I wrote about Rings of Power for both First Things and Mere Orthodoxy. There's potential in the show, but the first season fell far short of good storytelling. At First Things, I wrote about the moral muddle of its structure: Tolkien’s stories aren’t mystery boxes. His characters have a very clear idea of what is… Read More
Tag: Mere Orthodoxy
How Do We Value Care Work?
As the cover story for Mere Orthodoxy's third issue, I wrote on how we value care work, and the thin line between humility and degradation. A care worker knows that they are not easily replaceable, and they can't rely on the kinds of labor power that unions use to shut down a factory. Many workers… Read More
The Cautionary Tale of WandaVision
WandaVision is an ambitious offering from the Marvel Industrial Complex, but it falls short of its potential. I reviewed the show for Mere Orthodoxy (in a way I hope was comprehensible even to non-watchers!). The show is ultimately about the consequences of the stories we tell about our lives. The show uses the heightened style… Read More
A Game About Grace and Weakness
During Zinequest 2021, I wrote a piece at Mere Orthodoxy about the design choices and theology behind Back Again from the Broken Land, a game I wrote together with my husband. The game is Tolkien-inspired—it's about small adventures walking home from a big war. Part of our goal was making it Tolkien-like in the action… Read More
Searching for Other Feminisms
Gracy Olmstead and I had a conversation about the gaps in mainstream feminism for Mere Orthodoxy. I run a substack community, Other Feminisms, for sustained conversation on these topics. Gracy: My husband has struggled to get paternity leave, and experienced a lot of pushback when striving to carve out time to care for our children and… Read More
Keeping Vaclav Benda’s Door Open
At Mere Orthodoxy, I laid out my problems with some of Rod Dreher's recent writing on race and soft totalitarianism, drawing on his own Live Not By Lies for an alternate model of witness. The most serious danger Woke Capital poses isn’t to the people forced to adopt nonsensical cant or take implicit bias tests… Read More