Home as a Sacred Space

When I think about self-care, I think about the things that I do: activities, how I spend my time, spiritual practices, how I deal with stress. Recently I have been thinking instead about how my space shapes and influences me. This pondering was sparked by My Hygge Home by Meik Wiking (hygge: pronounced hoo-ga). Hygge […]

Pastors are People Too: A Review of Welcome to Triumph

Have you ever gone to the grocery store wearing pajama bottoms, a tank top, with your hair a mess and run into a parishioner? Or worse a member of your church board? I know some clergy who do their shopping one or two towns over so as to avoid this type of awkward encounter. What […]

Book Review: Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

I started Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande two years ago, as the world still reeled from Covid-19. I was preparing for the Lenten season ahead of time. This book I hoped would be the perfect discussion and inspiration after surviving a global pandemic. Then, my father was placed […]

Reading Making Paper Cranes: Toward an Asian American Feminist Theology by Mihee Kim-Kort A Decade Later

As I was reading Making Paper Cranes by Rev. Mihee Kim-Kort, I found myself feeling simultaneously exposed and held by her analysis and critique of the “both and” world that Asian-American women live in. I regret that until this past month I have never read or been given a recommendation on a book solely based […]

Follow the Love: In The Neighborhood of Normal Book Review

Earlier this summer, inside my Consecrate Box (a ministry subscription service for women in ministry), I received a discount code for the book In the Neighborhood of Normal* by Cindy Maddox. I was instantly hooked by the summary:the protagonist is an 82-year-old woman, when does that even happen? Days later, I received my copy and utterly […]

Emily Rose, The Wailing, and Belief

From connecting with pastors over the years, I’ve discovered that there are a number of them out there who adore horror. While I haven’t been able to nail down a complete explanation for this phenomenon, I have found one recurring, resonant theme: belief.  Horror movies are obsessed with belief. It’s the concept we’re grappling with […]

Book Review: Rest is Resistance

Tricia Hersey didn’t discover rest as resistance when she had the time or the money to rest. She began resting as resistance in the midst of one of the busiest times in her own life while she was a seminarian and a single working mom. This she says is what we must all do in […]

Barbie: A Goddess Travels to the Underworld and the Necessity of Divine Paradox

Venus figurines are among the oldest pieces of art humans have created. Through them we can see that there is an ancient relationship between figurines and the elevation of some kind of ideal on behalf of a community or culture. Venuses in their many forms have represented the ideal feminine or feminine power throughout the […]

Fandom Religion

Sometime during the catastrophe that was 2020, my husband told me there was a new show we could watch. An American football coach goes to England to coach a professional soccer team. I wasn’t really interested in a sports show, but with a newborn at home and nowhere to go, I finally agreed to watch […]

Peace is a Practice (Book Review)

In her book Peace is a Practice, artist and musician Morgan Harper Nichols posits that finding peace is not finding a state of being but rather joining a river flowing all around us. Perhaps the reason we aren’t at peace is because we are so busy that we miss the river of peace flowing slowly […]