Roots: A Communal Journal

Here I am again. It's Sunday afternoon and I'm frustrated, angry, helpless, and lonely all at once. Like when the high school youth group gets a turn leading the musical worship: I'm trying to sing along but everything is just...off. Sometimes I wish I hated my church. It has been a painful journey but I am now at peace with sloughing off the "evangelical Christian" label. I no longer feel the discordant crush of contradictory feelings and beliefs that holding onto White American Evangelicalism forced me into. I feel a freedom to question everything and find a faith that is more beautiful, inclusive, and academically rigorous. I feel thinly restrained fury when I look at what the American church has become now that I am choosing to be an outsider. Being able to hate (or at least feel repelled by) the evangelical church has made it easy to discard. But I don't hate my church. My church is full of people who love fiercely. My church has urged vaccination and fol...

We're thinking about schooling for our kid now, and I know that most of you who read this blog are in the same conversations as I am. I'm re-reading my senior thesis from a fellowship program I participated in throughout my last year of college. It was intense. I bit off way more than I could chew. I read, observed high school classrooms, met with professors, attended teaching conferences, and despite many important distractions in my last quarter (senioritis, parties, falling in love with my now-husband), I somehow managed to prepare a 30-page thesis entitled "Education and Equality: Tracking in the English Classroom." In preparing for tomorrow's conversation, I've read a handful of articles and listened to a podcast. This whole conversation on education felt so  familiar and I had nearly forgotten about the whole year I spent listening to educators argue with one another about all of this. (Thank you, classroom trauma!) I decided to peek at my thesis again, ...