One Cheer from Inside the Machine
The Aisle Journal

Faith & Weddings

One Cheer from Inside the Machine

Brad East gave the wedding industrial complex two cheers. I can manage one. I'm building it.

Faith & Weddings · June 12, 2026 · 1 min read

I'm building a wedding expo.

That's the confession before anything else. Forty vendors. A fashion show. A food truck row on what used to be a community swimming pool, in a museum garden in Anniston. I am, in some technical sense, the wedding industrial complex.

I read Brad East's piece in Christianity Today last week. He knows the critique — the debt, the expectation, parents going broke over one Saturday. He knows it and mostly agrees with it. But he musters one or two cheers anyway. I can manage one.

I wrote the full essay — the church ladies who held it all up, and the woman who married a man she knew had cancer — over on Southern Legends.

Read the full essay at Southern Legends →

The Aisle is October 18 at Anniston Museums & Gardens. Tickets at theaisle.app.

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The Aisle Expo

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The Aisle Expo. October 18 at Anniston Museums and Gardens.

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