Print from "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" by Kay Nielsen, 1914 Author's Note: I was so grateful and honored to be asked to give a sermon on the subject of story for the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in May 2021. I know I'm a lazy blogger, but I'm far from a lazy writer. This assignment was a gift of grace that helped me to process some ideas that have been floating around in my brain for quite a while now. I've included the reading I chose from Margaret Atwood's short story, "Happy Endings," as a preface to the sermon. In a season where we all have a chance to think ..read more

Sermon given Sunday, December 13, 2020 for Magic ValleyUnitarian Universalist Fellowship Zoom Worship Service I am so grateful to be here with you virtually today and look forward to the time when we can be together again in physical space. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts about this month’s theme: stillness. Like many of us during this year of global pandemic and tremendous change, I have begun to categorize my life into the Before Time and the Now. As some background, I’m a mother of four children (two in college, two still in high school), a wife, a community c ..read more

Ready or Not, the Future Is Now—and It Doesn’t Have to Be Dystopian Photo by bongkarn thanyakij from Pexels Many of us in higher education received emails last week about either taking our classes online or preparing to do so. If you’re anxious about the next several weeks, imagine how your students are feeling! Many of them have avoided online classes or have had a negative experience with one in the past. For context, I teach hybrid, face-to-face, and online classes in an open-access community college where many of my students are already at risk, and last week, I co ..read more

Why I went an entire year without posting to my blog Well, I mean, no one reads your blog anyway, right? A year ago today in 2018, I was fidgeting on the examination table at my ob/gyn’s office, a paper drape wrapped awkwardly around my legs. I take these women ‘s health things pretty seriously; in 2012, I was diagnosed with Stage 0 cervical cancer (or carcinoma in situ), which really isn’t as serious as it sounds, but when you’ve just lost your job and your health insurance like I had, anything with the word “cancer” can seem pretty darn scary. I had avoided the dreaded pap smear f ..read more

Image from http://voteblue.blogspot.com/  Why Voting Blue Is the Right Thing to Do for Compassionate Conservative Republican Women If you ask me why I’m a registered Republican, I can answer with two words: liberty and opportunity. For me, since I was young, liberty and opportunity have been my definition of the American Dream. While I identify with traditional conservatives on many issues like free trade and disdain for big government, I also consider myself socially liberal, with justice as my main political concern. The truth is, like most Americans, I am actually some ..read more

Madam Mao Tells a Cautionary Tale about What Happens to Women Who Seek Power The story could have been taken straight from the U.S. 2016 presidential election headlines. A powerful former first lady seeks to follow in her husband’s political footsteps, but instead of assuming the nation’s highest office, she is destroyed by chants of “Lock her up!”  While Hillary Clinton’s lofty political aspirations merely ended in retirement after a stunning Electoral College defeat, Jiang Qing faced an actual life behind bars after the death of her husband, Chairman Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader wh ..read more

Star Wars and the Hero's Journey by Rachel Scheller,  Telling Stories that Matter This is the text of a sermon I delivered to the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (BUUF) on Sunday, July 22, 2018. I teach a popular online course at the College of Western Idaho called “Survey of World Mythology.”[1]Every semester, my students start the course thinking that they are going to learn about Zeus, Hera, and maybe Thor—and in all fairness, Thor is why I initially wanted to teach the course. About three weeks in, we get to the part where I introduce Jesus as just one o ..read more

Families belong together https://www.familiesbelongtogether.org/  Thoughts on Kant, Fox News, the Bible, and the Separation of Children and Families at the Border Dear Conservative Friend, I am taking the time to write this to you after unfriending you on Facebook so that you will understand that I share your sorrow at losing a lifetime of close friendship over a single U.S. government policy: the decision by the Trump administration to separate children seeking asylum from their families at the border. However, while I believe that reasonable people can and should disagr ..read more

x It’s easy to blame mental illness, but we fail to mention that treatment works and recovery is possible for many. For mothers of teenagers like me, news about a school shooting never gets any easier. We experience the same dread, the same despair, the same fear that someone will attack our children’s school. In between mass shootings, we drill our children on what they would do. We check on their social media accounts. We try to pretend that there’s some sense of safety in a world that always seems full of random, unpredictable violence. I’m the mom CNN used to call whenever there was ..read more

Cosmic Webs, Neurological Disorders, and Human Compassion Image credit: GUI.Brush Blog, http://www.codres.de/2013/01/cosmic-web-vs-brain-neural-network On a recent Friday evening, I took my 12-year-old daughter to a free Boise State University public astronomy lecture presented by Dr. Christy Tremonti,  assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who leads a sky-scanning spectrometry project to map the chemical composition of galaxies. If Walt Whitman had heard this learned astronomer, I promise he would not have been bored and wandered outside to stargaze. With v ..read more