Place matters Archives – year of small things

Let’s talk about public schools (also, did you enter that Goodreads giveaway yet?!)

January 17, 2018Erin Wasinger

The conversation we started in The Year of Small Things wasn’t meant to end with the last page. (We’re living the sequel. Welcome to the version without the editor.) That conversation we started on money? Still having it. The hospitality one? Part of the Arthurs’ everyday life. Oh, and the schools one, the kid monasticism one — all still occupying our thoughts.

Especially that school one.

In the last few months, we’ve been discerning together where our kids should go to school. Again. We’ve asked questions about decisions we’ve made. Again. We’ve made a list of schools, again. I’m talking about segregated schools and school choice and district boundaries, again. The thing about discernment is that it can be a lot of “agains,” so here we are.

Around kitchen tables, through volunteering, through social media, in relationships, we’re talking about feeling conflicted about our values and our choices. To really love our city in an incarnational, live-there way, shouldn’t our kids be educated here, where we live?

This year I (Erin) want to amplify this conversation about equity and relationships and what makes an education “good.” One way I’m doing that is with the new series Passing Notes, where I and guest writers will be talking about our public-school choices (because choosing “the school no one sends their kids to” is also a choice). Subscribe to the Passing Notes newsletter here to follow the voices in this conversation.

And if this conversation is yours, too — where should our kids go to school, especially if we live in the city — let us know. Comment below or post in our Facebook group. Let’s talk about this thing.

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OH! OH! And don’t forget to enter the Goodreads giveaway to win a copy of The Year of Small Things: Radical Faith for the Rest of Us. The contest ends Jan. 30, so get your entry in before everyone else. (Ha!)

Year of Small Things: 10 things to know

November 29, 2016November 29, 2016Erin Wasinger

Where did the idea for The Year of Small Things come from?

As Sarah tells in more detail in The Year of Small Things: Radical Faith for the Rest of Us, when she and Tom transitioned from a “new monastic” community in the inner city (a Christian household that included homeless guests) to a suburban parsonage, they struggled to translate their former “radical” practices into their new not-so-radical setting.

How to find your people (Hint: at church)

September 16, 2016November 4, 2016Erin Wasinger

Dave and I didn’t have a lifelong mission statement, unlike some other people.

We married and had three kids in rapid succession. Since 2008, our lifelong ambition has been to hide the frozen yogurt from the kids.

On the spectrum of radical faith — with Jesus on one end and a bag of marshmallows on the other — Tom and Sarah have been edging ever closer to Jesus since before they were Tom and Sarah. On the other hand, Dave and I simply lived in a succession of beige-walled apartments and one cute single-family house, from Toledo to Lansing by way of Wisconsin.

We spent weeks at our newspaper jobs; weekends doing laundry and watching TV. We have never been arrested for demonstrating outside the Capitol. We haven’t had anyone stay at our house longer than a week or so.

Well, except our children. Do they count?

This was new monasticism before ‘The Irresistible Revolution’

September 14, 2016October 25, 2016Sarah Arthur

Lunch. Simply lunch, spurred into being by that announcement at Asbury Temple UMC.

Innocuous enough, and yet life-changing for the Arthurs. I won’t go into how we fell in love with not only the household but the vision, how we prayed, and talked, and came over for more meals. Suffice it to say, by fall semester we did not renew our lease on the one-bedroom near Duke.

We moved into the ‘hood–and stayed. For three years we shared a household with other community members committed to simplicity, hospitality, sustainability, and reconciliation—as well as with women and children in transition out of homelessness.

One lunch, one mission: desegregate ourselves by race and by class

September 13, 2016October 25, 2016Sarah Arthur

You know that feeling of regional vertigo, when you’ve been traveling so long that when you climb out of the car or step off the plane you can barely remember your own name, much less what state or country you’re in?

Maybe you’re hungry, and you think, “I’ll just grab a burrito from Cosmic Cantina on the way to the hotel,” and then you realize that Cosmic Cantina is roughly 867 miles away, and you haven’t a clue where to get food around here. Yeah, that. In addition to the bodily weirdness of traveling so far, there’s now a mini existential crisis, a spiritual displacement, as if your very identity, including the God you worship, is now up for grabs.

All because you walk on unfamiliar ground. Which is another way of saying that place matters.

From the inner city to a suburb the Arthurs would call ‘home’

September 12, 2016October 25, 2016Sarah Arthur

“I think we’re almost there,” I (Sarah) said, hands at ten and two on the wheel of the moving truck we had called home for the past thirty hours. As we eased down the suburban-country road south of Lansing, Michigan that Memorial Day morning seven years ago, our rusty Subaru trailering behind us, Tom and I gazed with interest out the truck windows. A newish subdivision, a church or two. Two farm stands (hooray!), followed by a barn with pygmy goats, and then more subdivisions. Garage sale signs by the dozens. Bus stops. Most properties well-manicured, even picturesque. And then–unexpectedly–a trailer park, across from which we read the sign for yet another subdivision, “English Meadows.”