Deborah J Chang

"We the People" -- The animating words of a covenant that holds only if we do “This is why God put you here at this time.” Historian John Meacham said it almost casually to Stephen Colbert, after Colbert made a joke comparing the idea of seizing Greenland for “national security” to simply grabbing someone else’s tie because you want it. The audience laughed — but the laughter landed because the analogy exposed something real. Meacham had been talking about his book American Struggle:...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about parts – not in the abstract, but in the deeply practical, day-to-day way that determines whether relationships survive strain or quietly fall apart. This reflection has been shaped by several threads converging at once: my ongoing work around parts with the Crappy Childhood Fairy Anna Runkle , insights from Jessica Fern ’s writing on attachment and relational shapes, a sermon I heard recently at Riverside, and two quotes that are often framed as opposites...

(and Why Interdependence Feels Radical Again) We stand because we are connected This weekend felt heavy. Not just because of the headlines, but because of the familiar pattern beneath them — isolation hardening into certainty, certainty hardening into harm. The details differ, but the emotional architecture feels increasingly recognizable. I’ve been sitting with a question I don’t have a clean answer to: What are we teaching ourselves to believe about one another that makes this feel...