About

My name is Chloé. I started this blog under another title in 2019. At that time, I didn’t have an outlet to share my writing and to explore the things I like to write about, even though I have always known I love to write. I was a college graduate with no certain career prospects and working jobs to barely get by that didn’t feed my creativity nor my desire to be a bridge for people to connect to one another. In the early days of this blog, I spent a lot of time writing personal essays and poems about my misadventures in dating, which was highly entertaining to my friends, but which have since been retired to the archives as they no longer reflect what I want to focus on with this blog. Some hints of those wild-child days can be found in some of my earlier poetry. Maybe someday I’ll find a new home for those essays.

I have always been a deeply spiritual person. It is something I have never been able to run away from. I have spent decent chunks of my life trying to make sense of it and at times have desperately tried to run away from it, although that was always unsuccessful. I was raised by two preachers who taught me a version of Christianity that emphasizes social justice, caring for others, and being critical of institutions. Even with such a strong and loving foundation, I was often and still am embarrassed by what many people assume Christianity entails and has indeed entailed both historically and in modern times. So much of what Christianity is used as a weapon for reflects hatred, judgment of others, and narrow-mindedness that I never want to live with in my heart. I know that is the folly of humans, but the theological questions it brings up and the divisions it causes still remains a lot to hold. Whether I identify as a Christian now is a question I ask myself every day, with an answer that is hazy and vague at best. What I do know through my years of studying religion, first by checking out books on world religions, crystals, and chakras from my local public library as a kid, to earning a Master of Divinity at a school where I studied interfaith literacy and leadership, and now in a secular religious studies department where I am working on my PhD, is that religion shapes the world whether we like it or not. But also, on a more personal and to me much more interesting level, spirituality and faith is something deeply specific to each person, including if they reject those aspects of identity and experience altogether, that oftentimes evades technical definitions or traditional theory-making. There is vagueness in “truth,” and yet our personal convictions bind us to the things we say and do every day. I’m fascinated by how it shapes my own life and how it informs how we interact with and treat each other and the Earth.

In addition to studying full time as a graduate student, I also work at a non-profit that incorporates spirituality and feminism into the programming we develop and the resources we provide to our community. My research in my doctoral program currently focuses on Black identity, spirituality, and community. I want to study how Black folks are informed by their spirituality (or lack thereof) to respond to (oppose, counteract, fight against, critique) the oppression that we experience systemically and interpersonally, be it through traditional forms of political activism or artistic expression such as documentary filmmaking, poetry, or quilt making. The opportunity to both study and work in the realms of spirituality and social justice all through the lenses of Black feminism, womanism, and existentialism, feels like a dream come true, even if that dream still takes a lot out of me sometimes.

In this summer of 2024, I have blown the dust off this old blog that I haven’t touched in years, spruced it up a bit, and revisited the essays and poems that still live here like old friends who seemed to always know I would find my way back. I hope in the coming days, months, and years I can do a better job of using this gift of a blog as an outlet for the thoughts, feelings, and ideas that may not end up in a conference paper or article one day, but that still inform my scholarship and my identity as a deeply spiritual person with an otherwise vague religious identity.

August 1, 2024