It’s Travis Greene coming out of the speakers this morning, though his voice is nearly drowned out by the hum of conversations and shrieking toddlers sporting bunny ears and the scrape of metal folding chairs against the concrete floor in this repurposed warehouse-gymnasium-sanctuary. The pastor walks by and I can’t help asking, “Where’d you find... Continue Reading →
Once upon a time, I was a contented evangelical teenager. Well, not really – I never did get into the spirit of Dare2Share’s “Letters from Hell” sketch, and I felt vaguely guilty for thinking in private that Barack Obama and feminism weren't as bad as the other church people seemed to think. And then there... Continue Reading →
Today the aesthetic is salted caramel on my tongue and leaves that tease autumn on yellow-tinted edges; damp hair chilling the back of my neck to contradict the warm inner fuzz of a new sweatshirt; a bench painted in psychedelic colors while someone at the heart of the pedestrian mall behind me is playing a saxophone. A homeless man I have seen out here before is sitting on the edge of a cement retaining wall fifteen yards away. I know I will pass him when I get up to leave but I have nothing to give him.
Once we reached Maple Road on the way home from school in the seventh grade, I could close my eyes and feel each bump in the road and know exactly where we were at that moment, tracing the entire journey from the turn off of 44th to Maple, to Spruce, around the corner, two houses down, then the bump and rise of our driveway before Mom shifted into park and shut off the engine. "We're home." I knew. In that, our fifth year of living there, the Lynnwood house started to feel like home rather than the Edmonds duplex I'd spent over half of my life in. Now, as I do my own driving around Iowa City, I try to avoid the eyes-closed-road-bump test. But perhaps there are better metrics for determining when a place is starting to feel like home.
I have a confession to make: I used to think that white supremacy was passé. Yes, I knew that racism was still rampant in our country – I could probably even have held my own in a discussion on the effects of systemic racism on public education and incarceration rates. But I genuinely thought that... Continue Reading →
I made my first quilt when I was eight. I say I made; I did make quite a bit of it, but it was something of a training-wheels quilt, made with a lot of help from my mom and Sue, the family friend I've more or less adopted as grandma. I still remember the excitement of... Continue Reading →
I am learning not to be ashamed of my doubts. That's not yet an easy statement for me to make – after all, for most of my life Doubt was a sinister shadow lurking on the edge of my nightmares. What if I wake up someday and don't believe all this anymore? I wondered. Will I still... Continue Reading →
The Great Commandment is one of the most-quoted passages of Scripture in the church: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). This commandment is very closely associated with the... Continue Reading →
It's been forty-nine years since Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "We must face the sad fact that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing ‘In Christ there is no East or West,’ we stand in the most segregated hour of America." In an article called "Is God Colorblind or... Continue Reading →
Why I'm observing Ash Wednesday this year. (No, I'm not converting to Catholicism.)
Marginal Notes 