Soft Words for Hard Days

Anna joins us to talk about the newly published devotional, Soft Words for Hard Days, available at https://enfleshed.com/products/pre-order-soft-words-for-hard-days-enfleshed-disability-wisdom/

Rev. Dr. Anna Blaedel is co-founder and co-director at enfleshed. For the first five years of enfleshed, Anna served as theologian-in-residence. They bring an attentiveness to the intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Through enfleshed’s “moments for common nourishment,” a bi-monthly column, they bridge the forefront of religious scholarship and a passion for reimagining our ordinary, common, messy life as the site of Divine unfolding. Building on their study of theopoetics, relational philosophies of enfleshment, and anti-racist, feminist, queer and eco-theologies of liberation, once a month they will offer words for a sustaining, grounding, and enlivening spirituality in our current context.

Anna chaplains college students in Iowa City through sacred collective: a place of belonging for spiritual misfits, and recently completed a PhD in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Anna’s dissertation is titled, “Sacred Enfleshments: A Queer Theopoetics of Collective Liberation.” Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry…, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.