"The raw now is where your elbows live, and your bruises, and your socks slipping down your ankles. It is what cannot be recovered later; the strap of your bag that has flopped over your grave Italian seat mate’s programme; the fear that you have left the sound on your phone on; a text from Hope: ‘You’re about to meet the pope!’ It is the point, probably, of the hair shirt and the cilice that we saw in the Capuchin crypt. Your awkwardness, the edge of confusion, irritation, pain, incomprehension on the pope’s face as you approach him, your hand circling your tummy, clashes of bodies, like beads against one another, which will be worn smooth over time."
"If I asked a teenager to create an Animal Crossing Island with a farm aesthetic, they might create something close to what Ballerina Farm looks like." [...] "... Mormon culture often tells girls they should grow up to be something kind of like an AGA. Always on. Divided into compartments — one that is ready to receive whatever needs warming, one that is always prepared to produce something sustaining. A surface that is not too hot to the touch. But enough warmth to extend to all the people in the space around you, all the while burning through more fuel than you can shake a damn stick at."
"Kim explains that since the religion prioritizes women marrying and starting families young, blogging has become a natural outlet for people to share their domestic lives, all with a coat of glamour. And it allows them to generate income without having to compromise their duties at home. The way Mormon women have used the internet to manage these basic needs has come to define a huge portion of the influencer culture we consume and criticize today."
"Icons are not primitive or rudimentary attempts to duplicate the physical world; they are nuanced and complex attempts to embody the spiritual world."
"It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern."
'[W]e can certainly identify which political and social realities must be abhorrent to a Christian conscience: a cultural ethos that not only permits but encourages a life of ceaseless acquisition as a kind of moral good; a legal regime subservient to the corporatist imperative of maximum profits, no matter what the methods employed or consequences produced; a politics of cruelty, division, national identity, or any of the countless ways in which we contrive to demarcate the sphere of what is rightfully “ours” and not “theirs.”' via https://www.metafilter.com/182022/has-filled-the-hungry-with-good-things-and-sent-the-rich-away-starving
"The popular misunderstanding, even among educated people, that Islam and Muslims are recent additions to America tells us important things about how American history has been written. In particular, it reveals how historians have justified and celebrated the emergence of the modern nation-state. One way to valorise the United States of America has been to minimise the heterogeneity and scale – the cosmopolitanism, diversity and mutual co-existence of peoples – in America during the first 300 years of European presence." also "‘New England’s business is cod not God!’"