed? Where is God in this mess? 

Starting with a defense of the historic life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the bulk of the book advocates for a trinitarian understanding of the atonement and argues that the Christian story best answers the questions of theodicy, unlike atheism or theism. Moltmann closes the book with what is essentially liberation theology in seed form. It’s a work that takes on quite a bit but delivers beautifully. 

With a trinitarian theology of the cross faith escapes the dispute between and the alternative of theism and atheism: God is not only other-worldly but also this-worldly; he is not only God, but also man; he is not only rule, authority and law but the event of suffering, liberating love. Conversely, the death of the Son is not the 'death of God', but the beginning of that God event in which the life-giving spirit of love emerges from the death of the Son and the grief of the Father.

TV/Movies

• Silo, season 1

My favorite show this year by far was Silo on Apple+. Wading through season 2 now and it is just as riveting!

• Children of Men

My new favorite Christmas movie

• The Holdovers

Also going to be a new holiday tradition around here.

Life

• Being Outside

Having one year old twins and a four year old in 2024 has forced me outside quite a bit more than previous years. Walking, biking, sitting in the grass, going to parks, all of these things I now love and have grown to despise rainy days. 

• Traveling 

In the six years before children, we traveled quite a bit. Our trips were mostly up and down the east coast, but living in Baltimore meant that we had easy access to most other major east coast cities. This summer we spent 9 days in London and Cambridge sans kids and it was glorious. We still take family road trips but I am looking forward to more solo trips and the kids getting old enough to travel more broadly with us. And maybe actually enjoy all the museums we drag them to. 

Looking forward to:

• Severance, Season 2

It’s been a long wait, folks!

• A new Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel

Having read everything she has ever published, I am so excited for something new! March 2025

• Other books on my 2025 to-read list:

  • Why We Pray, John C. Peckham

  • The Flourishing Family, David and Amanda Erickson

  • Against Worldview, Simon P. Kennedy

  • The Undoing of Death, Fleming Rutledge 

Here’s to 2025.

“Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.”

from Ring Out, Wild Bells (from In Memoriam), Lord Alfred Tennyson