Before I begin, a few markers from the year:
📖 30+ essays, reflections, and teaching posts
🌌 One full Genesis study series released (Cosmos & Creation)
🕯️ An Advent journey that began in the Psalms
💬 Several conversations that quietly reshaped how I write & teach
📈 Readers returned most often to pieces on fear, truth, and reading Scripture
Not the kind marked by a clear doorway or a clean transition, but the kind where several paths overlap, meshing the boundaries of beginnings, stalled ideas, and frameworks that evolve and change shape as they build. It can be a frustrating place, especially when you care deeply about the work you offering and the people who receive it.
Some projects moved from beginning to completion with clarity and momentum. Others stalled—not for lack of intention, but because life intervened: illness, technological failure, uncooperative timing. What I’m learning (slowly and sometimes uncomfortably) is that not all meaningful work moves linearly. Some projects need time held open around them.
This year taught me that producing thoughtful, genuine content means resisting the urge to rush toward completion simply for the sake of closure. It means allowing projects to mature, to return, to be revised—not because they failed, but because they deserve care.
What follows is not a list of what was completed or left unfinished. It’s a reflection on how my attention moved this year, what held, what stretched, and what continues to ask for time. If you’ve ever found yourself in a season where good work refuses to hurry, you may recognize the landscape.
When so much felt unfinished this year, I kept returning to beginnings—not to restart, but to stay and learn.
Genesis became less of an entry point and more of a place to dwell. I found myself lingering in the opening chapters not because they offer clarity, but because they resist it. Creation, as the text presents it, unfolds through pattern rather than progress: forming, fracturing, renewing, and handing something incomplete into human care.
That rhythm seemed to mirror my year. Teaching and writing through Cosmos & Creation made this especially clear. The project moved from lecture to study guide to published workbook with a coherence I didn’t anticipate—and then, almost immediately, other work slowed or paused around it. The contrast was instructive. Completion, I learned, is not a measure of value. Some work arrives whole; other work asks to be held longer.
Reading Genesis this way reshaped how I understand faith and ethics. Creation is not presented as a closed act, but as an ongoing responsibility. Humanity is not placed above the world, but within it—called to attend, name, tend, and respond. Ethical life emerges not from certainty, but from relationship.
Several pieces I published this year grew directly out of that attention. They explore what it means to be earth-formed and God-breathed, how breath signals both life and obligation, and why creation functions as a moral framework rather than a theological argument.
If you want to enter this work through Genesis, these pieces are good places to start:
Creation as Birth: Cosmos and Creation Part 1 of 5
When the Bible Sounds Like a Tribal Story
Creation as fracture and Rebirth: Cosmos and Creation Part 3 of 5
Genesis does not rush toward resolution. It stays with complexity, allows fracture, and continues to speak even when the work feels incomplete.
That, too, felt like instruction.
As I stayed with the text, teaching became one of the ways I listened.
This year blurred the boundary between teaching and writing more than any other. Lectures became drafts. Questions from students and participants shaped paragraphs. Study guides began to read less like instructional material and more like correspondence. I began writing with the assumption that my reader was thoughtful, curious, and capable of living with complexity.
The Cosmos & Creation series and the Tents and Thresholds series emerged from this overlap. Teaching Genesis required slowing the pace, resisting summary, and allowing the text to speak in patterns rather than propositions. That same posture carried into the writing that accompanied it here.
Interruption became part of the instruction. A lesson that didn’t record properly. Material that needed to be revisited before it could be released responsibly. Rather than treating these moments as obstacles, I began to see them as reminders that teaching is not performance—it is presence. And presence cannot be rushed without losing something essential.
Several posts this year grew directly out of that teaching posture. They reflect on why I teach the Bible the way I do, how pedagogy shapes theology, and what happens when learning is treated as formation rather than information.
These posts reflect that teaching posture most clearly:
Cosmos & Creation Video Series
When God Speaks: A Question I Should Have Answered More Simply
Good teaching does not rush toward clarity. It creates conditions for understanding to emerge. Writing, when it is faithful to that task, does the same.
As teaching and writing slowed me down, ethics began to surface without being summoned.
