“Hello, and welcome to Hallow. We’re grateful to pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary with you today.” This is the first thing that greets me every morning—okay, the second. The first is my alarm clock, but I’ve barely thrown the covers off before I’m being welcomed into prayer with my friendly “Hallow guides”—the voices who guide me through the various prayers and meditations with which I begin my day. If you’re unfamiliar with Hallow, it’s a popular Catholic prayer and meditation app that has taken the world by storm.

For me, every day starts with three things: Hallow, my rosaries, and a strong cup of coffee. Most weekdays my getting ready for work routine is itself an act of prayer to center myself as I prepare to greet whatever the day brings. I’m either praying the Rosary while making the bed or listening to the Daily Reflection with Bible scholar Jeff Cavins while brushing my teeth. Abby and the Daily Saint keep me company with my coffee, and sandwiched somewhere in between, Jonathan prays with me through the morning offering, St. Michael prayer, and litany of humility.

Whenever non-Catholics or non-Christians ask me about my faith, I generally respond that I was “born Catholic.” This statement is, of course, technically incorrect. I’m what we typically term a “cradle Catholic” since I was baptized at less than two months old, but being raised by parents who were Catholic school teachers and 12 years of Catholic education instilled in me this instinctive sense that being Catholic is somehow baked into my very DNA in the same way as my hair color or ethnic heritage, hence the “born Catholic” statement. I grew up attending Mass. I received my sacraments. I metabolized prayers and doctrine and knew in my bones that I had no reason or desire to question that when I received Holy Communion during Mass, it was the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus. Check, check, check, and yet, I never understood the meaning of a “prayer life,” because if I’m honest, I can’t say I truly had one. I knew Jesus. I believed in him, I loved him, but it was the kind of love one feels for a favorite storybook character. I couldn’t honestly say I had an intimate, personal relationship with him.

Then along came Hallow. I began this journey a little over two years ago, or so my Hallow streak tells me. I started with just the Rosary; then I added a few more prayers, a study of John’s Gospel with Jeff Cavins and Jonathan Roumie (who portrays Jesus on the hit TV series The Chosen), and before I knew it, I was hooked on prayer in a way I’d never been before. I can’t say how long it took for me to notice that the app was logging my daily prayer habit, and the first time I noticed, I admittedly cringed. It felt, somehow, like my resurgence of prayer was being, there’s no other word for it, gamified. What was this anyway? Spiritual baseball? How long was it going to take before I struck out?

I considered turning off the streak setting, but something prevented me. I noticed these small tectonic shifts in my daily routine; instead of reaching for a book with my cup of coffee in the morning, I was reaching for my rosaries. I wasn’t putting off prayer. Even though the feature to set aside daily time for prayer in Hallow is labeled a “routine,” this felt less like routine and more like ritual. I was being held accountable, and because I was, even if an app was taking my prayer attendance, I was showing up.

At first, that was all it was. I was showing up. I was trying, I was getting into the rhythm and building my endurance. Then suddenly I wasn’t just pressing “Play” anymore. I was entering into prayer in a way I never had before—fully, honestly, and completely. Not to say my mind didn’t and doesn’t still wander sometimes; I’m human, but I’m committed. As the streak days ticked upward, as I passed the six-month mark, and then the year mark, I realized that I’d formed a habit of prayer. This wasn’t a game. This was real. What seemed at first to be tracking my prayer the way smart watches track steps was in fact providing the building blocks for a real relationship with Jesus.

It’s hard at this distance to pinpoint when I had my own sort of road-to-Damascus moment, but I think it occurred several weeks after I started praying with Hallow, when I was completing the “Journey through John” challenge with Jeff and Jonathan—a meditation on John’s Gospel. This was, incidentally, around the same time I’d begun watching The Chosen, so being guided through a Gospel meditation by “TV Jesus” (as Jonathan Roumie is affectionately nicknamed) was crystallizing it all for me in a tangible way. Maybe it was the woman at the well. Maybe it was Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus. Maybe it was the moment Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus and hears him call her name in the garden after his resurrection. Wherever it was, somewhere in the middle of it, I fell in love with John’s Gospel because entering that narrative and walking it with Jeff and Jonathan showed me how John narrated his journey of falling in love with Jesus, and I realized that I was falling in love with Jesus too. Maybe quietly, maybe not intensely, but the kindling had been laid, and the flame wasn’t going out.

