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One Eye Squinted

Replacing vengeance with mercy in our death penalty policy
By Karen Swallow Prior — March 7, 2023
(RNS) — The troubling case of Andre Thomas invites a closer look at all the factors that play a part in the death penalty.

Grace Community Church let her down. Now she is standing in the gap for women.
By Karen Swallow Prior — February 16, 2023

Not all who harm the church are wolves. Some are renegade sheep.
By Karen Swallow Prior — February 2, 2023
More from One Eye Squinted

The alienation of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ at 100, has come to feel like home
By Karen Swallow Prior — December 13, 2022
(RNS) — The December birthday ‘The Waste Land’ shares with Christmas foreshadows the Easter that is to come.

We got here because too many good people put their head in the sand
By Karen Swallow Prior — November 7, 2022
(RNS) — Negligence is not only a vice — sometimes it’s a crime.

We can be an army of wounded warriors — or a collective of wounded healers
By Karen Swallow Prior — October 18, 2022
(RNS) — To be human is to be wounded, one way or another. Those hurts can be wielded in ways that further wound or in ways that help heal.

The scandal of evangelical Christian friendship
By Karen Swallow Prior — September 9, 2022
(RNS) — Christians more than anyone else ought to have the most robust and healthiest understanding of friendship, including, or especially, those between men and women.

A tight job market is a chance for Christians to rethink work
By Karen Swallow Prior — August 2, 2022
(RNS) — 'Ministry' is not defined by who signs our paycheck.

Can the Southern Baptist Convention be saved?
By Karen Swallow Prior — June 24, 2022
(RNS) — ‘Look for the helpers,’ said Mister Rogers, but right now in the SBC we need to look for the humble.

Overturning Roe v. Wade inches us back toward the arc of justice
By Karen Swallow Prior — May 3, 2022
(RNS) — Overturning Roe v. Wade will put abortion laws back at the state level, which only means that pro-life work is far from over.

Living with your parents — intentionally — can be life-giving
By Karen Swallow Prior — April 27, 2022
(RNS) — Multigenerational living doesn’t have to mean living in the basement.

Language is hard: Are you sure they mean what you think they mean?
By Karen Swallow Prior — March 30, 2022
(RNS) — Caring for each other includes the humility of accepting that we understand each other and our words only in part.

Let schoolkids read ‘Maus,’ lest they don’t read at all
By Karen Swallow Prior — February 7, 2022
(RNS) — The power books have is not in what they tell, but how they tell.

Being pro-life demands sacrifice — for a pandemic, too
By Karen Swallow Prior — January 25, 2022
(RNS) — It is not asking too much — in fact, it’s really the bare minimum — for those of us who believe we are justified in asking a woman to sacrifice much to preserve a life growing inside her body to inconvenience our own bodies by wearing a piece of cloth.

Childless at Christmas
By Karen Swallow Prior — December 16, 2021
(RNS) — Some holiday traditions offer particular challenges to those who aren’t part of a nuclear family at Christmas, challenges the rest of us might not even imagine.
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Karen Swallow Prior
One Eye Squinted
“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” — Flannery O’Connor, 1953 — Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is Research Professor of English and Christianity and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. She is the author of several books, including On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018). Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things and Vox, among others. She and her husband live on a 100-year old homestead in central Virginia with sundry horses, dogs and chickens. And lots of books.

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