Author Archives
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Teacher Appreciation Week & Appreciating Teaching by Sara Frykenberg
Part of discovering my love for teaching and moving through my anxiety involved reconsidering my “ideals” of teaching, which were numerous and high minded.
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Turning Five by Sarah Frykenberg
My daughter turned five years old this week. I am now a five-year-old-mother of one. Big Five <3. I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that this is the age when children’s brains are developed enough to start creating… Read More ›
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A Case for Context by Sara Frykenberg
I have a close family member who is staunchly Republican and frequently posts videos from the conservative platform PragerU or “Prager University.” Video topics include: why the Democratic Party is the “real” racist party (as though either party is innocent… Read More ›
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Moments of Beauty by Sara Frykenberg
Last week a friend of mine started a post asking people to share something that they’ve enjoyed or appreciated since shelter-at-home orders began across the country and globe. This friend was in no way trying to minimize the very difficult… Read More ›
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Staying Un-Frozen by Sara Frykenberg
It is February 14th, Valentines Day. So, today I want to explore my daughter’s love affair with Frozen; a story that I did not like, but that I learned to love by watching it through her eyes. A story which… Read More ›
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Teaching After the Getty Fire by Sara Frykenberg
This is the third year in a row that I will be writing about wildfires in California and their impact on me and my community. This year, I don’t have any poetry. This year, I’m not afraid. This year, I’m… Read More ›
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Productive Confusion by Sara Frykenberg
My experience of productive confusion, alternatively, shuffles categories. It breaks apart. It is life giving chaos; but god/dess does it FEEL loud (even though it often requires quiet). If I’m not surfing the internet, while watching a show, while having a glass of wine, I might have to hear my own thoughts. I might notice that my internal loudness is also a symptom of the institutionalized trauma, violence and oppression that works to keep me externally quiet.
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Avengers Vs. Sailor Moon Vs. … maybe… all that GOT *stuff
Spoilers ahead for Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones, so read at your own risk!
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I’m [Not] Batman by Sara Frykenberg
A little tongue-in-cheek, somewhat punchy, somewhat angry reflection for your consideration. Thank you for reading. Ever have trouble speaking your mind? I do. I do, particularly in situations where I was taught (in all sorts of ways, violent and nonviolent… Read More ›
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I <3 California by Sara Frykenberg
It’s Friday. I drive down PCH, Highway 1, at five-o-clock in the morning on my way to the airport. I left early and avoided the evacuation traffic. The sky is pitch black—not just dark, but black. Smoke cloaks the sky,… Read More ›
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Small Victories by Sara Frykenberg
Last year was a hard year. I wrote about this difficulty—vaguely eluding to challenges of environment, home, and work—in my last post. In this blog, which was a copy of my reflection for our last faculty meeting of the year,… Read More ›
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Reflection for the End of the Year by Sara Frykenberg
At my school, a religious institution, we start every faculty meeting with a reflection, meant to inspire us, make us think, help us to connect, etc. I am admittedly, sometimes very uncomfortable with these reflections. I don’t always like corporate… Read More ›
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What We Can’t See by Sara Frykenberg
As a professor, I find myself returning to a similar struggle again and again. I know what I know; and I know what I hope students will gain from the class, in terms of content knowledge, critical thinking, classroom community-making,… Read More ›
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Just South of Ventura by Sara Frykenberg
For those of us living in Southern California, it has been a tense week to say the least: flames ravaging up and down the coast, homes lost, thousands displaced, freeway and school closures, smoke thick in the air, and ash… Read More ›
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Freedom and Speech by Sara Frykenberg
Feminist theories and theo/alogies are often concerned with voice, naming and re-membering. Many feminists do this work, again and again, because of persistent silence and silencing, invisibility, erasure of stories, desires, religions and ways of being, because of missing histories,… Read More ›
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Working Hard at Spirituality by Sara Frykenberg
I sometimes have to work hard at spirituality. … And I haven’t been. I have realized that lately, when I sit down to write blogs for this community, I have a difficult time incorporating one of the most basic FAR… Read More ›
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Making America What Again? Reflections for the 4th of July by Sara Frykenberg
I find myself asking (again), when the religious right, evangelicals, and Christian fundamentalists hear Trump say, “Make America Great Again,” do they really hear him saying, “Make America Christian Again?” How can the really hear him saying that in light of what this man has actually said and actually done? The answer: because of the same mythical purity that erases the violence, slaughter, and atrocity attached to this “Christian nation’s” founding.
