If you have read my posts, you will have gathered that I attended a rather left-wing liberal, liberal arts college. Since my last writings for Grace Community Church I find myself graduated (hooray!) and doing things like job-searching, knitting, and painting my toenails fire-engine red. No worry, what I have mostly enjoyed is the sheer amount of reading and thinking that my free (at the moment) schedule allows! During this time of waiting, I recently had one of those philosophical-religious-intellectual conversations, where an astounding truth from God hit me.
I stayed in Berea (with its largely left-wing liberal environment) precisely because such conversations are still to be had. Read More→

My senior seminar class has been reading a book by Dorothy Allison about a girl growing up in the South under relentless child abuse. We read an article she wrote called “A Question of Class” alongside this text. Allison closes her essay, keying into her own history of abuse, with this statement: “I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us—extraordinary.” Read More→