Our community group tried our hand at collective prayer-writing this past week. It was… interesting! And really fun, it turns out. We were missing three folks so we had four groups of three and each group blindly selected one of the following words. The first three are taken from Anne Lamott’s book on prayer — aptly titled Help, Thanks, Wow — and the fourth word was added by Jason and me (and it should be …
Blog Posts
I am still on a high from reading They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. I know I already told you about this book by Hanif Abdurraqib and I’m starting to worry that I am overselling it but I keep coming back to it again and again and again. I even decided to write my critical paper on it this quarter for grad school. It’s getting out of hand. The critical paper is on …
Want to see how your kid’s school measures up in terms of racial equity? A few weeks ago ProPublica released some amazing interactive maps that they built with the data that was released by the U.S. Department of Education in 2016. You can check out the composition of your school (or any school in the country) and take a look at how many teachers are chronically absent or inexperienced, how the disciple shakes out when …
For the roundup this week I’ve got one article from Time, one video and one poem. And each one comes with a bonus! 01 The article, in particular, has given me so much to think about. It brings to mind a lecture I heard by Dr. Willie James Jennings a few years ago where he used the term “fictive middle” to describe the same thing — the “common ground” that Jones writes about. Jennings pointed out …
My husband and I have often wondered what our lives would have looked like had we known that I had multiple sclerosis sooner. I’ve likely had it for about 12-15 years, based on our hindsight-is-20/20, oh-so-scientific calculations. What would have been different? What would we have changed? Would we have gotten pregnant when we did? Tried sooner? Later? Never? Would we have traveled when we did? Worried more? Worried less? These are impossible questions to answer. …
I know. It’s Thursday. Midweek is Wednesday. We can be flexible though, no? I’m known for being flexible. This week I’ve got one article, one podcast and one movie. 01 First up, the article titled A New Study Reveals Why Obama Voters Switched to Trump by Zack Beauchamp. I read Hillbilly Elegy and (part of) Strangers in Their Own Land after the election, in an attempt to understand the conversation surrounding, well, how the hell did this happen? Economic …
I’ve written about the Enneagram before (fine, more than once) and if you aren’t the type who likes to geek out about this kind of thing, this isn’t the post for you. But if you’re curious about the Enneagram and want to know more or figure out your number, read on (and tell me your number! I’m a 5, btw). We had a friend over for dinner last night and she told me that while she …
This week I’ve got one interview, one podcast and one link. If you want to look back at previous roundups, click here. 01 First up, the interview. This is an interview with Christopher Bell (with Aditi Shrikant) about censoring music for kids. Bell is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs focusing on how race, class and gender intersect with children’s media. Our boys are getting more and …
My boy is ten today. Double digits. Just a no-big-deal decade. Last night Jason went out for drinks with some friends so after tucking Gryffin in for his last night as a nine-year-old, I naturally fell into the vortex of birthday nostalgia and spent an hour scrolling through pixelated versions of my boy — from birth all the way up to… well, yesterday. The math is simple, really. First child + first iPhone = A …
For this week’s roundup, I’ve got two podcasts for ya and one musician. If you’re reading this in your email, I don’t think the players show up in the email format, so if you’d like to listen and you don’t use a podcast or music app, click through to the actual page and you can listen from there. 01 You made it weird with Pete Holmes. Jason and I are on a Pete Holmes kick …