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Careful Criticism: Resisting Hetero-Patriarchy while Resisting Trump by Sara Frykenberg
My students are taking their final exams this week, which means I will be spending the week frantically, but attentively grading in order to make our grade submission deadline next week. End of semester grading is a mountain of careful… Read More ›
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Modern Matricide by Sara Frykenberg
Many feminist theologians powerfully and convincingly ague that racist, capitalistic hetero-patriarchy is matricidal, as are its religions. Mother-murder takes a variety of forms, including: Suppression of mother goddesses/ the mother goddess through establishment of patriarchal religion, Erasure and appropriation of… Read More ›
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You Can’t Debate Mutuality by Sara Frykenberg
I use words like “mutuality,” “listening,” and “love,” here as I discuss my understanding of feminist justice-making and eschew debate…I want to make it abundantly clear: I see these as powerful, often forceful and even angry tools. We listen to what oppressors say so that they cannot deceive with their “alternative facts.” We love forcefully…We counter violence—we do not debate it—with anger, humor, creativity and power, in order to redirect its energies into more mutual possibilities.
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New Year and Sustainable Resolution by Sara Frykenberg
At the end of 2016, my foot hurt—my body telling me: it is painful to move forward as you have been. You have to walk differently. Yow have to walk with more support, and sometimes, carrying less weight.
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Turning One by Sara Frykenberg
This month I turn one as a mother. My daughter, consequently, is also turning one—a first birthday I am excitedly planning. Specifically, I want to make Hazel a rainbow cake with lots of colored layers and white frosting. I’m not… Read More ›
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Debating a “Winning” Personality by Sara Frykenberg
I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch the debate between presidential candidates last Tuesday. As John Erikson discussed in his post “The End is Nigh,” one could easily predict Trump’s sexism and misogyny, it was just a question of how… Read More ›
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Politics and Mythology by Sara Frykenberg
Some part of us buys into some part of our common mythology; hence, the importance of recognizing and interrogating the stories in which we (often unconsciously) participate.
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Reading for Fun and Compromise—My Ongoing Search for Feminist Literature by Sara Frykenberg
What I mean to say is, what if, when I wanted to read for fun or simply for the pleasure of reading, I were to put down any book that demonstrated buy-in to kyriarchal ideas, overtly or even in micro-aggressive ways? I have flippantly responded to this question, “then, I may never read any piece of fantasy literature again.”
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Parenting with the ‘Same Words’ by Sara Frykenberg
Teaching and talking with my daughter, I find myself revisiting the subtle and not so subtle kyriarchial language in my own upbringing in ways that I do not when speaking to other adults with my very intentional and well-trained adult language. Parenting sometimes feels like a trip back in time where I remember and more readily feel my joy of singing particular songs or reading particular stories, simultaneously feeling my inner feminist and adult self cringe at the messages in too many of these stories.
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A Short Lesson in Subjugated Knowledges
“We” can give many answers for how to colonize someone; but for many of us, it often takes special training, years of education, reconstructive projects, task forces, books upon book of reading, listening through the loud and ever present static of dominant culture, constant vigilance, one’s own liberation, the liberation of others, etc. to learn how to think otherwise.
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STEM and Sexism: Pedagogical Responses to “Chilly Climates” by Sara Frykenberg
Another way to put this: there is nothing inherently competitive about the study of mathematics. The classroom is competitive in order to create a particular kind of graduate—one who engages in a particular [dominant] culture. Liberative pedagogy challenges the ways that classrooms are run in order to challenge the dominant culture.
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Breastfeeding and the Abject? by Sara Frykenberg
The trappings of motherhood are all too powerful reminders that, as Catherine Keller reminds us in her book From a Broken Web, mother goddesses have to be continually slain for patriarchal heroes to be born. Indeed, she suggests that conceptions of Western selfhood are based upon this symbolic matricide—so it is no wonder that breast milk might be considered abject…
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Feminism and “The Force:” Thinking Through “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” by Sara Frykenberg
Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), on the other hand, works to resist the call of the “light.” The Force Awakens puts emphasis on the villain’s perspective; and my question is, is this because many of us who are in the audience need to see how we are also like this villain?