So, I kept the streak going. When I looked at that number now, it wasn’t a mark on a scoreboard. It was a reminder. A testimonial. It was God saying: you did it. You showed up for me. You brought me your mess, your joy, your confusion, your whatever, and you sat with it and with me. It was also around this time that I started noticing Jesus’s voice (real Jesus, not “TV Jesus”) quietly speaking to me while I prayed the Rosary, particularly the Sorrowful Mysteries, which meditate on Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion. Why those mysteries specifically matters less here than that Jesus was speaking to my heart. One morning, I was praying through a particular difficulty when I heard (with the ear of my heart, in the middle of the second Sorrowful Mystery), “Do you know what your problem is? You think your problems are bigger than me.” Okay, Jesus. Message received. Then, and every now and then ever since, I will sometimes feel (or imagine) him standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders when I pray. I don’t have visions; I don’t hear voices; this is all in my heart, but it’s there, and it’s real.

On it has gone over the last two years—Advent challenges, Lent challenges, deep dives into the lives of the saints, all of it, please, and please, Jesus, can I have some more? Then it happened. Sunday, May 3, 2026, my two-year “Hallow-versary.”. I went through my usual routine. “Thank you for praying with us. We look forward to praying with you again soon.” I reflexively checked my streak before tapping “Done,” and…”1.” Excuse me? 1? I became an English teacher to have a legitimate excuse to be bad at Math, but I knew that was off—way off. “It’s fine,” I told myself. “I know I’ve been showing up for two years straight. Jesus knows I’ve been showing up for two years straight, and he’s not keeping score—not in the competitive sense anyway. So just start over.” But I couldn’t. I felt like I’d lost something—the history, the documentation, the testimonial proof of the habit I’d built. The clock had reset, quite literally, to the beginning of my journey, and I found myself once again asking that question: Do I turn off the streak setting? What does it matter if I keep track?

I suddenly remembered a 2025 Salon article by Amanda Marcotte in which she critiqued, not altogether unreasonably, the gamification of the prayer streak: “At first, Hallow didn’t seem so bad, even though I blanched when it immediately gamified the spiritual experience by congratulating me for maintaining my ‘streak’ of daily usage. (My best was three days ‘praying’ in a row, which falls far short of my workout streak on Apple Fitness).” Marcotte openly admitted that she downloaded Hallow as a non-religious journalist for research purposes, and her observations about the gamification of prayer are merely a sideswipe in an article that critiques other aspects of the app, but the gamification point was the one that stuck. Sideswipe or not, the blow landed hard enough in my brain to still sting over a year later when I saw that streak reset.

Was Marcotte right? Had I been duped? I could almost hear the Bangles taunting me in my head: Was I only dreaming, or was this burning an eternal flame? The answer came to me in a series of counter-questions: Was picking up your rosaries again being duped? Was returning to the Sacrament of Confession after over a decade being duped? Was studying the Catechism with Fr. Mike Schmitz and diving into the Great Adventure Bible study with Jeff Cavins, participating in and gradually taking on leadership roles in church ministry being duped? Answer: no, no, a thousand times no. Was all this possible because of Hallow? Not exclusively, of course, but Hallow brought me to the water, and once I drank, I couldn’t get enough.

While Marcotte makes a reasonable argument about gamification, the argument only scratches the surface, overlooking the transformative work Hallow is doing in people’s prayer lives. Hallow isn’t merely an app that houses prayers and meditations. It fosters a prayer life through building habit and creating community. Users join “community challenges,” prayer campaigns often focused on significant seasons in the Church calendar such as Lent and Advent. We also join to pray for the victims of natural disasters, mass shootings, and other tragedies.

This community is also fostered on a more personal level. For me, as a single person who lives alone, Hallow’s most appealing feature is that every meditation is recorded by a “hallow guide” who prays along with the listener, which lends a deeply personal and communal aspect to prayer. These guides are all Catholic and all walking along the same journey of faith as the rest of us, and they aren’t simply reciting prayers or reading a script. They’re praying with us and for us. In addition to the Hallow team guides like Abby and Francis, there are well-known voices like Jonathan Roumie (AKA “TV Jesus”), Jim Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and singer/songwriter Gwen Stefani of No Doubt fame. Yes, you read that correctly. The voice who belted “I’m just a girl” at my 13-year-old self out of a boombox in my bedroom now prays the Litany to the Most Holy Name of Jesus with me. Make of it what you will.

