Category: Essays
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My Mother’s Yankee Daughter
Here is a story that became a legend in our family: We were driving to church. My brother and I were kids. We were talking about the Civil War. Both of us knew it was fought to end slavery and keep the Union together, and that Abraham Lincoln was a hero. And my mother thought […]
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Imagination and the Problem of Evil
When I was a little girl, Haley Mills was the designated Disney movie star of the day. I adored Hayley Mills. I saw every Hayley Mills movie ever made during those years in the 60s, and what I wanted more than anything was nothing less than to be Hayley Mills. In whatever movie I had […]
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Rare Ingredients
I grated orange zest the other day. Grating orange zest made me notice that baking has something in common with magic. Orange zest is not a particularly rare ingredient, at least not in the 21st century United States. Thank you, Florida and California! I noticed this as I pondered what to do with the extra […]
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Thoughts on God’s Will
Friends of mine have invoked the theme of God’s will to condemn the demonstrations that have occurred in the past several days in the wake of the recent election. I don’t know that they have Calvin’s doctrine of providence in mind when they say this; maybe they are just thinking about Romans 13:1-10, which counsels […]
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What I fear as a white Christian
A lot of texts are on my mind, but here are two: The first is a text that is coming from my white Christian friends from various quarters: “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” or alternatively, “Christians have nothing to be afraid of.” That counsel seems to be contextualized in the immediate political context of […]
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On Not Knowing What You Don’t Know
There are a lot of things I used to be, and one of them was a political science major. Even then, I was not really that interested in electoral politics. The kind of politics I was then and have always continued to be fascinated by is micro-politics: how people establish boundaries and power relations and […]
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Changing “Us”
I have been thinking a lot about how to “be part of the solution rather than part of the problem” these days. It really started when I began noticing that my own and others’ tendency on Facebook and other social media is to make quick comments that assume or presuppose that all of one’s readers […]
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A Definition of Politics
Here’s something I have been thinking about for a long time … since 1987 or so, almost 30 years: how to “define” politics. That is another way of saying, “how to think about what we mean when we say ‘politics.’” Here’s my proposal: a helpful way to think about what we mean by “politics” is […]
Matters of Interpretation 