Soul

Beau Denton reflects on the gifts the poet Mary Oliver left us with, and what her life and work reveal about the nature of love.

David Rice offers a pastoral call to lean into the division-crossing love that might help foster a new kind of discourse.

As we move through National Poetry Month, Brittany Deininger shares some of her favorite contemporary women poets, reminding us that poetry is a place of radical resistance and beautiful intersectionality.

Mary DeJong (MATC, ’17) shares about how her time at The Seattle School helped inform the work she does in ecotheology, spiritual formation, and pilgrimage through her organization Waymarkers.

Dr. Curt Thompson, who will visit The Seattle School April 20-21, writes about empathy that compels us to action on behalf of each other.

As we observe Maundy Thursday and Jesus washing the feet of the disciples, Dr. Dan Allender recalls his own experience of feet-washing and what it revealed to him about the holiness of tender touch that is too much to bear.

Brittany Deininger turns to the wisdom of pilgrims and scholars as she writes about “the art of beginning” and the beauty of starting a new journey.

“Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.” – Jane Hirshfield When we think of the tools of an artist, we may visualize tangible elements of the worktable: brushes, typewriters, endless spools of thread and paper and canvas. However, the intangible means nearly every artist, theologian, and thinker employs is something we both crave […]

This fall, I began my fourth of six semesters at The Seattle School and simultaneously found that many expectations of where I’d be at this point in my life were fully falling apart. A year ago, I’d left behind a community of warmth, color, sunshine, and acceptance for a place that often felt ambivalent towards a brown (stranger) surrounded by mostly white (people) and gray (skies).

If I had to select one book of poetry that is the most dog-eared in my library, the most quoted in classes at The Seattle School, and the most used by friends in times of celebration and need, it would be, To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donohue. A master poet, O’Donohue has taught us that some of the most powerful and intimate words are the invocation, “May you…” Those two little words awaken our longing and desire. They strengthen our presence and belonging. They make a place for the Holy Spirit to dance. They evoke light and life and yes.

In an email discussing this month’s theme on Intersections, the word resilience came up. As I pondered the words I would present for this month’s blog post in response to that word, it became apparent to me: who more readily embodies the word resilience than the black woman?

The woman who anoints Jesus’ feet is a familiar story that appears in each of the four gospels. However, as I read it this year, in the midst of deep political and social unrest, it occupied my imagination in a new way and left me curious about the psychological and theological implications of a universal human emotion: disgust. Do we really see one another?