Intersections at The Seattle School

Dan Allender recently served as a keynote speaker at the Jubilee Conference in Pittsburgh, PA from February 14-16. An annual event with over 3,000 in attendance, the Jubilee Conference gathers college students around the connection between academics and faith, inviting them to imagine how their faith might be lived out fully in their life, particularly […]

We gather in a circle, hand in hand, and scan the faces of those standing in our midst. It is 8:30pm on Wednesday night, and most of us are undoubtedly feeling spent after full days of classes, work, internship and studying. And still, we gather. We take the hand of those nearest to us and […]

I can’t help but smile when I see the remnant of luggage decorating the spaces in our building. It is a reminder of the history that inhabits these walls. And before the luggage factory, back when the Puget waters met the western wall, a fisherman’s wharf greeted the day’s catch with open arms. This is […]

I love Preview Weekends. I have plenty of reasons not to. As a student worker, I spends Saturdays single-handedly covering both the library and the front desk. It’s not an incredibly heavy workload, but for those few hours I am the first resource for a steady stream of students needing anything from paperclips to paper […]

My sunrise service on Easter Sunday took place at The Seattle School. With more impending due dates than I could keep track of, I chose to write papers instead of attending a morning church service. Let’s not judge here. The decision to do homework on Easter wasn’t exactly an arduous one, anyway. I have been […]

Earlier this year, a memorial to rape survivors was temporarily in place in the reflection pool of the Washington Monument. The letters floated in blood red on the water’s surface, reading “I CAN’T FORGET WHAT HAPPENED BUT NO ONE ELSE REMEMBERS.” Upon encountering the image, my first thought was “Of course, that’s why we have […]

“Fiction is rooted in an act of faith: a presumption of an inherent significance in human activity that makes daily life worth dramatizing and particularizing.” – John Updike, speaking on religion and literature, 1994 I have this photo on my phone that I flip to often, probably more than I am comfortable admitting. It’s a […]

At seven years old, I experienced a mind-bending crisis of identity. There I sat, watching the LA Olympics on a small black and white TV, as boxers from the United States and South Korea took the ring and began pounding one another senseless in mutual pursuit of gold and glory. The official result of that […]

Can I be honest? The nativity story has grown a little stale for me. Those of us raised in the Church, at least, have heard the story multiple times each December for every December of our lives. For evidence that the store is tired is easily found at many Christmas services: it seems every year […]

Our stories are like a book unfolding, pages worn and marked, dog-eared to recall at a later time. Sometimes the page turns and we do not love what the next chapter holds.  I thought my chapter of graduate school would go a certain way.  I entered it with a grand naiveté and glamour around the […]

For the past several years, I have been imagining what it would look like to use surfing as a platform for community engagement in a rural village along the Indian Ocean coastline of South Africa. Toward this goal, I formed a partnership in 2010 with a Denver-based nonprofit named Empowering Communities to Transcend Adversity. ETCA […]

In the past, I have operated primarily through rationale and logic. Now, at The Seattle School, instead of relying on my ability to comprehend, understand, and analyze, I was being asked to wait, to ponder, and most of all to allow myself to be changed before looking for comprehension. It is scary, however, to stumble […]