The Wrong End of the Telescope
The Wrong End of the Telescope

It’s time this piece had a home. I’m finally publishing it, here.

From the rest quarters at the hub at the building, I walk outwards. Then hit a curved wall. The stairs have rotated away. So, I slink untethered through darkness, coiled snake power cords above and cold ground below, until the stairway looms, then climb to where mirrors fold billion-year light into sensors and screens flicker numbers. A little white dome rolling under the big black dome, feebly tracking pinpricks of light. I look down at my equations and wilt. When will it end?

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Jessica T Miskelly
In Deep Water off Antarctica
In Deep Water off Antarctica

During the last deglaciation fifteen thousand years ago, global sea level rose nearly sixty feet in less than five hundred years. Known as meltwater pulse 1A, this event was discovered in 1989 via shallow-dwelling corals found in the deep sea, bolstering emerging theories that climate change could be rapid. Ice and sediment cores in Greenland had already revealed evidence of recurrent spikes in atmospheric temperature of 10 to 15 degrees Celsius during the last sixty thousand years, and these spikes were closely spaced in time with other sea-level rise events. Ice sheet formation and decay clearly played a role in these climate changes, and the game was on to determine how, and how much.

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Jessica T Miskelly
The church is not a meritocracy
The church is not a meritocracy

What do you do well? Are you perhaps good at conversation? Skilled at playing music? Or, perhaps, a master at the specifics of your job? Next question: How much do you enjoy or even need to be told that you do something well? The pleasure of affirmation is a seductive pull.

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Jessica T Miskelly
Unreachable Rapture: Rescuing Romance
Unreachable Rapture: Rescuing Romance

Romantic love saturates the stories we watch, read and ponder. Denis De Rougemont, in his compelling Love in the Western World, says, “love and death, a fatal love—in these phrases is summed up, if not the whole of poetry, at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in European literature.” Why?

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Published, LatestJessica T Miskelly
Be Not Do
Be Not Do

I gird my world with task-lists. When every moment is accounted for, I know I’m being productive, and I’m protected from crippling uncertainty around what comes next, or why it should. I scurry; we scurry, like a lot of ants, ticking tasks off.

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Published, Liturgy/PrayerJessica T Miskelly
The Outsideness of God
The Outsideness of God

I am a child of thinkers.  Born in the post-Enlightenment West to scientist parents who wrote and solved logic puzzles for fun, I inherited a reverence for logic.  Logic undergirded science, science explained things and I wanted explanations for everything.

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PublishedJessica T Miskelly