The Terrifying Call of Christ’s Resurrection

April 16, 2020 By Amy Courts

This week, as a “welcome back” to Patheos, I’ll be sharing some recent ruminations around Holy Week, beginning with the following about the resurrection in relation to the current covid-19 pandemic and what it commands of Resurrection People in the months and years to come. I recently read a brilliant essay on Medium about the gaslighting to come. And Easter seems like a good day to address it because Christ followers are intimately acquainted with gaslighting. The disciples gaslit themselves... Read more

Choose Life or Choose Republicans. You Can’t Have Both.

November 5, 2018 By Amy Courts

This Tuesday, you cannot vote for Republicans AND vote “for Life.” Republican policies and rhetoric and appointments actively and expressly and deliberately harm and endanger and dehumanize Black lives and Indigenous lives and Immigrant lives and Refugee lives and Muslim lives and Jewish lives and LGBTQIA+ lives and Women’s lives and Student’s Lives and Elderly lives and Disabled lives and Children’s lives and Inmates’ lives and Assault survivors’ lives and Poor peoples’ lives and Sick peoples’ lives and Foreigners’ lives and The... Read more

Living in the Hell of White Male Terrorism in America

October 27, 2018 By Amy Courts

This week has been a deadly one in America: A white male domestic terrorist whose truck is covered window-to-window in Trump worship sent pipe bombs to a long list of Trump’s most outspoken Democratic challengers (including Obama, Clinton, Biden, Soros, and Maxine Walters who ain’t scared). A white male domestic terrorist opened fire at a Kroger grocery story in Louisville, KY, killing two black people while screaming racial slurs, after first attempting (and failing) to gain entry to an historically... Read more

Kingdom Building in the Age of Kavanaugh

October 6, 2018 By Amy Courts

Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed as the next Supreme Court Justice despite his long history of sexual assault and alcohol abuse, and his current inability to maintain even a fraction of the emotional stability required of his female colleagues. For me as a woman, the expected confirmation was like a replay of the morning of November 9, 2016: I knew it was coming, that the whole debacle wasn’t a nightmare but the beginning of a deep dive into dark places. But... Read more

When My High School Boyfriend Attempted to Rape Me, I Blamed Myself

September 28, 2018 By Amy Courts

Trigger warning: Sexual Assault, Attempted Rape, Purity Culture One night when I was in high school, when my boyfriend and I were fooling around and making out, he sexually assaulted me. He asked to pull down my pants and touch the tip of his penis to the opening of my vagina. I was crying. I told him I didn’t want him to do it. And he did anyway. He said he wouldn’t stick it in; He just wanted to know... Read more

Thirty-Seven (TL;DR: I’m in Seminary)

September 7, 2018 By Amy Courts

It’s a strange, even surreal thing to look back from where I am now to where I was exactly one year ago today when I wrote about landing in deconstructed unbelief on my 36th birthday. This time last year, I didn’t know or believe much other than that I want God — whatever, whoever, wherever that is — to be real. Having readily (and not regrettably) abandoned the evangelical tyrant of my youth, shaking it off as dungful dust off... Read more

ABLE is Publishing Their Wages and Thinks Every Brand Should Do the Same

August 9, 2018 By Amy Courts

ABLE IS PUBLISHING THEIR WAGES Editor’s Note from Amy: Last week I received a Facebook message from a good friend, Barrett Ward, telling me about the concrete steps his company is taking toward labor justice and equity, and as I read it I literally got chills. I met Barrett back in 2008 when as a singer-songwriter working in Nashville I became an artist advocate with Mocha Club to support their Village of Hope in Gulu, Uganda. (I traveled to Gulu... Read more

When You Unwoman a Trans Woman, You Unwoman Me

August 3, 2018 By Amy Courts

I just watched a heartwarming video from NowThis in which a trans woman tells the story of her grandmother’s affirming and loving reaction to her coming-out. I shared it. And then I foolishly read the comments, which were predictably full of transphobic dead-naming and mockery. One woman named Tammy quasi-mocked her (but was perhaps serious) saying, “I wish we could give the males who want to be females the ability to have menstrual periods and children, bet then they would want... Read more

On Teaching White Sons Why They Can’t Say The N Word

July 23, 2018 By Amy Courts

Uffda. Explaining to a 7-year-old white boy why his Black neighbor friends can use the N word but he can’t because the word they now use as a term of endearment and kinship has been laboriously re-appropriated after centuries of the word being used by white people to humiliate and dehumanize Blackness, and why that word therefore must never ever pass his lips… And it feels unfair to his 7-year-old self that they get to say a word we can’t.... Read more

The Promise of No Promised Land

June 28, 2018 By Amy Courts

The poor have always been and will always be with us. Some laws have always been and will always be unjust. Immigrants and refugees have always been and will always be dehumanized and rejected at the borders of cities where wealthy sloths drown in excess. The marginalized have never found and will never find themselves at the seat of power. That earth has always been and will always be plundered and pillaged and raped by the greedy. We will not... Read more