re-a-pprai-sal (n): A second look at or reassess a value of something; a new appraisal. https://www.wordnik.com/words/reappraisal My Mother’s Day 2024 held cards, and a rose after worship, and a thoughtful dinner featuring NY strip steak and store-bought dessert. It held some work, too, because that’s what my PhD life is like in the wake of […]
Big fat drops are sluicing straight down from the sky, smacking the metal housing on the window air conditioner. I’ve closed the bottom half of the apartment windows, but not the top — the smell of rain-damp air, the sharper sound of thunder: these are still novelties to me. Water! Falling from the sky! I’ve […]
My morning routine, these days, seems deliciously? flabbily? long and drawn-out compared to what it was when I worked full time for pay, or when my girls were young. There’s waking to news on the radio, then breakfast and “the newspaper,” now via tablet. “Breakfast” itself has become elastic, not just what I eat but […]
… “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” (John 3:16) …is out of the same compassion as God’s preferential option for the poor? So not that humans are better somehow than the rest of creation (Genesis 1:28-29), but that we are so forlorn, so separated from what God knows us to […]
I stubbed my toe on it while I was looking for Christian Wiman things — specifically whether or not the poems of his I’m likely to be (re)reading this spring are in the poem-volumes of his that I already own… a simple task if I were at my Austin house (where those books are right […]
non-sequitur — does not follow * Periodically I revisit those compressed, wild, exhausting times that were my girls’ preschool years. Sometimes I remember funny things, or things that went particularly well. This is one of those, except this story didn’t originate with us. I saw a good thing and I hung on to it. For […]
It’s a Saturday morning in Evanston, IL. M has gone to try out the Men’s Breakfast at the church where we’ve been worshiping, so it’s extremely quiet. The sky outside is white-overcast, making the light through the windows more diffuse even as the courtyard for our apartment block generally confines what comes into the apartment […]
I don’t have a daily, or even weekly, household staff. (I believe this comes as no surprise -!) Now that we pay for laundry with quarters instead of having the cost tucked into our water and electric bills, we change the sheets somewhat erratically. Underwear gets laundry-priority, and quarters are a half-hour’s expedition to be […]
…plus la change, plus c’est la meme chose…the more things change, the more it’s the same old thing It’s been a very long time since I was a nursing mother attending a convention. Or a corporate training session. And still this image, and her narrative, brought back some strong memories. The corporate training session: I […]
It is definitely true that imagination can be most difficult in our darkest moments. The numbness of despair that Brueggemann describes is the moment of greatest peril for imagination as our minds attempt to close in on themselves for protection. When the pain is so great, our only escape is to feel nothing, rather than […]
