Author of DISCIPLES OF WHITE JESUS: The Radicalization of American Boyhood (March 25, 2025) - AVAILABLE NOW! Order on Bookshop Barnes & Noble Comma (Minneapolis)
Order on Bookshop Barnes & Noble Comma (Minneapolis)
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Recent Published Works
I AM A MINNEAPOLIS MOTHER AND PASTOR, AND I KNOW WHERE I STAND
THE NEW REPUBLIC
JAN. 9, 2026
They slow down the video and watch her die, frame by frame. It’s not so much what they say they see but what they don’t see, what their eyes shield them from so that the terror inside won’t take over, make them realize the call is coming from inside the house.
They analyze tire tracks and footprints.
Her blood is all over the airbag.
As a mother, I’ve long known that when you bear children, your DNA is irrevocably changed. Your blood is forever mixed with their blood, your genes utterly altered. And so the blood on the airbag is not only hers but theirs, the ones who live on without her; the one who has to go back to elementary school without his mom, her and his blood still running through his veins, though now her fingers are cold as ice.
WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS WANTED, AND DESERVED, MORE. LET'S NOT TURN BACK THE CLOCK NOW.
MINNESOTA STAR TRIBUNE
SEPT. 2, 2025
Born in 1936 in the midst of the Great Depression on a hardscrabble farm in Newfolden, Minn., with an outhouse and no electricity, Carol prioritized her education and work at a time when women were mostly expected to marry and stay at home. She worked hard, earning a scholarship to a teacher’s college, and was named valedictorian of her high school class. When she graduated early from the teacher’s college, a portion of Carol’s salary went to pay for her younger sister’s education.
Like so many women of her era, women who took jobs and worked hard on the home front during World War II only to be pushed back into the kitchen during the 1950s, Carol excelled and achieved — only to be told again and again: “Don’t get a big head.”
“Smile.”
THE WORST KIND OF EVIL
MINNESOTA STAR TRIBUNE
AUG. 30, 2025
I do not know the desperation of parents and caregivers rushing to pick up children after a mass shooting. But their desperation is not altogether unfamiliar in a world where we treat kids as collateral damage: in Ukraine, in Gaza and, yes, in America. I understand why so many parents devote endless hours to the perfect organic diets for their kids, why so many of us research endlessly where to send our kids to school, how to address their medical needs. On a very deep level we sense that when it comes to protecting our children’s lives, we are ultimately mostly powerless, adrift in a sea of powerful interests, in a world where profit is king and kids are another line on a national expense sheet.
As a pastor and author of a recent book on radicalization, violence and young men and boys, I can’t help thinking, too, of another desperation: that of parents of troubled, radicalized boys and young adults. This shooting, like so many mass shootings that arise out of hatred, was brewed in a toxic online stew of marginalization, hatred, violence, anger and mixed-up ideas about heroism and guns.
Religion — Christianity — is here, too. Of course. The shooter invaded a sacred space, a sanctuary, and brought along deadly weapons and menacing hate. In these moments, I take refuge not in a militant, warlike, crusader Jesus, but instead in the savior who reminded me, early Wednesday morning just as I heard the news of a school shooting in my neighborhood:
“They killed me, too.”