I wasn’t setting out to write about justice this year. I was paying attention to what happens when Scripture is read carefully enough—long enough—for responsibility to emerge on its own. Genesis does this quietly. The Psalms do it insistently. The prophets refuse to let it go.
Ethics, in these texts, is not an add-on. It is woven into the structure of the world the text imagines: how power is held, how voices are heard, how the vulnerable are named, and how leadership is measured.
What changed for me was noticing how often ethical clarity appeared not at moments of certainty, but at moments of friction—when praise refuses to bypass injustice, when God’s attention bends consistently toward those pushed to the margins.
If you’re drawn to Scripture as a source of moral formation rather than answers, start here:
Faith, Fear, and the Search for Truth: What I Told a College Dropout
The One Who Practices Mercy Does Not Fear Death
Ethical formation happens when we stay present to the text long enough to be changed by it—not instructed from an external source, but reoriented from within.
As ethical questions sharpened, my attention kept returning to structures: what we build together, and what those structures require of the people who inhabit them.
Genesis 10–11 became especially generative here. The story of Babel is often read as a warning against ambition, but staying with it revealed a more unsettling concern: unity that demands sameness. A city built to secure a name, leaving no room for difference to speak.
Read this way, Babel is not a failure of collaboration, but a failure of imagination. It assumes that coherence requires control, that stability depends on uniformity, and that human flourishing can be engineered from the top down. God’s interruption functions less as punishment and more as protection—an insistence that difference is not a problem to be solved, but a condition to be preserved.
Scripture measures authority not by scale or success, but by its capacity to preserve dignity, widen participation, and attend to those most easily erased.
These essays explore how Scripture critiques power while preserving difference:
Creation as Human Legacy: Cosmos and Creation Part 5 of 5
Sisters | Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, & Zilpah
Seed, Surrogacy, and Survival: Women and Identity in the Joseph Cycle
Legacy, in the biblical imagination, is not about permanence. It is about responsibility carried forward.
As questions of power and difference opened outward, the work increasingly took on the shape of accompaniment.
Many of the pieces I wrote this year began with conversations. Often with people whose faith no longer fit inherited frameworks, but who were unwilling to abandon thought or integrity in order to keep belonging.
Writing became a way of walking alongside rather than leading ahead. Less about persuasion, more about presence. Less about resolution, more about naming experiences that already existed but hadn’t yet found language.
This clarified where my work lives most honestly: in the space between certainty and dismissal—where Scripture remains trusted, but not weaponized; where doubt is not celebrated, but recognized as part of ethical seriousness.
If you’ve ever felt caught between belief and thought, these reflections were written for that space:
When Faith Grows Up: Fear, Simplicity, and the First Crisis of Belief
Scripture Isn’t Off-Limits: Reading Without Fear
Why Do We Try to Tame Scripture?
Accompaniment does not require resolution. It requires attentiveness. Staying. Willingness to listen without rushing the outcome.
As I move into the year ahead, the direction of my work feels clearer than the shape of any single project.
I will continue returning to the Hebrew Bible, especially its ethical and justice-bearing texts—asking how Scripture forms moral responsibility, leadership, and care for those at the margins. I will continue developing teaching series that invite thoughtful engagement rather than quick answers, and publishing writing that grows out of that work.
This space will remain open and accessible. All of my writing here is free to read. Some readers choose a paid subscription as a way of supporting the work and its ongoing development, and I’m deeply grateful for that generosity. What matters most to me is that this remains a place for careful reading, honest thought, and shared inquiry.
If you’re here to read, reflect, or return occasionally, you’re welcome.
If you’re here to walk more closely alongside this work, your presence—whether quiet or sustaining—makes it possible.
I’ll keep doing what I’ve been called to do: reading closely, teaching carefully, and writing in ways that honor both the text and the people who encounter it.
Thank you for walking this path with me.
Dr. Erica Mongé-Greer is a biblical scholar, writer, and longtime teacher whose work explores Scripture as a source of ethical formation, relational faith, and thoughtful engagement with complexity. She writes at the intersection of theology, pedagogy, and lived experience, inviting readers to stay with the text long enough for it to shape how they live. She is the creator of Scholarly Wanderlust and the On the Path study series.
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