KtBlog

On Gratitude
But there was love, love, love,
dripping from our hands.
We both gripped the sharp edge,
and it was painful

Two Poems by Joe Gross
Sometimes
multiplication
of loaves
just means
splitting
one loaf
between
two people.

Poems for the Cruelest Month
All of the intensity and unpredictability of this season, the surges of hope and terror, the stirring of memory and desire—word images, symbols, and sounds arranged in rhythm, engaged in elegy and mystery may be our best bet for helping us hold it all.

All in the Name of God: The Multibillion Dollar Troubled Teen Industry and the Christians Who Profit from It
All across our country, there are “homes” for wayward and rebellious children and teens. I was one of the fortunate who didn’t get sent away, but countless others can’t say the same.

Embering
What to do with this grief over what happened to you? I don’t know, so I’m making a ritual.

Baptism
The still surface lifted by morning fog
as if a bed sheet
that I’m beneath, in the silt, hair reaching,
skin frog-throat white

Five-Foot, Fifty-Dollar Green Beauty
The sight of your friends’ faces illuminated by hot light, standing in a circle as flames leap into the air, as needles crackle and burst, as sparks fly, this image will stay with you. This moment feels holy.

Our Daily Bread and Roses – An Interview with Ben Wildflower
About three or four years ago, I began to see a strange, arresting, and beautiful image circulate among some of my Twitter and Facebook friends—a stark white and black agit-prop expressivist engraving of the Virgin Mary with a defiant fist raised in the air while she stomps on a twisted Satanic serpent, encircled by a cartouche inscribed with a variation from the Magnificat.

11 Questions: Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology by Ed Simon
Unnerving, uncanny, unsettling.

Days Like Dominoes
My thoughts these days are fraught, frazzled little things still precious even though they are as clumsy and malleable as the playdough jewels my daughter likes to shape.

The Great Ganesh Milk Miracle
The news of the Great Ganesh Milk Miracle was dissected in every newspaper and every household. No one could talk of anything else.

Wild At Heart: QAnon, Sex Trafficking, and Evangelical Masculinity
The connection between spirituality and child trafficking may be new in New Age spirituality, but it is one that has been common for years within evangelicalism.

11 Questions: IRL by Chris Stedman
IRL takes the shame out of our dependence on the internet and helps us imagine new kinds of consolation and community for a fragmented and sometimes lonely world.

11 Questions: Beyond the Synagogue by Rachel B. Gross
Rachel B. Gross’s engrossing new book looks “beyond the synagogue” to find religious practice in museums, restaurants, and children’s books. Through years of wide-ranging travel, conversations, and reading, Rachel has written a book that has so much to tell us not just about Jewish experiences and identities in the US but about what nostalgia is…