The Afterlife of Rachel Held Evans

On a recent Saturday morning, Jeff Chu, a writer and ordinand in the Reformed Church in America -- a small Protestant denomination -- pushed a green grocery cart through a Whole Foods in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was scouring the produce section for lemongrass and galangal. Chu, who is forty-four and slender, had learned to cook family-style Chinese meals from his mother and paternal grandmother. He had travelled to Chattanooga to prepare dinner that evening for twenty close friends and family members of Rachel Held Evans, an influential Christian thinker and writer, who died unexpectedly in 2019. He had brought a wheeled suitcase in which he had packed sauces wrapped in newspaper, and the Chinese greens and mushrooms that he feared would be nearly impossible to find in Chattanooga. For the rest, he'd have to improvise. "Sometimes you've got to make do with what you have," he said.