Lent never stopped because no one was raised from the dead and we didn’t make a thousand visitors’ bags, feeling hopeful that this Easter’s crowd would finally stick around, because there was no hallelujah as we looked into our phones to see fellow refugees in their pajamas every Sunday, not knowing whether we will ever pass the peace of Christ again. When will we close those giant buildings that waste most of a week’s worth of air conditioning where we... Read more
I’ve spent much of the pandemic contemplating the meaning of the biblical Garden of Eden story that instills the mythological framework for Western Christian epistemology. Do we trust our bodies to tell us intuitively the truth about our world or are we supposed to submit our innately flawed personal intuitive experience to the orthodoxies of authoritarian institutions like the church that convey the knowledge of good and evil to us? This is the quarrel that Western Christianity has had with... Read more
I’m needing to get out some feelings and thoughts about my experience as an autistic. I was at a virtual Christian gathering this past weekend that had a high percentage of autistic and queer participants. It was a really beautiful, grounding experience even though it happened online. I don’t know how to explain this but my body knew it was safe because of what I read on the faces on the screen. Part of it was that I saw myself... Read more
I continue to call myself a Christian for two reasons: 1) because my mother is still alive and 2) because I believe I am anointed by God for good works not as a reward for believing anything correctly but as a gift discovered more fully the more I fully renounce proving myself to be right. It is out of loyalty to the core principle of justification by faith that I renounce all orthodoxy of salvation through correct belief as filthy... Read more
We could be called The Fools, because we speak with the freedom of those who have been crucified enough by life to have no public reputation left to defend. Which means we are no longer trying to hide our real selves. We lack the calculated poise of people who are still trying not to fail. Fools fail continuously not because we are incompetent but because we risk everything for the sake of wisdom. Foolishness speaks without any idols to defend,... Read more
Very few interpreters of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis 3 pay any attention to the identity of the fruit that supposedly corrupted humanity forever. In fact, the fruit is often labeled simply the forbidden fruit as though its actual identity has no significance. The mainstream interpretation of the story at least in western Christianity is that God said not to do something which Adam and Eve did, so God punished them for disobeying his command. The whole matter... Read more
Well I just got banned from a white queer Christian discord space for attacking Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, which is such a bizarre thing to me that I needed to blog about it. I also got my feelings hurt a little bit. I think it was mostly because I was behaving like an unmasked autistic who thinks and types at a thousand miles an hour. Online text-based conversation space is my kryptonite because I naturally write really long posts... Read more
When I was in my early twenties, I called myself a Christian pagan, a memory which later made me cringe with complete embarrassment in my neoorthodox thirties. In college, I had discovered Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, art, and madness, as well as Hekate, the pre-Olympian goddess of witchcraft. Somehow I stumbled upon a version of the mythology in which Dionysus is Hekate’s son/lover who is committed to overthrowing Zeus and the patriarchal Olympian pantheon which was likely my... Read more
[Update: Read the first comment. I think it gets at the heart of what I’ve been missing in my understanding of God as Trinity.] I have been largely dormant on my blog over the past year of pandemic largely because of the post I am about to write that I have been dragging my heels to write. My heart has been heavy with grief for the state of the United Methodist Church and the institutional church in general. There are... Read more
[Trigger Warning: Coarse, Erotic Language About God] I want to propose a vocation for white men: becoming fools. What I mean is: learning how to engage in strange, whimsical, silly embodied behavior that is the opposite of disembodied rationalism, which is the cultural disease our ancestors bequeathed us and everyone else they tried to colonize. Now when I talk about white men, I have to first of all specify that I’m talking about a specific kind of white man: those... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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