Roots: A Communal Journal

I ’ve thought about vaccinating you in your sleep. About flying across the country to break into your house and flooding your body with mRNA and teaching it to fight and protect itself and stand up against this stupid, homicidal virus. Even if you hate me for it. Even if it’s wrong to do that type of thing. But I won’t.   Instead I’ll write. I’ll write all the things I wish I could say, that our family Facebook thread can no longer bear, after a year and a half of us brandishing articles like swords, and all-caps billboards of threatening Scripture, and the occasional whiplash of swerving from a vitriolic debate to a cute picture of someone’s baby in the next line to a conspiracy theory in the next. Text-to-text will never be the same as eye-to-eye. So here I am, writing this. I wish I could see you, in person, not through a screen, and we could sit tucked into the corner of a sectional, or on the floor of our parents’ oversized closets like when we were kids. We could giggle behin...

Across the street, the Bungalow with its burnt, proud brick, stubborn and red standing tough since the end of last summer has finally and inevitably begun to come Undone The shingled and slanted roof layered one too many times like grandmother's ice cream cake has, in spite of its patient protests finally relented to the hollering hinges that have born the weight of winter's snow The aluminum porch canopy Once the lookout tower  for many a snowball fort Now lies collapsed surrendered Scraping a forbidden trench into father's front lawn and abandoning its ally  the splintering bench that has refused to abandon its post  The dining room is exposed To say nothing of the family's den Each whistling their dismay past beams and joists bowed by long-winded pressure These rooms recall faint memories of dinner parties and movie nights like an old carousel projector playing itself Rain's condescension and Fire's temper have relentlessl...

Review:  Stanley Hauerwas The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson Eerdmans Publishing Co. (2018) ________________ Note: I plan to publish a monthly book review here on Roots. Each review will focus on a book I'm reading as a part of my devotions and studies. My hope is that these reviews will weave their way into conversations already happening here, spark some new ones, and maybe even point someone to a quality read.   -- On September 17, 2001, TIME magazine named Stanley Hauerwas "America's Best Theologian" . The irony of the award was likely lost to most. Hauerwas had spent his career calling the church away from the center of national attention and back to the margins. And in the shadow of 9/11, Hauerwas' lively and outspoken pacifism coupled awkwardly with the American thirst for vengeance.  Perhaps TIME hoped to highlight Americana ideals and virtues, but even then, the virtues Hauerwas championed had very little to do with America and e...

Screaming at my Grandma on the Fourth of July: Part I I don’t even remember the comment that started it. The grenade released. The earth-shattering, war-mongering sentence that was thrown into the middle of my safe haven, the place I call home. To the best of my recollection, it was something along the lines of, “We can just lock all the kids in Central America up in cages!” It was stated by an extended family member who is hard to love. One who, for lack of knowing him better, has become a familial amalgamation of Trump supporters. Someone who enjoys his incendiary statements. If given a Facebook, he would certainly be the one sharing ludicrous memes and throwing around the term “triggered” for the sake of mockery. The word-grenade was irrelevant to the conversation. It was thrown out with a grin as he was getting up from the table. It was undeniably, irrefutably, incontestably… bait.   I took it. For years, I had done a good job of rolli...