Reading · The Green Door · RSS Amplifier

There she was. Strolling, maybe hovering, on the side of the road in the heat of the Alabama suburbs, looking like a medieval relic. Donned in a gorgeous white robe with a timeless black habit and a silver cross swinging low, a lone nun made her way over a hill dotted with starter homes built in the 50s. As the sight of her came and went on my car's dashboard, the scene congealed in my mind as a kind of symbol.

She was a small reminder of the divergent environments I’ve found myself in over the last year, a contrast between what feels like the ancient and the modern. To recap, 2025 was another year spent in Oxford and filled with book clubs, pub nights, lectures, and evensongs. It was a blur of running around with my gal gang in red lipstick and my corduroy winter coat in old, low-lit buildings, talking big ideas. It’s a city that has stood for over a thousand years and asks much of you.

Fast forward to 2026, and I woke up to find myself a mom in Alabama to our adorable baby boy and perfect black kitten. They are both extremely cute and extremely mischievous. Suddenly, so much of my time and energy goes to these tiny creatures that I love fiercely and cannot imagine life without. I am, of course, still in the process of sorting through the tectonic identity shift of matrescence, but here we are.

My days now have this metallic, contemporary feel as I get into my car and pass gas stations, billboards, and car washes on the way to the nearest grocery store the size of an industrial warehouse. I don’t know what this environment is asking of me yet, and I don’t know what stories are lurking in this place either. What I do know is that it is indeed different, but possibly worth the whiplash to see my brothers and parents make my newborn son smile in their arms on the porch.

But getting down to business: this Substack has been lying low for basically the last year, but it’s finally time to resurrect her. Through my job as an editor for Christianity Today’s Inkwell, I have the privilege of coming across lots of fascinating goods—on Substack and elsewhere. For my own sake, I need a place where I can gush about these words that keep my brain on fire in the best way, an avenue to let these sparks fly.

I occasionally attended something called Scriptorium when I was living in Oxford. It was essentially mirroring a day in the life of a monk, one bookended by prayer and marked by togetherness. Practically, it was a co-working day in a theology library, divided by tea times, a meal, and closing with evensong prayer in the chapel. The word “scriptorium” refers to the room in a monastery where texts were copied, the place where age-old ideas were actively preserved.

When I think about what spiritually and intellectually drives me, it always comes back to this very simple, even cliché idea: going back to ancient wisdom for modern problems. This is the secret thread that animates my own work, and the thrust that draws me into any good piece of writing. I’m eager to preserve the ideas and truths I’m encountering, as well as my own intellectual and spiritual life, so here’s a little scriptorium, albeit digital (sadly), where I can do this labor with you folks here on Substack. Below, you’ll find a few things that have recently come across my desk.

This piece had me in stitches. It was especially delightful as I had drinks with Susannah and her husband a few weeks ago at a mutual friend’s house. There, we both held a stunning bunny named Luna, and Susannah did a dramatic reading of a friend’s article that also made me shed tears of laughter.

In light of AI coming for all our jobs, and the fact that learning to code now sounds like an absolutely absurd piece of advice…“The solution here is obviously to become a total weirdo.” She suggests doing the careers people have always done. Could becoming a cheese monger right now be more reasonable than becoming a software engineer? Susannah says maybe so. Here’s her metric for career success:

If there’s a job or skill or career that you can do and get paid for, ish, now, and could have also done in 1750 in London, and ideally could have also done in 400 in Cappadocia, you’re good to go.”

This was a thoroughly reasonable take on the current cultural conversation on the resurgence of faith. This topic is something I’ve written about and have been chatting about with people for the last two years—predominantly about its manifestation in the UK, but also more generally in the West. Seeing the Quiet Revival report redacted has been a hard pill to swallow, as well as hearing Ryan Burge go on every podcast possible to make sure people know that the real story of religion in America is still one of decline.

This has raised some helpful questions: did Christians put the cart before the horse, get overly excited, and start throwing around the word ‘revival’? Did we project a rising interest in faith where we wanted to see it, tired of being uncool for so long, and eager to finally get some positive press? Ross says it best: both stories can be true at the same time.

“In such a moment, it’s entirely possible to have a spirit of revival or intensified belief among the restless and spiritually curious — yet also a continued decline in religious practice among cradle believers. (And as birthrates drop, a decline in the number of people born into a religion, period.)”

Sometimes, spiritually curious people have years of conversations with religious friends before showing up at a church. Maybe the raw statistical data on church attendance can’t fully capture what is stirring in our culture. As Rowan Williams says, “The church is always renewed from the edges, not the centre.” Excited to keep thinking this through during Inkwell’s new series The Church is Back in Style?

We published this piece over at Inkwell, and it was honestly an emotional read while I was editing. I’ve long been an admirer of Helen’s writing. She doesn’t waste a single word, each dealing an incisive cut to the concept she’s parsing through.

My grandfather died the week we published this piece. We went to visit him at his deathbed, and it hurt immensely to see this strong, larger-than-life figure suddenly thin and struggling to breathe. Forty minutes after we left, he passed away. Helen’s line, “Death cannot be managed,” kept swirling around in my head. Having all the gumption and charisma in the world doesn’t change our fate. All the technology and bio-hacking cannot stop the march to our mortal ends. Our control is a puny and laughable thing. Thankfully, my grandfather faced death bravely—with his family reading scripture over him, watching college basketball, and circled by all the people he spent his whole life telling good stories to.

Helen’s piece ultimately wrestles with this helplessness. But she suggests maybe one thing we can do is create in the face of our grief. It is at least some sort of attempt to reckon with loss and to experience nearness to God.

“On the other side of life, burying my mother has felt in some ways like excavating my childhood home—for forgotten diamonds, swallowed by dust, buried in the grime of myth, misunderstanding, resentment, regret. Some things are lost forever; there’s no way to retrieve them all, but we try.”

Undiscovered Landscapes: Someone called C.S. Lewis sheltered, and I took it personally by Sarah Jane Souther

Towards a Feminism of Interdependence: Why the Common Good Requires a New Feminist Politics by Elizabeth Oldfield
Midweek Quick Take: Is Instagram Catholic? by Mary Harrington
Are We All Clavicular Now? How successful and prosperous societies undermine the family — and human flourishing with Wisdom of Crowds
Been enjoying Mere Fidelity and Collin Hansen’s GospelBound podcast for some theology, and The Bulletin Podcast for news
Is there anything better than a Sunday afternoon reading words by your friends? Rosa Lía Gilbert, Josh Nadeau, & Sarah Ring at The Lottura Post

Inkwell went to Nashvegas! Here are a few shots from our time there, where my son got to experience his first conference as a 1-month-old. Proud of him and hoping he’ll be a conference junkie like his mother. Pictures courtesy of Slow Shutter’s disposable camera—capturing some much-needed gal catch-up time, us and Evan McCarthy experiencing the stunning poetry and essay readings at the Inkwell Evening hosted at The Rabbit Room’s North Wind Manor, a classic brainstorming session with some InkBros, and shooting the breeze with the infamous Thief of Boredom, Josh Nadeau, and Lansing Brown. A good time was had by all.