Welcome to this month’s installment of Wrapped.
If you are new here, this is basically like virtually grabbing a cup of coffee with me and I share with you about everything I am reading, watching and thinking about. Rather than avoiding anything touched by the world, here at Jenna’s Column, we seek to find glimpses of the good in all things.
Hi friends. It’s sweet to be in your inboxes, in your Substack feeds…I think that’s it. (Maybe you are accessing this in some other way I don’t know about?)
We are almost a week into April and I keep putting off posting this. That’s mostly because I am either doing homework, laundry, taxes, more homework, or unloading the dishwasher. Along with a whole lot of other fun and really good things, too. But most of it is homework. Lol.
Summer is soon, though. We are only a few weeks away and my soul needs a break! It’s been about a month since I announced that I no longer had the time, nor the emotional bandwidth, to post consistently on Substack. Wow. It has been so freeing. If you missed that post and are wondering where I’ve been, you can read about that here.
I miss talking with you guys, though. I miss writing about things that set my heart on fire! But dang — it has been convicting too. I am humbled by my audience (we are at 4.9k subs!!! what in the world) and I realized how quickly I sent out posts. I look forward to having more margin, and letting more discernment (and editing) take place.
But my goal for so long was to keep writing, but now that I have a writing job (thanks to my boss for discovering me on Substack) I can focus on the quality of my work more. Yay!!!!
So, thank you for reading Jenna’s Column. However you find yourself today, I hope my recommendations bless you. <3 comment something that you’ve been loving lately!
*This post is too long for email. Click on the title to read this in your browser or read it in the Substack app!
Articles, Substack Posts/Notes & Poems that I want to show you!
What I wrote this month:
Essays
Why I am anti-anti-aging — on accepting my good and ordinary body
I have been haunted by anti-aging marketing. It always leaves me feeling icky, ugly and (if I’m honest) a little psycho. This essay was born from those feelings, plus grounding them in scripture <3 my speciality lol
For some women, changing their bodies with a GLP-1 or some Botox may have an individual psychological benefit. I don’t doubt it. Here’s my sticking point: after so many of these individual choices, the collective result is that our societal expectations of what a good body is become warped.
I wish we could look at a woman’s body and just let them have wrinkles and rolls.
I wish we could celebrate that God called this vessel good, and that goodness is inherent, that it can not change as you expand or deflate, but that it is just that, good. Very good, actually.
Devotionals
Taking a break... — some updates about Jenna’s Column <3
Linked above, but here’s where I am at! Taking a break!
Because I am always thinking through a million ideas, the weekly devotional made a lot of sense. Plus, I wanted to start monetizing my Substack, which has been such a gift. That additional post is fun for me to write, but I feel an invitation from the Lord to push past my inclination to immediately write about whatever I have learned in prayer, in my grad school reading (the most common culprit), or in class! I feel Him guiding me into a slower season of deeper intimacy with Him, and I think that will require a new kind of hiddenness from me.
I want to write about faith and spirituality for the foreseeable future. It is my life’s dream and it’s my favorite thing to do! I also love to stick to a deadline and a goal so this feels REALLY HARD. Removing deadlines and moving goal posts feels so unnatural! But I have found myself missing my weekly devotional deadlines lately and falling behind on my monthly essay + curation post. (Don’t worry, those are sticking around!)
Cool things other people wrote
7 Points of Wisdom for Physical Boundaries in Dating by Marc Sims
Christians are so weird when it comes to talking about boundaries. It feels like there is no spectrum between waiting to kiss on your wedding day and casually sleeping with your partner. This post was so helpful in outlining the harmful ideas we can get in our heads about sex when we have boundaries, along with some practical tips.
