Maundy Thursday in rural Illinois: someone drove their tractor to church

A word for tonight

Blessed Triduum. Linking the first part of a long (indulgent) essay I wrote last year about the Holy Week I spent coping with the immediate aftermath of a breakup. substack.com/@elizabethca...

anyway

One of my favorite things about my cat Zadie is that she LOVES ice cream and if I'm eating it she'll track me down from anywhere in the house to ask for some 🥲

It be your own petard

It is only Holy Tuesday and I am already tired of seeing fellow clergy members portray the events of this week through the too-narrow lens of 21st century American partisan politics and completely ignoring the cross while doing so

Working on my Maundy Thursday sermon and overcome with a desire to give Jesus a hug. Or better, maybe, to say "to be hugged by Jesus."

Every day I think about the email I received from a young clergywomen's group that addressed us all as "Niblings in Christ"

"I'm the last person who deserved x" is just the main motivating force behind all of American politics. Ladder pulling at every level.

me finding out my least favorite ex works in AI now

folks will be like “yeah, i don’t love that he celebrates the death of people, but think about all the good stuff he’s done” ok. done.

Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith:

I will not cheer this on as a good thing, not for the country and certainly not for the Church, not because I don't think our faith can or should inform our politics (it can! it does! it should!) but because of something I like to call "the separation of church and state"

Me when I get to preach about how Jesus shows up most fully in places of pain and loss, even if we don't have the eyes to see him in it: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me when I'm in a place of pain and loss and don't have the eyes to see Jesus in it: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

absolute all-timer

me personally I have had enough

Ok, I'm reasonably confident these are universals for ALL the growing churches in my survey response set, right now in apparent decreasing universality: 1. Support women's ordination 2. Have coffee hour 3. Seminary trained clergy (at least 80% full time residential!) 4. LGBTQ+ support (leadership)

Substack notes is full of people copying viral tweets from 2015-2023 like no one will notice. Too bad there's me, a woman who will never recover from the decade and a half she spent on twitter dot com and whose brain is stuffed full of dumb jokes she read online

hello

Big news from my little town in rural Illinois: we got a Dairy Queen and it opened today

This morning, I woke up and sat on the couch reading and drinking coffee and my cat Otto made biscuits on my stomach and then fell asleep purring on my chest and it's just like the shirt retired white guys like to wear says.............. LIFE IS GOOD!!

By German theologian Dorothee Sölle, from Of War and Love (1983)

Father @cebm.bsky.social is a Lutheran now and that's on the power of being friends with me and @varbergensis.bsky.social

Teaching middle school confirmation is so precious to me because where else could I hear the exact phrase, "Pastor Elizabeth, I'm bouta crash out" ?? Nowhere

I love to go to church!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

seriously considering what Christianity is, and what the truths of the Gospel are

So much online conservatism these days is just "I miss being a kid"

huge news: my cat Zadie just ate a cheeto

you really do learn something new every day

thanks, I hate it

This man was murdered by the federal immigration authorities as surely as Renee Good and Alex Pretti were

Thinking a lot about mainline American Protestantism failed so many in generation, maybe bc it's gotten subsumed into American evangelicalism, that weird mix of Calvinist cruelty and Anabaptist solipsism. We desperately need to get better at catechesis - "not being evangelical" is not good enough!

“Men are hardwired to—“ no they’re not.

Will never stop being baffled by how many Christians think that Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is 1) a Christian song and 2) a worship song. My brothers and sisters in Christ, why are we singing "remember when I moved in you" in the middle of church

7:45 a.m. annual meeting... penance for my sins

JD Vance personally invited Pope Leo to the U.S. 250th celebration on the 4th of July. Today the Vatican announced Leo will be spending the day with migrants instead.

I am never going to get over the fact thar so many Americans died that corpses stacked up in nursing homes and hospital morgues, that refrigerator trucks had to be brought in for the overflow, and that the big takeaway from Important Pundits is there should have been *less* mitigation.

please look at my cat

Blessed Ash Wednesday. If you are responsible for the imposition of ashes today, please remember not to mix them with water because you will create lye and inadvertently give someone a cross shaped chemical burn. Do not ask me how I know this.

upending gender norms by being a woman who got her boyfriend to listen to cameron winter and geese

I am five-and-a-half years sober today. Thanks be to God!

Jesus Christ is the light of the world, the light no darkness can overcome

i once thought that i was a valentine's day hater but now that i am in love, i have seen the error of my ways!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news. (Mark 1:15)

This is the 38th time that the U.S. military has unlawfully killed civilians on the orders of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump. At least 130 people — never charged with crimes, their identities unknown to their executioners — are now dead.