Hello there, dear reader. I’m Kate.

I’m a writer, speaker, and culture enthusiast currently living in Seattle. I’m at once a God lover and an ambivalent member of the Christian community. I’m Kingdom-focused in a way that’s firmly rooted in life on this planet. I struggle with despair and am regularly surprised to find that the words that come from my hands are brimming with hope.

Welcome to my blog.

This space is where I write out the astonishingly hopeful connections I’m finding at the intersection of theology and culture.

It’s a pretty frequent occurrence for me to mumble short phrases in movies. During a scene early on in Mad Max: Fury Road I leaned to my friend and whispered, “the crucifixion.” In Room, the whisper was: “Jack is Job.” In Song of the Sea: “incarnation.”

So the blog started, in part, to give me an outlet for these thoughts in a format that’s a bit louder than whispers.

It’s not only in movies that these connections exist; the metaphors of Christianity are all over the place in our culture. Theology is happening everywhere. Our understandings of God are in our books, our movies, our politics, our lives. With each piece of culture I engage, I find myself excitedly telling others about what performance art teaches us about prophets, what a song reveals to be true about the incarnation, how selfies are a soul-challenging spiritual practice.

At some point, you’d think I’d stop being surprised that God keeps showing up in the culture I live in. But I’m still surprised. So I keep writing about it as a way to process and articulate, to make real sense of what I intuitively sense.

My writing practice helps me on my faith journey, and perhaps some of my reflections help you on yours as well.

Perhaps you’re not a believer or you’ve been burned by the Church, and you’re trying to figure out what Christians find to be “relevant” about some guy who died two thousand years ago. Perhaps you’re a Christian seeking to deepen your understanding of God through more intentionally engaging the movies you watch and the books you read.

Either way, I hope that the words and resources on this site help you engage your culture in ways that expand and deepen your experience of the divine. I hope to help you learn to read culture as a means to understand God. I hope to help your understanding of God be influenced by the world you live in, and help your daily life to be infused with an awareness of the divine presence. I hope to help you metabolize the cultural narratives that are shaping your life through interpreting what they reveal about our humanity and our God.

My hope is that this blog increasingly becomes a gathering place of culture-lovers seeking to question, discuss, and understand the culture we live in.

A place of spiritually aware beings looking for the ways the divine shows up in our world and lives every day. A place of thoughtful feelers and emotionally aware thinkers. A place of quotidian ministers tending our sanctuary.

The easiest way to stay connected is to sign up for the newsletter, which also gives you access to the free library of resources to help you engage your culture in ways that deepen your relationship with the divine.

You can also connect on Facebook, twitter, and tumblr.

Some Core Beliefs

• I believe that Theology is happening everywhere. We’re working out our understandings of God with every story we tell, whether that story is a multi-million-dollar blockbuster on every screen in the country or a story told about something that happened on a playground twenty years ago.
• I believe the Christian tradition is a living tradition. Scripture is relevant. Theology is worked out in our very lives. Holiness surpasses the walls of the sanctuary and is present in our libraries and cinemas. Spiritual practices sustain us, practices including both prayer and pop concerts. Symbols are an unavoidable part of our lives, so we must make some kind of meaning with them.
• I believe story-telling is among the most deeply formative of human activities, whether those stories are told via book pages, film, or spoken word.
• I believe that culture is our collective quest to understand our humanity and our God. We can discern culture’s dominant understandings of God through thoughtful and emotionally engaged examination, and get glimpses of what God is up to in and through culture’s use of symbols.
• I believe the Triune God is alive and well and working towards the flourishing of all humanity.

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Credentials & Life Facts

The credentials: I earned a Masters in Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology and hold bachelors degrees in English Language & Literature and Spanish Language & Literature with an emphasis in Marginality & Difference.

I currently work with St Luke’s Episcopal Church, where I’m developing a contextualized learning program, among other things. St Paul’s Episcopal Church is my home parish as I continue the process of ordination to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church.

I also preach at some other Seattle churches and speak at events and retreats. For a full list of where I’ve preached and published, see my publications page.

In addition to reading and writing, I regularly spend time running, hiking, practicing yoga, planning travel adventures, knitting, sailing, and hosting slow dinners with good people.

For those of you interested in this kind of thing: I’m an ENTJ (The Leader, Executive, or Commander), Enneagram 1 (The Reformer/Perfectionist), with a 9 wing (The Idealist).

My husband Keller is a web developer — he helped build this site (thanks, Keller!). Our dog is known on Instagram as #OliverIke and contributes to our work through boosting morale and encouraging regular walk breaks.