October 27, 2016 at 9:26 pm
It’s been a rough week. In the aftermath of a death, I have been trying to figure out how to put my feelings into words but I haven’t quite gotten there yet. So I’ve fallen back on poems and scripture, trying to use them to put my own feelings into words. First, Matthew Dickman’s poem, […]
October 18, 2016 at 11:16 am
At our weekly staff meeting, we did a guided meditation followed by a time of journaling. For my blog post this week, I want to share what I wrote, unedited and unpolished, from that brief moment of reflection: The thing about quiet spaces is, all it takes to destroy them is a single noise—the nervous […]
October 11, 2016 at 11:14 pm
For my blog post this week, I have several fragments—instances this week where I felt part of something bigger—a larger community, a movement, an experience beyond myself. They were meaningful to me and I hope they can bring some sense of meaning to you as well. Thursday: My professor lets us out of class early […]
October 3, 2016 at 9:59 am
I don’t want to write this blog post. When I went to bed last night, I had absolutely no ideas for my next post and hoped I would think of something to write about by the time I woke up. This morning, I still had nothing and the blank space on the page seemed to […]
September 25, 2016 at 2:09 pm
Over the past few weeks, as I’ve gotten back into classes, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the relationship between science and religion. In my anthropology class, we started by reading Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in which he argues against the idea that science will supersede religion (many scholars of […]
September 16, 2016 at 3:54 pm
I have a complicated relationship with ‘home’. It’s something I’ve continually struggled to define since my sophomore year of high school when my family moved to Holden Village, WA. A small intentional community grounded in the ELCA Lutheran tradition, Holden Village is a community that is constantly in flux, as most people stay for a […]
December 2, 2015 at 10:15 pm
Sometimes, it feels like the world is ending. Over the past few weeks as the bad news piled up every day, it certainly felt as if the world was devolving into chaos—massacres in Paris, bombings in Beirut and Baghdad, shootings at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs and a health center in San Bernadino, refugees continuing […]
November 11, 2015 at 9:20 pm
At Holden Village, the Lutheran retreat center where my family has lived for over five years, we join together in worship every day. As a result, we are able to explore a variety of styles and formats of worship services. One of these forms is ‘praying the headlines.’ Essentially, someone reads a few headlines about […]
November 4, 2015 at 8:07 pm
At Holden Village, the Lutheran retreat center where my family will live for 19 more days, we have a summer theme around which to organize our programming. Every Monday, our vespers service revolves around the theme and one of the visiting teaching staff will give a homily about that theme and the passage it comes […]
October 28, 2015 at 10:51 pm
When it comes time each week to write a blog post, I sometimes have so many words clamoring for space in my head that I have no chance but to lay them all out on the page, rearranging and editing until they read just right. But on other weeks, I don’t have that same clamor […]