What follows is a compilation of notes taken during the Graduate and Professional
School Campout 2011. For those unawares, Campout is a 36-hour festival of Duke
basketball in which thousands of graduate and professional students sleep in tents, U-
Hauls and RVs and compete for the chance to win one of 800 highly sought-after season
tickets.
This is the story [...]

A reflection on the Duke Divinity Women’s Center panel: “Should I Heart Feminism?”

Mumford and Sons May Show a Way Forward

This year for Lent, I am considering wearing the same outfit from Ash Wednesday to Easter. I am probably not brave enough to do this alone, though, and therefore here’s a dare for you: join me.

1. Choose one outfit to wear this Lent.
2. Don’t buy any new clothes for seven weeks.
3. Be creative. Prepare for resurrection.

Why is it that in this cruel and twisted world that often seems to reject the humanity of its inhabitants, we can gain the most hope by looking deep into the places of the most pain? Perhaps it is because it is at this intersection that we see most clearly what must change.

If they are men, former soldiers are twice as likely to kill themselves as their civilian counterparts; if they are women, four times as likely. Logan Mehl-Laituri, MTS ’12, argues that these suicides are driven in significant part by “moral injury,” which psychologist Brett Litz defines as “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to or [...]

As we came created from the ether some cloud
In the starry nothing showed us a lullaby, a soft
Something, a reality to offer to little children that
Gave hope breath in the abyss, buried deep in the murk.
So for an eternity into the infinite the trialogue
Ushered out into the immensity of all else as nothing
And came [...]

Pilgrimage is exhausting. Even with airplanes. My feet are blistered, I am tired as I have ever been, and it is day number two. As soon as I sat still yesterday I fell asleep. In church. Three times. In fact, I spent the day falling asleep in famous churches all over London. It is best to visit a new city on a Sunday so you can go to its churches. In fact, this is mantra I have come up with from this mini-pilgrimage: always make a point to visit a new city on the Lord’s day. You can really get to know a city through its churches.

“Any question I know how to ask concerns bodies,” writes Benedict Ashley in the book Theologies of the Body, “since even if something exists that is not bodily, I will know it only if somehow it contacts me as I am a body.”