Friends,
I am writing a short vignette for Reformed Journal each of the first five Sundays of Eastertide, loosely organized around the question: what do we need in order to feast?
Here’s the first, on being too proud to enjoy a fancy East Coast church feast:
I mean no disrespect to the hearty food of my potato-loving Midwestern forebears when I say: this was not a church basement potluck. This was a hobbyist pastry chef’s tomato tart experiment plus a vacationing pediatrician’s signature hummingbird cake plus one of our many resident professor’s favorite focaccia recipe.
It was very bougie.
Thanks to Steve + the RJ team.
Things I’ve been reading and thinking about:
Matt, one of my pastors in Ann Arbor, preached this lovely sermon about Mark’s Easter gospel for Good Friday people– those of us who are more comfortable with the kind of doom and gloom that makes sense than with the resurrection that doesn’t. (Starts around 16:30).
This Defector piece has been pinging around in my brain a lot: “The idea that a business could make nothing but money, and produce nothing but dividends, is one of the strangest and most popular capitalist fantasies. The appeal of it is obvious, but incomplete even as a fantasy, or at least dependent on another fantasy—that the people on the right side of these deals will somehow never need or want any of the things, from entertainment to medical care, that they are making impossible or obsolete, and that everyone else will consent to losing not just their jobs but all these other otherwise healthy parts of public life. It's unclear what would be left, once everything is broken down and sold off.”
Perhaps relatedly, I have gotten very into this substack about monopolies and anti-trust law. Lina Khan is an American hero.
My book club is reading The Other Significant Others, inspired by some fascinating episodes of the Ezra Klein podcast. Here’s the author, Rhaina Cohen, but these two on demography and parenting ask similar questions: what kind of households do we want? What kinds of communities? What would make them more possible?
As always, I am thinking a lot about climate change, genocide, and our presidential election. It is Easter–a great time to call your senators about supporting a ceasefire in Gaza and ending the flow of US weapons to Israel. It is a great time to go solar and get informed about opportunities to support the climate movement. It is a great time to make a plan to get out the vote for candidates who believe in democracy, even if we don’t like them as much as we want to.
And this is why I haven’t been writing (on this platform, anyway)! I am finalizing my dissertation edits this week and will then have some long and sappy things to say about the friends and colleagues who have walked this long road with me. In the meantime, if you know anyone hiring inside the Venn diagram of higher ed, qualitative research, capacity-building, and public engagement, give a girl a recommendation.