The following was a presentation I gave to a Lutheran Women’s Missionary League (LWML) Zone Rally hosted at Village Lutheran Church in Ladue, Missouri, on March 25, 2023. Good morning! Thank you so much for inviting me to talk to you today at the Zone Rally. It’s a real pleasure to get to spend thisContinue reading “Jesus and Jane Austen: The Faith and Witness of the Greatest Romantic Novelist”
Category Archives: Culture
On Reading and Starting Anew
Jonathan and I have talked at length about reading, especially fostering that love of reading that so many of us experienced in childhood or adolescence. It’s clearly a significant topic, because it’s also cropped up in both of our friend groups. I’ve been sitting on some thoughts about it for a while now, and figuredContinue reading “On Reading and Starting Anew”
Beauty and Christ: A Reflection on What it Means to Be Human
We inhabit a culture of terrible ugliness. Not only metaphorically—though there is plenty of ugly behavior, ugly politics, ugly thoughts and words—but also literal, physical ugliness, ugliness to which we have become desensitized and comfortably numb. I won’t dishearten you by parading out examples or generalizations; if you’re still reading this, you likely already knowContinue reading “Beauty and Christ: A Reflection on What it Means to Be Human”
Pop Music, Taylor Swift, and Storytelling
If you are a woman or know any women between the ages of about 18 and 35, odds are you’ve heard about Taylor Swift re-recording and re-releasing her old albums. (I don’t fully understand the legal reasons, but the short version is she didn’t have ownership of the original master tracks of her songs.) LastContinue reading “Pop Music, Taylor Swift, and Storytelling”
Tune Your Harps to Cheerful Strains
There’s a famous dictum that comes out of the early days of coding and computer building: garbage in, garbage out. In its original context, it had to do with a phenomenon where poor input data resulted in flawed outputs. Growing up, though, I heard it most often applied to music, of all things. Most ofContinue reading “Tune Your Harps to Cheerful Strains”
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