Dress for Action like an Anglican

June 24, 2024 By Anne Kennedy

After many days of distracting suspense, the Anglican Church in North America (the US and Canada) selected a new Archbishop–Steve Woods. He is currently the bishop of the Carolinas, but by the end of the week, he will be functionally head of the Province. Sometime later in the year, he will be formally consecrated. As you have already expected, public and private online social spaces launched into their thoughts, feelings, and prayers with a frenzied fervor. Some places articulated doom... Read more

Who is Spoiling for a Fight

June 17, 2024 By Anne Kennedy

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There is an article going around on the app formerly known as Twitter that dovetails nicely with something I’ve been thinking about all weekend. Having raised six basically sensible and sane children, I have been mulling over what I did and if it worked. That, and the fact that I work with very young children at Church, I’ve been trying to re-learn a skill I began to develop as a young mother, which I am finding most useful for nearly... Read more

I’m Over Forty And I Won’t Be Reading All Fours

June 10, 2024 By Anne Kennedy

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I should be rousting my sleeping children to clean my house and do profitable things with their lives, now that all the finals are done and the ballet shoes have been shoved in the cupboard. There is something about a house full of sleeping teenagers, though–it’s almost as nice as a house full of sleeping toddlers. I might as well sit here and let them be a while longer. Plus, there are so many interesting things to write about. On... Read more

I Will Never Stop Talking About Jesus

May 20, 2024 By Anne Kennedy

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Having grown up in the 80s, under the thrall of exciting books like This Present Darkness, and many thrilling discussions about spiritual warfare and the malign power of the New Age, I have always tried to temper my inclination to see demons in every corner. It’s too easy, for the most part, to see something bad and attribute the badness to a spirit sitting there, trying to wreck everything. But lately, as the tempering quiet of Christianity recedes from the... Read more

Sourdough and Botox

May 13, 2024 By Anne Kennedy

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I resisted as long as I possibly could, trotting over to Insta and looking up Ballerina Farm. All the flap about Sourdough Bread didn’t drag me in. All the long articles about the inherent racism of the tradwife phenomenon did not even pique my interest. No, the final straw was reading this piece by Mary Harrington about Lauren Southern and the listical approach to ideology and life. Ballerina Farm’s videos are beautiful, of course. In a world full of ugliness... Read more

Casting Pearls Into The Algorithm

April 29, 2024 By Anne Kennedy

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Art by Aedan Kennedy @targambie on Insta I am a little bit embarrassed to admit that I have been quietly checking on H. Pearl Davis–on the X App, @pearlythingz–provocateur, and peddler of iniquitously questionable takes. I haven’t quite come round to listening to her podcast, so perhaps she is much more reasonable than she appears in a hundred characters or less, so take this with a grain of plausible deniability. Nevertheless, the tweets are bad–so so so bad. Pulling at... Read more

What Does the Word “Culture” Mean Anymore?

April 15, 2024 By Anne Kennedy

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I’m wondering if it’s time to get rid of the word “culture” and replace it with something more interesting and true to reality, like “meme” or “miasma.” I use the word myself a lot because it’s so handy. But I am tiring of its elasticity and its ubiquity. Two weeks ago, I said something like, “no functional culture would countenance such a thing” and a lot of people became extremely angry. Then I read a book full of the terms... Read more

The Only Command With A Promise

April 8, 2024 By Anne Kennedy

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The best thing about getting older, as far as I can tell, is forgetting things. I am the mother of six children, and I can’t remember anything–their birth weights, where I left my keys, what I used to make them for breakfast, or what I did when they were wicked. This, I find, is a blessed kind of amnesia, affording me plausible deniability, the chance to be reminded by their narration of the past, and a sweet haze of affection... Read more

Unless It Dies

March 18, 2024 By Anne Kennedy

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As many of you know, I’ve been irritated by Glennon Doyle’s mischaracterization of the concept of self-sacrifice ever since I read Untamed, however many years ago. The manner in which she twisted the idea of dying to the self for the sake of another as though it were a bad thing vexed me so that every now and then, I think about it again and become annoyed. This weekend I gained a small measure of understanding about why, indeed, and... Read more

A Happy Mistake

March 11, 2024 By Anne Kennedy

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It occurred to me yesterday that Easter is just around the corner. For some reason, even though it is so early this year, I had in my mind that it was a long way off. Plus, I have been distracted by watching too many reels on too many platforms. My current favorite is this person, who I found on Facebook, who cooks enormous amounts of food for her nine children and makes it look like the opposite of a chore,... Read more