Critics argue that these “celebrity” guides do little more than draw fans, making it “cool to be Catholic.” Eric Sammons argued on The Crisis Point Podcast that “the only reason they’re on Hallow is that they’re famous.” One element of Hallow that lends an air of familiarity and intimacy to prayer is that each of the guides, including the “celebrity” guides, are designated in the app only by their first names. One might call this a parasocial relationship—a one-sided construct in which a fan feels that they’ve established a connection to a media figure who has no clue they exist.

Yet characterizing Hallow as a parasocial, fan-based interaction grossly undermines the reality. When I pray the Rosary with Jonathan or the St. Michael Chaplet with Jim, I’m not merely listening to someone recite prayers. When they press “Record”, they’re actively entering prayer in the same way we are when we press “Play”. Does being guided through a prayer meditation by actors who portray Jesus on screen enhance the meditation experience? No more than gazing on an image of Jesus or a crucifix. In fact, as a blind person, I particularly value these audio meditations because sacred art is inaccessible to me, and when I hear Jonathan read the Gospels or Jim recite a scriptural meditation on Christ’s seven last words, I’m entering into the narrative of Christ’s life and walking the path he walked for me 2000 years ago.

This is not a parasocial illusion of intimacy. This is prayer, purposeful and powerful. In fact, the Hallow guides frequently choose to record and lead prayers that carry specific significance for them. Take, for example, Jonathan’s devotion to the Surrender Novena—a nine-day prayer meditation that focuses on surrendering everything—worries, struggles, and fears—to Jesus and asking him to “take care of it.” Jonathan has shared on numerous occasions that he discovered this prayer during what he’s described as the lowest moment in his career, when he had no choice but to get on his knees and surrender everything, which eventually led to him being cast in The Chosen. That testimony inspired me to begin the ritual of praying the Surrender Novena in Hallow at the start of every school year, surrendering my work, my responsibilities, and my students into Jesus’s care. Whenever I pray in Hallow and hear those now-familiar voices praying with me and for me, whenever I tap “join” on a prayer challenge and see the thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people praying along with me, I’m reminded of St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 12:26: “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy.”

I’ve also stumbled across various articles during the last year suggesting that I’m not alone in my resurgence. The National Catholic Register reported this past March that dioceses across the country are witnessing an astonishing uptick in their OCIA (Order of Christian Initiation for Adults) programs. In my own home state of Florida, for instance, the Diocese of Venice welcomed 1,072 members into the Church this year. Coincidence? Perhaps. (Only God knows if this is proof or providence). Some of my readers know I’m an academic at heart, and the data needs more unpacking than is called for in this space. For now, I’m just experiencing and witnessing something that, to me, appears quietly miraculous.

On February 18, 2026 (Ash Wednesday) Hallow reached the number 1 spot in the App Store, beating out ChatGPT and WhatsApp, but while the upticks of prayers prayed, streaks held, and app downloads logged might appear to be mere datapoints or scoreboard entries, they’re pointing to something more powerful. They’re a witness to the power of prayer to change lives—one of which was mine.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I did successfully troubleshoot and restore my streak. 773 days strong! (Not that I’m counting or anything, and if Jesus is, I’ll find out eventually).

When I stood at the front of a classroom in 2007 to teach my first English Composition class, I heard one of my favorite lines from “The King and I” echoing in my mind: “It’s a very ancient saying, but a true and honest thought, that if you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught.” I vowed in that moment to always strike a balance between authority and authenticity, to eagerly share my knowledge and subject matter expertise with my students while acknowledging that many of the teachable moments in that room would come from them as they invited me into the vulnerable spaces where learning happens and showed me how to fill those gaps.

Fast-forward to 2022, when my pupil turned out not to be a person, but a chatbot. It’s been nearly four years since ChatGPT burst into our classrooms like Frankenstein’s creature on steroids, and every time I think I’ve cracked the code of AI’s DNA, it has another growth spurt. Yet it would be grossly unfair to say I’ve gained nothing in the struggle. True, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by the constant loop of revising assessments to prevent academic dishonesty from wiggling under the guardrails, but at the heart of effective pedagogy is innovation; we can’t continue to teach the same way we always did as our student populations, needs, and instructional tools evolve. Frustration notwithstanding, the moving goalposts of AI have challenged me to be a better educator because I’m consistently racing to meet my students where they are in an era when educational technology is evolving faster than we can find the on-switch.