Like many fine-points of life, the Bible doesn’t appear to give us granular directions on exactly what to do in setting physical boundaries in dating. Instead, it provides clear prohibitions on premarital sex, and then general principles for us to apply with wisdom in our particular situations. I want the bulk of this article to be on considering wise principles, but let’s begin with what the Bible is abundantly clear on…
The Tyranny of the ‘Christian Experience’ by Michael Jensen
This essay engages a conversation that needs to be had more often in our churches and outside of them: What do I do when I don’t sense God’s presence? Of course, we know that God never leaves us, but there seem to be times in our lives (and in others) when he quiets. Things go still, and we wonder what to do. In these vulnerable deserts and painful plateaus, it is easy to panic, but no need. We kindly need to be reminded that our feelings, while important to attend to, do not determine our place with God—Jesus does.
The truth of God’s being and the truth of the gospel is not dependent on the vividness of my inner life. Rather we receive these realities through the prism of personality - in weakness, in ecstasy, in dullness, in numbness, in joy, and even when God seems absent. The absence of intense feeling is not the absence of God.
Books I recently read or am reading (sometimes a review) and a recommendation from my library. Let’s be friends on GoodReads!
Read
Nonfiction
GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything by Freya India
I have never read a book and felt so seen in my whole friggin life. If you wonder about what it was like to grow up on social media (like I did)—this is a MUST read. It highlights the difficulties that girls are facing today, and what we can (try) to do to mitigate the damage.
I know we often beat the dead horse in terms of “social media is harmful!” here on Substack, but truly, after reading this, you’ll want to throw your phone in a river and deactivate your Instagram account, but at the same time call your niece and check in on her. GIRLS® was the wake-up call I needed, and it might be for you, too.
Now, exposing even the most intimate information about themselves is not only normal but expected. Girls are growing up watching influencers market their memories, monetize their relationships, even commodify their own children, and they have never known any different. Some simply cannot conceive of living life without an audience consuming it.
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher & Sara Gilliam
For my job at a Christian non-profit, I am doing a project on the erasure of teen/tween culture this quarter. It’s been so interesting to look at girlhood specifically, and adolescence more broadly. This was one of the books I read for my research!!
I have so many thoughts, but this book was so informative! It was originally written about adolescence in the 90s, but the author (and her daughter) wrote an updated edition in 2019, in light of social media and such. It is decidedly secular, but it has a lot of helpful information. The author is a therapist, but is very practical and does not attribute any difficulty or quirk to pathology, which is a rare find in our therapeutic age.
When contemporary girls leave home, they know less about coping and resilience than did their counterparts in 1994. ‘Adulting’ is now a verb, and many teens don’t want to do it. They are more risk averse, and many doubt their own basic competency.
The chapters focused on eating disorders I found to be the most helpful. If you disciple girls and love to learn more about psychology, I would definitely recommend this!
NOTICE HOW I DON’T HAVE ANY THEOLOGY BOOKS. I REBELLED. I FELL BEHIND ON MY GRAD SCHOOL READING. Pray 4 me. (Most of my books are due in the middle and at the end of the semester, so thankfully, I read most of them in February, but I still have some chunkers to get through. RIP.)
Fiction
No fiction this month </3 just grad school reading 24/7 !!!
Currently Reading
The Dark Night by St. John of the Cross (pray for me bc I have been procrastinating this)
Beauty, Order and Mystery: A Christian Vision of Human Sexuality by Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson
Seasons of the Soul by Bruce Demarest (finished this early April actually but this is a March wrapped soooo)
Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth (this has been mind-blowing)
Mostly music and movies. Let’s be friends on LetterBoxd.
Music
Playlists I keep going back to:
MARCH 26 — the monthly conglomeration of what I am listening to
G-rated Summer Playlist — bc it is summer yearround here in SoCal
INKWELL 2 — idk where the ‘2’ came in but we made this playlist for our Inkwell event in March and it is a vibe.
Top 3 Songs:
Taste Back by Harry Styles — His new album (are we rlly using the acronym KATDO?) has been on repeat in this house (my car/headphones). Parker likes it too though, so sometimes it is actually playing in our house.
Superstar by Taylor Swift — I have been a huggggeeee Fearless girl this month. Idk, just my vibe lately, I guess. This song was always a skip for me, but now I am literally obsessed with it. Whoop. Whoop.
Good Legs by Jensen McRae — Shoutout to my coworker CJ for putting me onto Jensen McRae. She’s INSANELY talented. This track is peak singing my fav song with the windows down vibes.
