A conversation with Sara Moslener, scholar of religion, gender, and racial discrimination. — Today over on In Polite Company I share a conversation with Sara Moslener, a lecturer at Central Michigan University, where she teaches the history of religion and racial discrimination in the United States. Moslener is also the author of Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence. Her current research, The…

A reflection on how certain old symbols carry new meaning — The excerpt below comes from today’s post at In Polite Company There’s an image that a minister friend shared years ago online that I haven’t been able to shake from my mind. It’s the portrait of an imagined meeting between the Bible’s Eve and Mary, created by Sr. Grace Remington…

Some of the roots of so-called Biblical womanhood — **Excerpt from In Polite Company A couple of months ago, I was in Louisville, Kentucky reporting for my book, when a wild hair struck. Louisville is home to the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which according to CBMW’s nonprofit filings, is on the campus of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary…

A conversation with Faith Choice Ohio’s Elaina Ramsey about keeping faith while fighting for choice — The following is an excerpt from my newsletter, In Polite Company. Click though below to read the entire interview. In Polite Company aims to offer rich context on a range of faith-related topics. I’ll do so with weeks-long themes. Recently, I looked at the ways adoption is framed as an…

Reflecting on the Club Q shooting and the toll of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric — Today, I’m sharing an excerpt from In Polite Company, my weekly newsletter for people who want to interrogate or otherwise defrag American faith. I’ve been thinking a lot about how people of faith frame reproductive choice. …

Migrating my work to try to bring spiritually diverse reader groups together — As my regular Medium readers know, I’ve had a heck of a year. The sort that makes a person regroup and not only consider how to focus one’s time, but also, how to create the most meaning from daily labor. When I see readers respond to my religion writing on…

I landed my first book contract in the middle of the hardest year of my life — I asked a friend how she was doing the other day. She told me, honestly, that professionally things had never been so good; personally, they were brutal. I’ve had essentially the same sort of year. Last August, my father fell and broke his hip and suddenly my long-distance care coordination…

There’s little fight as desperate as one with a failing care facility — I kept a spreadsheet itemizing each call I made on behalf of my parents, each text to the director of nursing, each plea with the nursing home administrator at the place I’d trusted with their care. The heat went out frequently enough that hall units were added on a temporary…

Waxing poetic about beards is just another version of manly-man worship among patriarchal Christians If nothing else will drive me off social media, perhaps it will be a week of men flipping out because Bible teacher Beth Moore tweeted about grapes followed by another week dedicated to the godly gift…