Happy Birthday to The Priory!

With gifts to celebrate!

[An image from inside the twelfth-century British Lanercost Priory https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/lanercost-priory/history/

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”¹

It’s the first birthday (or anniversary?) of The Priory! Be sure to read all the way to the end for news of gifts to celebrate!

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year already.

It’s also hard to believe it hasn’t been ten years, truthfully.

The life I had just over a year ago seems at once both ever-present to me and at the same time like someone else’s life from another time and another place.

Lord willing, this post publishes while I am in the U.K. to speak at a conference on Baptist history at the University of Cambridge. (I will be giving another talk there, which you can attend in person or online by registering here.) I’ve never been to Cambridge before! So this is one of many things about my life that is new.

Now that I have no office, my husband is building me my own library (basically a big she-shed!). That has been a fun and daunting project. This space is necessary, but I think, in part, it is his and my way of planting our flag in this ground (where we’ve lived now for 25 years) and saying, “This is home. We are staying.” This is meaningful, because we had been planning to move for my previous position. Now we will remain even longer in the home we have restored and loved for so long.

The way my husband has been caring for me, for us, for our future on overdrive for the past year and a half has been amazing. He’s a hero. He’s always been, but the tender way he has cared for me through others’ injustice and mistreatment has been a beautiful picture of the way Christ cares for his bride.

I’m traveling, speaking, and writing more than I was before. Some highlights of the past year are:

• The release of The Evangelical Imagination!

• Being (and speaking) at North Wind Manor for the first time (home of The Rabbit Room)

• Taking a last-minute and unexpected retreat at Laity Lodge

• Having a wonderful, standing-room-only book signing at Landmark Booksellers and meeting many dear friends there for the first time.

• Speaking at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College (which met in-person for the first time since the pandemic—what a joy!)

I’m also home more, which has been so very, very good for my mind, heart, and soul. It really has been a kind of refuge for the soul for me (you might call it a priory!).

Things in my former world and its circles have largely worsened over the past year as seemingly the entire world increasingly goes through more polarization, more sowing of division, more chaos. I mainly feel relief, even liberation, to be (mostly) no longer tied to all of that. (I also shared more of my story in a recent Newsweek article covering a number of faculty who have been “canceled” by their Christian college/university employers. You can read that here. Most of the stories are very different from mine, but I wanted, finally, to make known what happened to me. I finally feel strong enough to do so.)

So, mostly, I feel free.

But there are moments, as layer after layer gets peeled back, when I feel deeper and deeper feelings of betrayal, loss, and disorientation. Those moments are brief, for the most part. But when they come, I remind myself that it will take more than one year to steady myself after the loss of a life that was decades in the making.

Mercifully, I’ve been too busy to miss the classroom much. (And I have the life-giving classroom here to help fill the loss!) But as August has approached—as others go back to school, as the weather shifts in ways my body notices before my mind does—some inarticulate grief and pain have been whispering now and then in my soul.

Thankfully, I have much, much to be thankful for:

• For my husband, as described above.

• That my mother has been fighting cancer all year—and is winning.

• For one book released a year ago, and a new one turned in to my publisher a month ago (look for it next August).

• For being surrounded by so many old, dear friends, as well as a few new ones.

• For my dogs, Ruby and Eva, who give me endless joy and peace.

• For this space—and all of you—who read, share, and join in the discussion.

• Especially for those who support me with your dollars—it has made this project possible. It is both humbling and honoring to have your support, to have this cushion to pay actual bills that still come whether I have a job or not.

• A special thank you to my friend Eileen Lass who so generously shares her stupendous skills in proofreading to review these weekly newsletters out of sheer love. We all owe her a debt of gratitude!

Thank you, all, for creating this place. I pray it adds something good to the world.

***

For the next few weeks, I will be featuring interviews with writers as part of my series on platform and publishing. Then in September, we’ll return to class—stay tuned for upcoming reading assignments!

***

BOOK NOTE:

It seems providential that this book would show up in my mailbox this week: Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eliza Griswold.

The title alone seems fitting, to be sure. But there is another, more personal, reason why I’m drawn to this book. You see, Eliza came to stay with me when she wrote this profile of me for The New Yorker a few years back. It was a hard, beautiful story, and I’m glad that Eliza wrote it, and I’m even more glad that I got to know her through it.

Looking back now, I see that Eliza saw then what I didn’t: the writing was on the wall for me. I could not and would not survive the SBC world.

But I wasn’t supposed to. Instead the Lord set me free—not to survive but to thrive.

***

GIVEAWAY!

I’m honored and thrilled that the summer reading at The Trinity Forum is Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, which we read together here, too! I was delighted to make the selection and offer the introduction to this reading. To celebrate that and The Priory’s first birthday, I’m going to send a signed copy of this booklet to the first ten new paid subscribers. I hope my old paid subscribers aren’t too miffed (I love and appreciate you so much!), but if so, send me a note and we’ll see what we can do. Many, many thanks for your partnership.

1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.