Caroline McTeer is a San Diego-based writer and has been published in Sojourners, The Bitter Southerner, Litro, and elsewhere.
Posts By This Author
Experiencing God in All Her Specific, Maternal Power
The Black Madonna of Czestochowa in the Polish church of Paris. Photo: Godong / Alamy
Teresa Kim Pecinovsky's Mother God and Christena Cleveland's God Is a Black Woman offer different portraits of a feminine God whose powerful love reshapes the world.
Why I Can’t Stop Watching ‘Righteous Gemstones’ Absurd Pastors
Danny McBride’s HBO show "The Righteous Gemstones" is a dark comedy about corrupt, hyper-wealthy Christian pastors.
Danny McBride’s HBO show The Righteous Gemstones is a dark comedy about corrupt, hyper-wealthy Christian pastors. The Gemstone family runs a famously successful megachurch in South Carolina, but behind the scenes, they evade taxes, snort cocaine, pull knives on their friends, bicker like filthy-mouthed children, and say things like, “You are forgiven for my suspicions of you.” And though they all live in mansions on the same compound, patriarch Eli Gemstone and his three adult children — Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin — generally only come together in spirit when they need to ward off blackmailers, snoops, and evil grifters from their past: anyone who might reveal their secrets or jeopardize the family’s wealth-hoarding.
The Subversive, Sapphic Spiritual Lives of Nuns in ‘Matrix’
‘The Vale of Rest’ by Sir John Everett Millais, Bt. Oil paint on canvas, 1858-1859. Photo via Tate / CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)
In Lauren Groff’s newest novel, Matrix, monastic life in the High Middle Ages serves as a stunning backdrop for the story of Marie, a nun who feels “her greatness hot in her blood.” Marie arrives at an English abbey as a reluctant teenager, at the appointment of her queen, Eleanor, who expects Marie to become abbess and save the Crown from the public shame of a royal abbey where nuns die of starvation and disease.
How Religion Primes Us to Think God Is On Our Side
Photo by Tajmia Loiacono on Unsplash
I knew there were Christian slaveholders, Christian Nazis, and Christians who opposed the civil rights movement, but in my mind, these people were “Christians” — with scare quotes. These so-called Christians, I imagined, were either conscious hypocrites, using the guise of Christianity to seize and maintain power, or mindless followers of the status quo who never devoted real attention to prayer and scripture.