By Erika Marksbury

Growing up in Nyeri, on the slopes of snowcapped Mount Kenya, Edward Buri had seen snow from a distance, but nothing like the blanket of white that coated Princeton’s campus this winter. “

People kept saying it was coming,” he remembers, grinning, “but when it did, I was completely amazed, like, wow. What is this? I saw people playing in it but I didn’t think it was something to be touched. Honestly, I thought, ‘Those people are messing it up; they should just let it be....’”
Click to read Called Out of Kenya*

By Erika Marksbury

Aaron Anastasi has been asked not to wear his lip ring when he leads worship. Some people, he’s told, might find it a distraction. But the M.Div. middler’s ministry is to those who wouldn’t, those who see it and are intrigued that someone who looks like him (and like them) also loves the church.

The ring is a witnessing tool for him, as is the tattoo of his last name that stretches across his back. The “t” is painted as a cross—partly because Anastasi, as every Greek teacher he’s studied under has told him, means “resurrection,” and partly because it raises questions. His spiky black hair—now that last year’s streaks of pink have faded—seems to some more like an invitation, or a reassurance, than a distraction.
Click to read Love Letters in Shades of Punk *