We want to hear your responses to FSR Blog’s @theTable: “FSR Summer Book Club” The “FSR Summer Book Club” series started off Summer with a bang! Holly Hillgardner started off the series with an introduction to the stunning novel, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. Second, Rev. Mia McClain suggests that you read a classic play this summer through […]
By Jimmy Hoke. “Is a virus not a kind of zombie, a quasi life-form moving in and out of inertness? It is zombie time…” –Lorrie Moore, New Yorker, April 13, 2020 It is “zombie time”—or time to think with zombies. While the spread of Covid might provide a particularly poignant moment for reading stories that […]
By Yasmine Singh. How does one live in an atmosphere where most if not all bets are against you because of your class, gender, and/or religion? Is advancement possible for those who dream and aspire but struggle to survive? If so, at what cost? Who gets a second chance if they find themselves at the […]
By Christy Cobb. In the past year, the fragment called the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” has received a resurgence of attention in popular media, after the journalist Ariel Saber published the book Veritas which outlines the discovery of the papyrus as well as the complicated path that ultimately revealed this fragment as a forgery. Yet […]
By Mia McClain. “And then there are all those prophets who would lead us out of the wilderness—into the swamps!” –Beneatha Younger, A Raisin in the Sun Last November, I prepared a special dinner and excitedly sat down to watch the highly anticipated film version of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Released on […]
Summer is here! For many of us, summer can be a season of exploration: whether we are taking a vacation, thinking about a new project, imagining new courses, or trying something new at a Farmer’s Market. The first weeks of summer are also when some of us get excited about making new lists: projects to […]
By Sarah Kurzweil. Growing up in an affluent New York City suburb with a large Jewish population, I heard the term Jewish American Princess make its way into conversations quite frequently. In the past few years—and especially in light of rising expressions of antisemitism in the United States—I have considered how stereotypes such as the […]
By Andie Sheridan. Myung Mi Kim, an influential poet in the Asian American writing community, immigrated from South Korea at the age of nine to the United States and began writing about the colonization of the Asian American body through poetry. Her book Under Flag (2001), which explores the trauma of Asian American women’s bodies, […]
By Jacob Perez and Zebulon B. Hurst. The escalating spread of COVID-19, the ways it has disrupted and transformed our communication and interactions with one another, reveals eschatological dimensions within our responses—our spiritual and embodied desires. Prayers for an end to the pandemic are filled with yearning, longing for a time when it will be […]
By Yohana Junker. [1] Over the past few weeks we have been forced to grapple with the ways COVID-19 has shaken our structures in profound ways. As the numbers rise exponentially, we are witnessing the disintegration of whole communities, cities, and systems. In the US, we are at the beginning of a long-term process that […]