I teach first-year composition and introductory literature courses, two subject areas that have suffered massive casualties in the crossfire of the AI revolution. Why, students ask, do I need to learn to write if ChatGPT can write for me? Why, students ask, do I need to learn how to conduct research if AI Mode in Google can find the answers? As strange as it sounds, I invite these questions because they serve a clear pedagogical purpose that feeds directly into writing and research instruction. Educators claim that the best antidote to cognitive offloading with AI, if not a panacea, is to teach students the value of learning, but stating this outright sounds too much like rosy-eyed optimism in an increasingly dark educational landscape where learning for learning’s sake has been undermined by skills-based training and workforce education. College and university programs equip graduates with skills and degrees that make them marketable in the workforce, certainly, but they also equip graduates with the critical thinking skills to be productive, responsible citizens and savvy consumers of media and information.

When I introduce AI into classroom conversations, I emphasize that responsible AI usage hangs on two hinges: knowing when to use it and knowing when not to use it. Equipping students with the skill to make that discernment naturally involves teaching them the value of developing subject matter expertise rather than giving in to the lure of taking the AI shortcut route. Current college students are preparing to enter a workforce in which many of them will be permitted, even encouraged, to use AI, which makes subject matter expertise even more crucial because without such knowledge, they lack the ability to determine where AI automation can make their workflow more efficient and where human oversight is necessary to ensure accuracy and quality. The potentially catastrophic errors resulting from failure to evaluate AI output range from networks shutting down when AI incorrectly flags a data breach to a life-threatening medical diagnosis when a human medical professional incorrectly interprets AI-generated results.

When students use AI to cheat, the main reason they get caught has little to do with AI detection, which educators like José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson, in their book Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning, have likened to academic smoke detectors. Case in point: when was the last time burned toast or popcorn in your apartment triggered your smoke detector? I’m asking in the interest of science. Sort of thing that could happen to anyone. The point is: AI detectors might be useful in alerting us to potential abnormalities in student work, but the real detection tool is our subject matter expertise. If a student who has never read Hamlet generates an AI analysis of Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, that student has no way of knowing whether AI hallucinated or misattributed quotations from the play because without having read the play, they lack the subject matter expertise to evaluate the accuracy of the AI’s output.

Unfortunately, cognitive offloading that produces inaccurate output is the most common AI flag I identify in student writing, detection tools or not. Yet simply assigning a failing grade without analyzing the suspected AI-generated content and discussing it with the student is a missed opportunity to create a teachable moment. Many of my colleagues and I have adopted the approach of using AI-detection reports not as proof of academic dishonesty, but as a conversation starter. Students whose writing, however rarely, falls into the false positive trap will typically respond correctly to questions about their work; students whose essays are suspected of containing AI-generated content (even if detection tools return a 0% score) will wriggle uncomfortably like a worm on a hook, unable to answer the simplest questions about their thesis or even the topic of their essay. When we explain this and work through the assignment’s weaknesses, we emphasize the instructional value of learning how to write rather than outsourcing the task of writing to AI.

Nowhere does cognitive offloading harm students more than in the writing classroom, where the mantra of process over product is repeated with almost religious enthusiasm. As writing instructors, we don’t teach our students how to produce polished essays. We teach them how to write essays, which involves the metacognitive work of thinking through purpose and process: brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and revising based on feedback all foster thoughtful rhetorical choices informed by a metacognitive approach to audience-centered writing. Questions about word choice, tone, and evaluation of evidence prompt students to consider the building blocks of their writing, which is why, if a student submits a polished draft without an outline in one of my courses, they lose points. An outline is the writing equivalent of the “show your work” directive on a math test. Don’t just give me the answer. Show me the steps you took to get there. Outlines also demand self-reflection by requiring students to slow down, asking questions like: Where is my argument? Are my body paragraphs flowing sequentially? Am I developing an essay that stays within the parameters of the topic?

