Topics, Issues, Questions & News
Topics, Issues, Questions & News
Topics, Issues, Questions & News
FEATURED | “Female Scholars, a new generation answering the call” ~ Regent College Alumni News
I was honored to have my story featured alongside six other female scholars, all Alumnae of Regent College in Vancouver, Canada: Female Scholars | a...
AWARDED | Grant from the Nanovic Institute for Symposium on “The Bible, Narrative, and Modernity”
It is now official! Thanks to a generous grant from the Nanovic Institute, the symposium “The Bible, Narrative, and Modernity” will be taking place...
Sexy My Little Ponies & The Bible’s Silenced Women
As a little girl, I loved Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Ponies. My daughter has, somehow, developed a similar love thanks to the ubiquitous...
Can Science Discover Everything?
Marcelo Gleiser, a theoretical physicist specializing in cosmology, nonlinear physics, and astrobiology, has a new book out, (The Island of...
Report on The Conference on Christianity and Literature, hosted by Westmont College
Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA hosted this year’s Western Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature. As a Westmont alumnae and...
AWARDED | The AAUW (American Association of University Women) Dissertation Completion Fellowship!
Since filling out fellowship applications, gathering up transcripts and following up on letters of recommendation last autumn, I’ve been waiting to...
Dynamic & Efficient Student Learning with iBook Course Reader for iPad
The digital humanities, technology in the classroom, ebooks — words that strike fear in many a literary traditionalist, at times myself included!...
The Chaos Waiting Around the Corner
I have a confession to make: I am deeply afraid of the chaos that lingers at our doorstep, the chaos that rips into our mundane lives, forever...
Kingsley and Narrative Form: The Mellon/ISLA Conversion and Literature Workshop At Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame is a great place to be when working on anything related to Religion and Literature. This week, I participated in the...
The Incarnation & Restoring All of Creation
For many, Christmas is now over: the presents are opened, the meal is eaten, the carols are sung, and it is time to start thinking about packing...
God Sucking a Nipple
August was world breastfeeding month, which meant that breastfeeding―and controversies surrounding feeding (especially in public) helped fill the...
“Why can’t people wait for Christmas?”
While shopping today, my three-year-old pointed to a Christmas tree and asked, “why can’t people wait for Christmas”? She didn’t ask it critically...
What do Christians believe?
If you type this question into Google, the first hit—“gotquestions.org”—says that the answer is found in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4: “that Christ died for...
What are you afraid of?
My nine-month old son has just started bawling hysterically whenever I leave the room. It starts when I place him in someone else’s arms: he begins...
Letting the Fire Rage
“Moralistic-therapeutic deism” is the phrase University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith uses to describe the religious beliefs of North...
“For thine is the story…”
My nearly three-year old daughter has a beautifully illustrated version of the Lord’s Prayer* that we read almost every night. She piously folds her...
What I learned in my First Half Marathon
I recently ran my first half-marathon...well, “jogged” is a more accurate verb since I run very, very slowly—but I ran/jogged the whole thing....
Seeing Jesus through the Faith of Others
Recently, I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Charles Dickens’s least-read work: The Life of Our Lord. It is a slim volume that re-tells the story...
Jesus According to Charles Dickens
Between 1846 and 1849 Charles Dickens wrote The Life of Our Lord, a simplified version of Jesus’ life for his children, who ranged in age from...
An Uncomfortable Jesus | Midwest Victorian Studies Conference
This next week I will be presenting a paper on Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord at the Midwest Victorian Studies Association’s annual conference. The...
Happy (Christian) New Year!
The Christian year begins on Sunday, December 2nd this year, with the beginning of Advent—so for western Christians, now is the time to take stock...
The Bible & The Novel: The Gospel of Mark 11-16 (& Netflix’s Messiah)
Ever wished there was a gospel written specifically for those really bleak, hopeless moments when all appears lost? A gospel writer that seems to...
The Bible & The Novel: Mark’s Gospel (& Netflix’s Messiah)
Resurrecting Jesus from the fog of familiarity can be hard—so hard, in fact, that we often gloss over the way each individual gospel text portrays...
Preaching the Household Codes in the #MeToo Era
Sometimes the Bible can be really difficult, especially when it talks about things like wives submitting to their husbands and slaves submitting to their masters. These “household codes” seem antiquated at best, and downright offensive at worst…
The Bible & The Novel: Netflix’s Messiah (& Mark’s Gospel)
Stories that reimagine Jesus, considering what his life would look like if lived in the modern world, have a long history in the Christian...
The Bible & the Novel: Ruth & Marilynne Robinson’s Lila
Too often texts fall silent because we think we know the story. Or because we find the barriers of time, place, and culture insurmountable. At...