I did not expect to feel #TurningRedMovie so deeply. What a lovely portrayal of awkward girl middle school years, of feeling like too much and feeling too much, of female friendships and mother-daughter love. And such diverse representation! I thought my heart would burst. Also: someone could write a while ding dang dissertation about how the ways that evangelicals are bad at watching/reviewing movies correlates with our worst habits of reading Scripture 😬

A thought about the ways we celebrate a complicated past:

I was in a seminary class once, talking about how I didn’t love our “heritage week” every year because some of the people we honored wouldn’t have wanted me or any of my women or BIPOC classmates at the seminary. My prof asked if I wanted to get rid of the week, and I said no, I wanted it to include the first women and BIPOC students and professors, the people who paved the way for the rest of us to be there. I wanted it to include graduates who were doing important work for change.

Happy Easter!

Here's the ending to my favorite Dorothy Sayers essay, an appropriate exhortation for this morning:

“Let us, in heaven’s name, drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashing sentiment heaped upon it... and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some kind of vigorous reaction.

If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much worse for the pious – others will pass into the kingdom of heaven before them.

I heard a LOT about being willing to die for my faith in youth groups from many of the same people who are currently terrified of losing political or social power.

It’s a reminder for *all* of us that we might be cultivating a counterfeit courage instead of the real thing. I don’t say that last part lightly. I spend a lot of time thinking about how any of us younger evangelicals will be able to find our own biases and blind spots before it’s too late.

Someone was talking about fear in a class today, and they mentioned how much more fear there is when you get married and have kids, because you have more people relying upon you. And while there is no doubt something true in this, it bothered me. Here’s why: Our isolating and elevating of the nuclear family has led to this kind of thinking, that the only people that should demand something of us are our nuclear family members. We don’t need to shoulder anyone else’s burdens or feel responsible for them.

There's something I've been noticing in some peers and definitely in myself: the idea that we should wait until we have influence/authority to say hard things.

But I'm increasingly convinced that many of us who think this is "wisdom" will end up with influence but no courage. My friend @SHoddeMiller says in her book NICE that courage is a muscle you have to use in order to strengthen it. It takes practice. You don't become the leader who can act or speak courageously if you aren't practicing it before you have the position.

I had a class on Men's Ministry today, and ya'll - I have some thoughts.

1. I'm tired of classes that rely on tired gender stereotypes for an easy laugh or simplistic analogy, instead of robust and nuanced analysis of gender differences. Such as:
-Men don't care about frilly lady things like centerpieces. Maybe flower arrangements aren't your thing (they aren't mine), but the appreciation of beauty is something we should value, recognize, and cultivate in all people, not just women.