Essays
A collection of reflections shaped by curiosity, conviction, and care. Written for those navigating faith, culture, nature, and meaning in a world that’s always in motion.
Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith
A lovely and honest account of regenerative community agriculture, featuring in-depth portraits of several small, faith-based farms.
Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing
By Gayle Boss. More gorgeous little essays, this time intended for reading during Lent. Also appropriate for children, but this book features animals at risk
All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings
By Gayle Boss. Ideal for reading with children (ages 6+) during Advent. Gorgeous little essays about how different creatures spend the winter, with wise spiritual
Perchance to Dream
If only I could dream! Dreams come rarely these days. Where is the God of dreams?
Pious Petunia Starts a Podcast
Oh I believe we must focus still more on sins. The Heidelberg Catechism has much to say in Lord’s Day 34 to 44.
Where Angels Fear to Tread
“I’m angry. I’m sad. I feel as if we’ve reached the end of an era with this bunch, and I don’t know what’s next.”
We Have to Talk About Economics
I hate to say this, but we’re going to have to talk about economics in church.
Lie Detecting
I wonder: Would knowing when people are lying be a gift? Or would it just make life worse?
Everyone Wants to Play God: Extrapolations and a Climate-Bleak Future
The episodes are short-story-style vignettes, introducing mostly new characters, different climate-related scenarios, and a tangled web of ethical dilemmas.
The Year You Finally Read a Book About Climate Change
A book list compiled by the New York Times.
An Inspiring Message about Palm Sunday
Wow, I didn’t know that Palm Sunday was about openness, inclusion, and tolerance. Something to reflect on, I guess. What about that donkey, shall we reflect on the donkey, too?
Truth Listening in the American South
I’ll be processing this experience for a long time, but for now I’ll share just a few key words that focused my thoughts during and after the trip.
Why Does Religion Get in the Way of Climate Action?
Depending on which corners of the church you hang around in, you might notice anything from heavy-duty activism to climate denial. So I’ve been wishing for a long time for hard data. What are the numbers on what actual church people are actually doing and thinking about climate?
Threshold
It never occurred to him to see me, exhausted and falling to pieces, alone in that room with my mother as she labored on threshold of death.
Chaptering Our Lives
Best-selling memoirs tend to tell big, dramatic stories—getting sober, the messy divorce, the cancer diagnosis, the series of lovers, living through war, recovering from abuse, the woes of being famous. For most of us, the challenge is to perceive the contours of our ordinary lives lived on smaller, more private stages.
Church of Empire, Church of Refugia, 2047 and Beyond
We’re all speculating here, I guess, with the understanding that the speculation is itself a process of hope: what do we long for? what outcomes can we imagine and, through that imagining, help enact?