December 18, 2025 An incredibly convoluted announcement of changes coming next year, as only an Enneagram 4 could write. XOXO – Jeannie Rose “Why don’t you have a website using your name?” It was the third or fourth time someone had suggested it recently, as I’ve been seeking advice and on how to build the platform I apparently need to sell a book. It’s a totally normal approach, on...
December 15, 2025Isaiah 58 Below is my contribution to our church’s 2025 Advent devotional, written for today, December 15, on today’s Old Testament reading. Sunday after church, and all my kids want is a screen. “No screens on Sundays” doesn’t compute as a way to rest—what is rest but zoning out, no one bugging you? One’s hogging the couch where another wants to sit, and Sabbath...
December 5, 2025 Prayer is my mind racing to try and solve the various work on my plate: write the stubborn paragraph, cook the meal I’m responsible for next Monday, hash out an agenda. But the paragraph is comprised of thin wisps of words which float away as soon as I’ve thought them, however brilliant they shimmered for a moment in my mind. The meal remains illusory, the agenda wavers and melts...
November 13, 2025 A few weeks ago, my schedule created an accidental interesting mashup of ideas: the Center for Christianity and Public Life conference (which I wrote about here), overlapped briefly with a trauma-informed care course I’m taking. To join a live small group conversation with the course trainer, renowned psychologist Dr. Dan Allender, I step out of the conference, where...
October 20-21, 2025 Have you ever seen one of those ads that starts off with a supposed brand confession and apology? “We admit it, we were wrong when we said we were one of the best skin care lines. We’re so sorry to everyone who purchased our products.” The big reveal is utterly predictable, even as it keeps you hanging on: “Turns out we’re not one of the best because of our incredible products...
Nothing in my hands I bring. It’s a line from an old hymn, and a refrain that periodically echoes through my imagination. Any Christian could tell you it describes a core element of our theology, that salvation is not earned, but is a grace freely given. But true as this may be as a matter of doctrine, as a matter of practice this lovely idea wars with the implicit assumption most of my life...
September 16, 2025 “I didn’t want Charlie Kirk to die, I wanted him to be different,” my friend Jonathan wrote in a recent substack. Jonathan is a black man, the kind of person Kirk might have had in mind when he said “Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” –...
June 3, 2025 There’s a scene in Gossip Girl, a show I greatly enjoyed while living in New York City during and after law school as a mental break from all that law—and which made me, in its portrayal of the emotional and relational challenges of my city’s super wealthy, grateful for my ordinary life, and in full disclosure, a show which I’m enjoying again years later, watching through a second...
“How can you tell a story about plants or chores that would be very interesting?” A friend offered this honest response to my invitations to join the upcoming experiential storytelling workshops. “Maybe it takes someone who’s good at creative writing,” he continued, with an unspoken note of regret: And I’m not that someone. Perhaps you have also asked this question. Maybe, like my friend...
May 7, 2025 From the chair where I sit most mornings to pray and write, I can see out a window to an expanse of sky draped lavishly over a spread of trees, a break in the city-scape afforded by a sliver of a national park that follows a through road in a stream valley several stories down from the second floor of my house, where I perch. The sky is often inky gray when I first come, early, to...