COVID 19
March 1, 2023 | Lukas Bacho SM ‘25
Though the season of Lent brings the drama of wandering the wilderness to the fore of our spiritual lives, the liminal state the desert represents never seems too far off. As I write this, I sit isolated in my dorm room with COVID-19, having taken my health for granted just days ago. Though my lack of symptoms and the low number of cases on campus are signs of how far we’ve come in three years, the to-go boxes piled up by my door and the KN-95 mask on my desk are grim reminders of what we all lived through if we were lucky. Yes, isolation has been a nuisance. But I’d be lying if I said this social fasting hasn’t provided welcome time to decelerate, catch up on work, and take stock of my life—this minor wilderness recalling other wildernesses, from the pandemic and even earlier, right in time for Lent.
March 4, 2022 | By Stephen McNulty PM ‘25
There is something about the desert — as a site of temptation, but also as one of opportunity — that pervades Biblical literature. After all, after the Lord delivers the Israelites from Egypt, their story isn’t one of “milk and honey,” per se. Instead, it’s a story of wandering.
January 20, 2022 | By Raquel Sequeira TD ‘21.5
“I’ve never felt as dependent as I am today on shaky data to make what could be life or death decisions.” I was struck reading the words of Dr. Neel Shah, an obstetrician describing what it’s like to care for pregnant patients in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. [1] As I watch the world through my internet browser, scientific facts seem to flip-flop like pundits. A graph of biotech stocks, responding to daily progress reports from the companies racing to produce a vaccine, might as well be tracking the sentiments of Facebook users as each new pandemic model urges hope or despair.
November 7, 2021 | By Shi Wen Yeo MC ‘23
One of my favourite parts about Sunday mornings is walking into church and smelling the musty pews gently speckled with the mid-morning sun, and seeing the rows upon rows of pews, pews that are usually littered with hymnals and psalters. I have been doing some reflection on this recently. What does it mean that hymnals or psalters are usually distributed as separate books as opposed to the rest of the Bible?
March 11, 2021 | By Justin Ferrugia TD ‘23+1
Lent is a quarantine—literally. The word “quarantine” comes from the Italian expression for the period in which any ship sailing to Venice had to stay anchored away from port during the time of plague. Quaranta Giorni: Forty Days.
March 6, 2021 | By Shayley Martin DC ‘22
God wrote His law on my heart but it feels dry erase.
Feb 24, 2021 | By Taylor Plett ‘21+1
What does it mean to be in the wilderness?
I spent a good hunk of 2020 moving between ranches in the Great Plains states—a near-nomadic stint of life in literal wilderness. It was an accidental metaphor for the world at large during a global pandemic. I can draw some parallels.
Dec 10, 2020 | By Serena Puang DC ‘22+1
Before coronavirus moved church online, Ben Stuart stood outside the Howard Theatre every weekend he preached there. He’d greet people as they left the service, answer questions they had about the talk, and hear about their lives. Any random person could just walk up and chat with him. I know because I was one of those people.
Nov 23, 2020 | By Ashley Talton BR ‘23
Over the past two years, I have lived in three different places. I’m never really sure which to call my home anymore. One of them is the tiny town I grew up in, that I spent fifteen years in, and since March, I’ve been here again. Another is Durham, North Carolina, the city I lived in for my junior and senior years of high school as I attended the residential school, the North Carolina School of Science and Math. I loved living in Durham, and in those two short years, it became my home.
Sept 20, 2020 | By Serena Puang DC ‘22 + 1
I came across “Not in a Hurry” at an Augustine Collective Conference in January, which now feels a world away. I was struck then by the lyrics because not being “in a hurry” is antithetical to my life at Yale. I am in a hurry! In fact, I rarely even listen to music because I’m in such a hurry that I don’t have time. After quarantine started, my extracurriculars and places to go were gone. I did the math, and between commuting and extracurriculars that no longer existed, I was allegedly saving 23 hours per week, but I was still rushing around.
Sept 13, 2020 | By Shi Wen Yeo MC ‘23
It was just after midnight last night. There were raucous shouts coming from Cross Campus. I craned my neck out the window and beheld throngs of college students mere inches from each other, merry-making, to celebrate the end of their two-week quarantine. I can almost imagine the conversations going on (at a distance of less than six feet, of course). “I was SO bored during quarantine. I want to live the full, real college life that I deserve, not this subpar quarantined version.”
December 15, 2023 | Lily Lawler BK ‘23
During the winter months when the world is pulled into the deep sleep of hibernation, we look to the beginning of spring as a time for us to emerge from our rest into the light of longer days. The year is a breathing body moving between seasons of rest and productivity. But the world around us has turned it into a grinding machine that churns out work non-stop and year-round without fail. We have become trained to think about our lives like a perpetual season of spring, all fruit and flower with no room for barrenness.