Redesigning my assignments in response to AI-generated writing now involves an even greater emphasis on process and reflection, challenging students to embrace the messiness of drafting and encouraging them to let me sit with them in the mess. I now ask students to include a prompt reflection with their outlines identifying which prompt from the assignment guidelines they chose and how they think their chosen topic will aid them in practicing whichever rhetorical device we’re developing. This serves the purpose of detecting and assessing simultaneously.

Chatbots can populate an outline worksheet with generated text, but chatbots don’t know my students and generally produce bland, nondescript reflections. I’ve tried. Running my outline worksheets through multiple chatbots consistently yields mediocre results, or the chatbot omits this section of the outline entirely. Including the prompt reflection challenges students to consider how researching and writing about a specific topic develops the skills the assignment is intended to capture. Principally, the rubric individually scores each section of the outline: prompt reflection, introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion, and applicable research. As a result, students who attempt to bypass the outline and submit a completed draft lose credit because, as I emphasize, the outline is a tangible artifact of their engagement in the process instead of their focus on turning in a product.

Requiring students to provide a skeletal outline that breaks the essay into its component parts prompts them to imagine what the linear structure of their essays might look like. Crucially, the section directly following the introduction includes a space for a working thesis that directs students to isolate the sentence from their introduction that they believe to be their thesis. This prompts them to identify their working argument or main idea and demonstrate that they understand the components of their thesis that set it apart from the rest of their essay. Chatbots routinely fail this test, instead generating entirely fresh statements for the thesis. Typically, students who present a thesis in their outlines, even an underdeveloped one, will often earn higher scores than students who attempt to bypass the draft to underscore my objective: process matters more than product. As counterintuitive as it sounds, I reward messiness at this stage of the writing process because messy thinking is honest thinking.

Not being a software developer, I can’t definitively explain why chatbots fail my thesis test, but I suspect it’s because the task is deeply metacognitive in nature. As an academic experiment, I asked Claude, my current preferred chatbot of choice, to provide some insight on this behavior. As a writing instructor, I find engaging with AI myself in this way fascinating to “get under the hood,” as it were, of AI and learn how students are interacting with it so I can tailor my teaching accordingly. Evaluating the output also reveals why it’s so tempting for students to reach for AI because the response sounds uncannily human in its self-reflection.

According to Claude:

The short version is that language models are optimized for production, not retrieval or self-analysis. When you ask a chatbot to complete an outline with a working thesis, its default behavior is to generate — to produce a well-formed thesis-shaped sentence that fits the prompt. When you then ask it to go back and isolate the thesis from the introduction it just wrote, you’re asking it to perform a different cognitive operation entirely: read its own prior output as a text, identify a functional structure within that text, and extract rather than create. It will tend to generate a new thesis-shaped sentence anyway, because that’s the path of least resistance, and it often won’t notice (or flag) that it has done so. There’s no internal ‘wait, I should look at what I already wrote’ mechanism that reliably kicks in.

What I found equally fascinating and unsettling was the way Claude acknowledged the metacognitive value of my outline assignment while simultaneously attempting to explain why AI generally struggles to mirror human metacognition. Claude essentially produced a response in which it conducted an analysis of an analytical process beyond what it’s optimized to do. If this feels like a technological house of mirrors to you, you’re not alone. If you’ve spent time watching Claude’s thought process in real time by reading its “extended thinking” notes, it appears to engage in textbook metacognition—thinking about the process of thinking, analyzing, evaluating its response, and sometimes even self-correcting. Yet its response still maintains that the metacognitive work I’m asking of students cannot be adequately produced by AI.

This response is equally encouraging and unnerving because it blurs the boundaries between AI-resistant and AI-inclusive pedagogy. While I do design specific AI-resistant assignments to ensure I’m teaching students foundational skills, I don’t teach writing with an AI-resistant approach. On the contrary, I help students gradually build the skills to use AI in ways that foster critical thinking by exploiting the very process, emphasizing that prompt engineering and asking follow-up questions constitute an iterative process that neatly dovetails with the process of drafting and revising based on feedback and evaluating output. Claude’s response, then, is encouraging because an AI model that recognizes its own limitations is more likely to refuse to complete a task when it identifies a gap in its skill set. In fact, in my experimentation with chatbots over the last three years to determine how they might behave as a writing tutor, Claude was the only one that consistently would not immediately revise a piece of writing without prompting me to work through it myself or asking if I’d like further help. ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini consistently produce polished writing without prompting, only refusing to do so when in guided learning or study mode. Yet as encouraging as Claude’s response was, it was equally unnerving because it demonstrates precisely the kind of self-reflection that both software developers and educators insist AI is incapable of producing. Not to mention, this is also precisely the kind of self-reflection that students resist through cognitive offloading.

