Welcome!
I write cultural criticism rooted in Christian theology, ranging from scholarly critiques to pop culture analyses to personal reflections. I co-founded the podcast-plus-publication Orders of Magnitude under the pen name Acton Bell. I’ve been a staff writer and associate editor at Christ and Pop Culture for the past five years, as well as a freelancer contributing to the Front Porch Republic, the Christian Research Journal, and Salt and Iron.
While I earned my degree in English and am an avid reader of classic literature and non-fiction, I worked for a time at Washington University School of Medicine overseeing clinical trials for patients with blood and bone marrow cancers. (I’m still not exactly sure how I got the job, but I learned as much there as I did in college.) To this day, my writing is informed by having seen “how the sausage is made,” scientifically speaking, and by witnessing the anguish of cancer patients up close. I find myself returning to such thorny questions as: How much of our embodied experience is a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be borne? How do I respect my body’s nature and limits? How do I suffer and die?
I’m a Christian, born and raised, having spent years as a non-denominational evangelical, then a Baptist, then a Reformed Presbyterian, and now a Catholic chrismated under the name of St. Hildegard of Bingen. Religiously speaking, I’ve always been gripped by questions about the meaning of the body, and how each strand of the faith was able (or unable) to properly speak to my experience as a limited, mortal, fruitful, and sexed creature — to my experience as a woman. The more liturgical, sacramental, and ritually beautiful the tradition, the more participatory it was for my body, and the deeper I found it to be.
I’ve been a wife for nearly twenty-five years, a stay-at-home mother for eighteen years, and a classical homeschooler for thirteen. I made it my ambition to focus on one thing at a time: first on my children, and then (as they’ve grown and need me differently now) on writing. One of the benefits of living life in stages rather than trying to “have it all” at the same time is that I finally have enough experience — of marriage, motherhood, friendship, failure, suffering, loss, faith, and changing my mind about important things — to feel I have something to say. Something that isn’t theoretical or idealized, but practical and embodied.
You can find links (and short descriptions) for my previously published essays under Publications. I write about women, gender, sex, marriage, technology, theology, symbolism, therapy, evolution, suffering, virtue, death, and embodiment.
You can find my podcast (the OoMPod) and latest writings at Orders of Magnitude (here on Substack), with new articles coming out every week. Jessica Otey (aka George Sand) and I read and write in conversation around real books — the kind where you turn the pages (instead of scrolling), write in the margins, and pass on to a friend. Join us!