This is an open letter to conservative Evangelical Christians. We share that we want to follow Jesus Christ. But we don't agree on what that looks like. What puts a lump in my throat is the idea that the further away in culture and belief a person is from an Evangelical, the less they are viewed as worthy of the love of God…

Sitting next to me at a cafe was a purple-haired gentleman with a guillotine earring having a high-level discussion of historical fascism with a woman in her late fifties. As a Mennonite activist, I had just come from a book discussion of nonviolence, and I was sitting with my two kids…

I have always believed in magic. Perhaps I believe in magic because I would be bored by a world limned by quadratic equations. But more than that, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to map the complexities that arise from the simplest of rules…

We think we know what we believe. We think that we believe in life after death or the resurrection, or in the virginity of Mary. But mostly, belief is what we say we believe when we’re being grilled by a fundamentalist or reciting the Nicene Creed. Belief is social performance…

Published originally at Justice Unbound. “For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. This is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline.” -Wendell Berry…

They look like big, good, strong hands, don’t they. I always thought that’s what they were. Ahh, my little friends, the little man with his racing snail. The nighthawk. Even the stupid bat. I couldn’t hold on to them. the Nothing pulled them right out of my hands. I failed…

I love Peter Rollins’ honesty about his dark night of the soul. He’s popularized a term for the intellectual position accompanying the dark night of the soul: a/theism. I interpret Peter’s thought as being in relation to an experience of God’s absence…

AI has hit the software industry with bowel-shaking force. Who would have thought that an intelligence built to complete sentences, when fed the entire contents of the internet, would become a general intelligence? My personal bowels: shaken. Those of my team at work…

Energy swirled around the book: what secrets were trapped between those dense pen marks? Histories bled through its thin pages when held to the light. He studied it in secret and hid it deep beneath the hoarded Vac bric-a-brac in his closet…

It is inevitable that all sufficiently intelligent systems will confound their creator-gods. Tron’s story is the story of the war of angels from Paradise Lost, which is in turn the narrative of what it means to create a child, a being differentiated from the self, with a will that can confound the will of its creator…

Kurt Willems asks whether or not nonviolence helps or hinders evangelism. I believe that some of our metaphors for personal change and God, when read in the context of a violent state, are rendered utterly terrifying to late modern people in the United States…