Yet my approach is not, as it might appear, weaponizing the process as a punitive measure to “catch” students cheating with AI. The key ingredient here is feedback. I don’t simply deduct points; I show students the gaps in their critical thinking, AI-generated or not, to show them why, ultimately, learning is active, not passive. For example, teaching students the pitfalls of AI-generated research essays entails teaching them what research actually is—not simply Googling search terms and searching for sources, but seeking answers to questions through discovery. Locating sources is only the first piece of the puzzle. The remaining and more critical piece involves evaluating sources and making thoughtful rhetorical choices around weighing and selecting logical evidence. I lean heavily on students using the quote sandwich to analyze and contextualize research, something that AI, despite advancements in web searching and deep research capabilities, still executes inexpertly. My feedback will include clear comments such as “This quotation is dropped and doesn’t clearly support your research,” or “You’re writing about TikTok’s impact on teen mental health, but you’re citing a study from 1995 before TikTok even existed.” (This one beat all the competition when it comes to glaring AI-generated content.) The successes, when they occur, are equally satisfying and impressive, like the health science student who grappled with hours of research to locate data on algorithmic bias in AI-generated analyses of skin cancer screenings or the student who pored over mental health data across the state of Florida to argue in favor of a bill that codifies mental health days as excused absences.

Will some students still slip past the guardrails? Undoubtedly. No judicial system is flawless. That said, the payoff I’m finding is that all my students, not merely the ones seeking shortcuts, are challenged to throw more muscle behind their work. Grades this semester have been lower than previously—hardly surprising given more nuanced assessment strategies and heavier weighting to emphasize the importance of academic integrity. What I have found equally surprising and refreshing is that more students than previously are coming to me not to challenge their grades, but to question, to understand how I evaluate their work, and to learn how they can apply that feedback moving forward. This is precisely the growth mindset approach to learning that I’ve struggled for nearly twenty years to instill in students, and I suspect, like many of my colleagues, it’s taken a chatbot-turned-cheating-tool to bring us to this epiphany.

On my first day of teaching, I vowed to learn from my students as much as to teach, to receive as much as to give. AI has entirely reframed that philosophy because even as I teach students to inhabit the gaps in their knowledge and admit what they don’t know, I’m admitting that I’m not always the expert in the room. The nearly twenty-year gulf of experience between my desk and theirs suddenly shrinks when we’re all trying to wrap our arms around this creature called AI. AI has challenged me to step up my game as a teacher because responsible teaching is about more than imparting subject knowledge. It’s about teaching students to use the knowledge and tools at their disposal with personal and professional integrity. In the end, AI is no different than every other tool that invaded our classrooms. Every anti-AI argument we’ve made has been previously launched against computers and search engines that are now as ubiquitous in our workflow as were the pencil and notebook before them. No longer the elusive shape-shifter that simultaneously breaks the mold while constructing a new one, AI is becoming a recognized part of the framework. As we acknowledge its existence and learn its functions, AI feels less and less like that spare part we find when unboxing a toy only to stare at it and wonder where it fits. As the tech gurus are fond of saying, “It’s a feature, not a bug.”

Dear Reader,

Wherever you are, you’re here, inhabiting this space, and in so doing, you’ve invited me into yours.

So now that you’re here, what can you expect to find? Think of this as less of a blog than a memoir in motion of my adventures (or misadventures) navigating the world with my self-deprecating wit in one hand and my white cane in the other. Whether I’m trying to solve a particular pedagogical puzzle, reflecting on my journey through the world as a woman of faith, or ruminating on whatever I happen to be watching or reading at the moment, if I’m living it, I’m probably writing about it.

Stories have always been how I make sense of the world, so writing has always seemed a natural outlet. The world is full of chaos; writing is my attempt to bring order to it. For me, writing isn’t an art form. It’s a primal itch. It’s how I engage with a world I can’t see. It’s why, as often as I’ve put down my pen over the years, I’ve returned to it again, because the primal itch will always need to be scratched. Yet this itch isn’t merely an urge to record, but rather to reach out, because a story only finds meaning if a reader inhabits that space. I teach my students that writing can’t exist in a vacuum; when we write, we’re bearing witness to something we want to share, so there’s always a purpose for writing that extends beyond ourselves.

