One Eye Squinted
Not all who harm the church are wolves. Some are renegade sheep.
By Karen Swallow Prior — February 2, 2023
(RNS) — The distinction makes a difference.
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.
Truth, justice and the torturing of tolerance
By Karen Swallow Prior — November 3, 2021
(RNS) — Too many in the church have tolerated too much for too long.
‘Cosplay Christianity’: The sin is in the denial of the life God calls us to
By Karen Swallow Prior — October 13, 2021
(RNS) — Sometimes it’s as deadly serious (and ironic) as a riot in which grown men in costumes channel William Wallace in ‘Braveheart’ crying ‘Freedom!’ while attacking the seat of democracy.
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 earned her Ph.D. in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is a popular writer and speaker, as well as a columnist for Religion News Service. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vox, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, and many other places. Her most recent book is The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos, 2023). She and her husband live on a 100-year-old homestead in central Virginia with dogs, chickens and lots of books.