Movies
Hoppers
5 stars
It is so hard to find a kids’ movie today that actually makes you laugh out loud, but wow. This one, guys. It’s great. If I had any downtime to spare at all I would go to the theatre right now to see it again. That’s how funny and pure and hilarious this was. I unironically said, “this is the best movie I have ever seen” after seeing it, which tells you everything you need to know.
Tbh, I think going into this movie blind is ideal. Because if I try to explain it you are going to get confused. So, just go with it—trust me.
Project Hail Mary
4 stars (I feel like if I re-watched it I would give it 4.5, but the pacing felt slow, I’m sorry!!! but honestly I still rlly loved it)
Ryan Gosling, you and your darling sweaters. Ugh. Guys, this movie was truly a delight. If you liked the Superman movie that came out over the summer, you are going to love this! It has the same upbeat, refreshingly earnest vibe from a main character dude you would expect to be kind of the worst.
As somebody who is deeply afraid of space, but who also would say Interstellar is in my top 3 favorite movies, I implore you to see this film. It is delightful, it is fun. The pacing is a little off (it feels a wee long), but it is overall worth the price of a movie ticket, which nowadays, can not be said for a lot of movies. Space movies in theaters are great. Even if you don’t care about the plot, just look at the fake stars and smile, ya know?
The section where I tap the shoulder of writers and thinkers I love, so you can get a taste of writing that is good, true and beautiful! When I don’t have time to edit somebody’s work, I simply pop some pondering of my own here.
Losing Faith in Universalism by Evan Barber
In my junior year of college, I tried, and failed, to convince myself of the doctrine of universal salvation.
I had a friend named Christy, who was in the process of walking away from her faith. Among other things, she was struggling with the idea that God would send people like her friend Anna (an atheist) to burn in Hell forever just because she didn’t believe in Jesus. So, I reasoned at the time, if I could convince Christy to believe in universalism—and that ultimately no-one goes to Hell—then she might stay a Christian. After all, there are some verses in the Bible that kind of sound like that, and according to a couple of articles I quickly found on Google, early church fathers like Origen probably believed in universalism too.
Christy wasn’t convinced. And I have to wonder whether the casualness with which I was willing to throw away one of the doctrines of the faith made her doubt the substantiality of the whole thing even more.
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But for a while afterward, and partially for her sake, I tried to make myself believe in universalism. Why did 1 Timothy 4:10 refer to God as “the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe”? Could it mean that God really does save everyone, and that those who believe are just in a special category? I tried to stitch together a new view of the afterlife, linking out of context verses in my mind from across the Old and New Testaments—thinking, half-consciously, that I might save my friend from Hell by convincing her not to believe in it.
Around this time, in a simple act of faith, my little brother asked if he could practice his gospel presentation on me. At one point, he held up a ballpoint pen and asked, “If I offer you this pen, what do you have to do to receive it?” And the answer was, “You have to take it.” In other words, the pen—and metaphorically, salvation—was not the sort of thing that would get forced onto us apart from our consent. The idea was that we had to consciously accept it.
There’s a lot that I still don’t understand about how all of that goes—and frankly, about what happens to people like my friend Christy. But I realize that on the whole, I had been tempted to judge God by my idea of Hell—instead of judging Hell by my idea of God. What did I already know about who God is? What did I already believe about His character? And although years later, I did change my view (to a view called “conditional immortality”), it wasn’t because I felt the need to get God’s character off the hook. My faith didn’t hinge on coming to a particular conclusion, because I already trusted that the Creator of everything was loving, kind, and just—even if I can’t fully wrap my mind around some aspects of what He’s doing.
Evan is a writer, editor, and podcast host based in Colorado Springs, CO. He writes about faith, philosophy, creativity, and culture on his Substack “The Barbershop,” where the overall vibe usually lands somewhere between Nate Bargatze and Søren Kierkegaard.
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Your friend,
I appreciate your book recommendations!
I read Reviving Ophelia for a college class- I agree it’s so informative