July is the month we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Katerina’s last post. She has been writing with us since August 2015.

It’s a post calvin tradition to agonize over your final post. How can I both honor and neatly tie up this monthly practice that has trailed me for eight years across countries and convictions, through more than eighty posts?

If I can sum up what I’ve tried to say in these raw years, it’s something like this—

Look to the margins.

I so keenly wanted to understand the world when I started writing, and I only ever got close when I listened to the stories of marginalized people and started to understand the ways that my privilege set me apart. While good intentions are a start, they can reduce people to caricatures, simplified to a single story. People’s lives are so much richer and more complex. Any attempt to advocate for just policy requires the humility to abandon what you thought you know and follow the example of those whose experience isn’t centered in our systems of laws and government.

In listening to people’s stories, a pattern quickly emerges. Poverty and injustice are not random—they are built off prejudice and profit. To start to unspool this, it becomes important to

Look to the (profit) margins

of the industries that run our world. I wrote once that one of the most important things I knew was to “distrust capitalism” and the instinct to “add money and stir” without addressing systemic inequalities and injustices. Like a virus, money seeks to replicate itself, taking over hosts to do so. In our fragile, warming world, we need alternatives to this blind growth, where even seemingly-innocent industries have widespread implications. This requires new ways of thinking, and it also requires influencing those whose thinking is entrenched. To see where these conversations are happening, we need to

Look to the margins.

When I go birdwatching with my dad, he takes me to unassuming places—parking lots, roadsides, or trails that cut from forest into open brush. Birds hide well in dense forests and don’t often linger in exposed spaces. But something happens at the margins of these two environments—birds perch visibly on the outermost branches, darting back and forth from the field in bright blurs as they feed and forage. When we stand in between two spaces, we see things we wouldn’t see otherwise.

I worry sometimes about polarization that finds us in echo chambers, reciting the same Instagram stories back to each other. I worry that in our pursuit to think what we already think more correctly, more completely, that we lose those bright flashes of insight that come only when we let down our guard around a different way of seeing the world. I remember how this felt when I crack open my college texbooks and

Look to the margins

where I’ve scribbled exclamation points or question marks, references to other things I was reading at the same time, imperfect summaries to help me wrap my head around new ideas. As I came up to the edge of what I already knew or imagined, I worked to discern, to order, to set ideas in place against the sum of my learning and experience.

the post calvin has been a continuation of this, scribbled approximations at integrating new ideas into old.

I don’t know exactly what or where I’ll write next, but I want to carry into this next decade the curiosity and hope I stoked here, to keep listening and to keep looking to the margins.

post script

I want to end this post with gratitude—to Professor Rienstra who first encouraged me to write nonfiction, to the original editors who brought me in and the current editors who carry on their torch so well, to my fellow writers whose lives I’ve followed throughout our twenties, and to everyone who has read my wondering, wandering posts. Thank you for this space to think out loud.

Katerina Parsons

Katerina Parsons lives in Washington, D.C. where she works on international humanitarian assistance (views not of her employer). A graduate of Calvin University (2015) and American University (2022), she lived in Honduras for four years before moving back to the U.S. to work on policy and advocacy. She enjoys reading, dancing, and experimenting in her community garden plot.