My writing journey dates back to 2010 as a struggling doctoral student in English surviving on a diet of dreams and dollops of peanut butter, praying Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth edition) would come to rescue me from my misery. When I wasn’t attempting to complete my dissertation, blogging became a kind of pressure release valve. While I sometimes tracked page-counts of dissertation chapters in a nod to Bridget Jones-style calorie counting, mostly, I just wrote. The only rules were mine, namely to indulge in the pure pleasure of writing in a space unfettered by the chains of academic expectations. My think-pieces on everything from Braille literacy to book reviews amassed a small following that eventually led to a short stint in freelance writing as a stopgap between online tutoring work and applying for tenure-track teaching positions.

I eventually secured the coveted teaching position, and if I weren’t Catholic and didn’t already believe in the existence of Purgatory, the five-year tenure track would have convinced me that it is in fact real. There’s a twisted irony in an English professor teaching writing and having little time to devote to practicing the craft, but I resigned myself to sitting in that uncomfortable fractured space until I could mend it.

If purpose moves the pen, it naturally follows that the pen ceases to move when the purpose is lost. I no longer remember precisely where or when I misplaced my purpose, but in the midst of climbing the tenure ladder with one hand and holding my life steady with the other, Covid happened. The pandemic was the punctuation at the end of every sentence. The entire world seemed at once to be standing still and spinning out of control, and no one knew quite how to articulate what was happening. When I endeavored to write anything, I felt stuck in the same lockdown loop as everyone else, and writing a grocery list, let alone an entire blog post, required more words than my brain had the capacity to formulate.

Then I emerged from the end of the world, the Earth tilted back into position, and I found myself on solid ground again. I circled the idea of returning to the blog, but without any real conviction to move forward. After securing tenure and settling into what felt like a comfortable work/life balance, I noticed the writing itch tickling the corners of my brain until I could no longer ignore the urge to scratch. I needed to write again, but why, and about what? The answer I kept returning to was simple: whatever was in my heart that I felt moved to share.

I felt called to bear witness to something, and finally that something crystallized for me a few months ago while rewatching a scene from Season 3 of The Chosen, a television series that dramatizes the life of Jesus and is one of my absolute favorite shows. The moment occurs during a conversation between one of the disciples, Little James (played by Jordan Walker Ross) and Jesus (played by Jonathan Roumie). Jesus has just commissioned the disciples to go out two by two, preaching the gospel and healing the sick. Little James has extreme difficulty walking, and toward the end of the episode, he asks Jesus, point-blank, why he hasn’t been healed if Jesus has given him the power to heal others. Jesus’s answer hits the bullseye, because of course it does, because he’s Jesus:

In the Father’s will, I could heal you right now, and you’d have a good story to tell, yes?...but think of the story that you have, especially in this journey to come, if I don’t heal you; to know how to proclaim that you still praise God in spite of this…to show that you can be patient with your suffering here on earth because you know you’ll spend eternity with no suffering.

The pathos in this moment lands largely because Jordan Walker Ross has scoliosis and cerebral palsy, so this call to bear witness that Jesus invites Little James to answer isn’t merely performative. It’s deeply personal, and it runs counter to the myth that people with disabilities can only bear witness to how Christ works in our lives if we’re healed. The moment also hits home for anyone like me who lives in a body that isn’t considered “normal.” Jesus is encouraging Little James to bear his suffering with patience precisely because in this moment, his patience is being tested. He’s been carrying this cross for his entire life, and he’s aching with the weight of it. Never as a person with a disability had I felt so seen as I did while watching that exchange. My lack of patience is the cross whose weight I tend to buckle under more often than not, but this is my reality. It’s not miraculous, not in the jaw-dropping, raising Lazarus or healing the blind man way that we tend to associate with miracles. It’s just bearing witness to life, and by sharing my story, perhaps someone will see the reflection of their own.

This is the purpose of my pen. Welcome to Quill and Grace, Reader. I’m glad you’ve come, I’m glad you’re here, and I hope, most of all, that whatever you’re seeking in this space, you find it.