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. Fascism was, as usual, on my mind. So I introduced myself and struck up a conversation. The woman was a professor of Latin American history, and the man a professor of Russia and Polish history…

Meat space: the alternate reality to Zoom calls, texting, and Netflix. Do you all remember? Yes, we used to gather in person. This Nation article lays out how the Democratic party left behind meat-space, the work of building a membership-based organization: The Democratic Party was swept up in this civic transition. Today, the party focuses almost exclusively on election campaign sprints optimized for short-term mobilizing rather than for long-term organizing…

We find it easy to write what a man should not be, but it is impossible to write what a man should be without finding yourself saying things that cannot be said. To be a man is to take up the way of strength, for better or for worse. Men are not born, they are made. Any boy can be strong, but a man wields strength for the good of society. Manhood is conferred by a culture upon a boy, throughout history. For me, a good man is a farmer, not a raider. A protector, not a rapist…

In a world where neural control has proven cheaper than metal machines, Isaac is being groomed to become a part of the AI that governs and shapes reality. As an operator, he’s training to remote control factory workers to support the war effort. But when he discovers his memories are being deleted, he realizes his personality has been constructed to serve the AI's economic machine…

This year saw social media bolster fake news and Trumpism. But what is salvaging social media, for me, is #MeToo. The stories I know are not mine to tell. But I have seen how resistant powerful men are to any sort of accountability, sexual or otherwise. I know that a lot of people feel nervous that innocent men will be pilloried with false charges of sexual harassment. I believe all people, victimized and abuser, need due process. But what is happening is a kind of glasnost…

In a world where patent companies control the world, Jack pirates drugs for the poor. In the course of cloning a productivity drug, she accidentally unleashes a wave of lethal addictions to banal tasks. But did she make a mistake cloning the drug? No. She learns that big-pharma company Zaxy is trying to expand their reach by addicting high-tech workers to a patented drug -- and to their jobs. As Jack races to engineer a cure, Zaxy deploys a military bot and a human partner to hunt her down and keep their trade secrets secret. Newitz has written a solid 4.5 star book…

Wyldling Hall reaches out to touch the place where music and magic merge. As musicians or lovers of music, we enter this liminal space and feel it prickling our skin, but when we subject it to our rational thinking, it disappears. Many reviewers called Wylding Hall a "ghost story." But it is, instead, a story of faerie—the music of faerie. I loved Wyldling Hall. I couldn't put it down. There are times when the suspense and the flashes of otherness feel a little much, but in a mostly good way…

Writers of political near-future or alternate-history fiction often file the serial numbers from our world, mix in chop-shop parts hocked by radicals and heretics, and call it a new thing. It can be surprising to realize that, after consuming fiction for so long, we're open to ideas we would have thought too radical if we'd considered them directly. Phillip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle is just such a book…

Ever since the Red Wedding, I have seen George R. R. Martin as the God-killer. God is integrally linked to the part of our brain that perceives holistic meaning from the chaos of life. And the hero is the individual who makes order from chaos, creating an order that proves divine blessing by the order that it creates. God is the narrator of the cosmos. But when heroes die, divine blessing is lost and a story becomes meaningless…

Our brains associate neural regions that are architecturally close together. For many, the parts of our brain that give meaning to "Trump" are the same regions associated with Hitler, zombies, and evil capitalists like Lex Luthor. The more juice we put into those places, the more the currents try to leap across new synaptic gaps. To forge grand meanings and narratives…

I have been reading conservative news occasionally, specifically the National Review and Brietbart. But rather than making me more conservative, it's caused me to wonder. I ask this question: what sort of movement would be acceptable to the National Review? Nonviolent protestors that take things over are called coercive and authoritarian... let alone the boilings over of rage that result in riots or confrontations with police, simmered as they have so many years. Their critique is that black rage goes too far…

This book failed to enchant me. Perhaps I have a high bar, prose-wise, for enchantment. Perhaps I am not the target audience. Or perhaps the book rides on Kawasaki's reputation rather than its content. The book is a loosely organized series of maxims with supporting explanations and stories. Throughout all of his advice, I can't help but think about the greasy-palmed corporate hacks on the other side of his advice: "Give for Intrinsic Reasons", "Bake a Bigger Pie", and "Default to Yes"…

Somewhere along the line, I learned that racism was over. Nobody told me that. But I learned that the way we get over race was by pretending it didn't exist. Even so, it still was wisdom to lock your doors when a black man crossed the street in front of your car…

Bernie Sanders is clear-and-away the Christian choice for president. He began his political career organizing for civil rights and was arrested during a sit-in. That's prophetic. And when you listen to his speeches over the years, his words are likewise prophetic. Not in the sense of "predicting the future," but in the sense of speaking timeless truth to power--the Biblical meaning of the word. And why wouldn't he sound like a Hebrew prophet? He is a Jew, raised on the Hebrew Scriptures…

I am often puzzled by our culture's need to supersize a story out of the realm where ordinary people can relate to it. Why must we make all things epic? When was the last time you faced an absolute evil that required you to don full chain mail? And so, I was again caught flat-footed by the Peter Jackson Hobbit franchise. Why inject a cosmic battle of good against evil into Tolkiens' humble tale of a hobbit far from home caught in forces beyond his reckoning? Now look here…

Emma Watson gave an excellent speech to the UN where she claimed that men suffer from gender stereotypes, too. She called men to join women struggling for feminism, and asked men to draw from experiences of being stereotyped because of their gender in order to join in the struggle for women’s rights. So I ask: how can a white man draw from his experience of gender stereotypes? Is a white man’s experience of gender stereotypes really comparable to a woman’s experience of patriarchy…

While reading "How Playing Good Christian Housewife Almost Killed Me," I thought about Bakunin, a Russian anarchist and atheist, who once said, "If God did exist, it would be necessary to abolish him." There are truly dark gods of bondage and patriarchy that must be slain. As Vyckie Garrison explains, "Based on a literalist interpretation of Psalm 127, Quiverfull families eschew all forms of birth control. They have a high regard for the patriarchal family structure found in the Old Testament which emphasizes hierarchy, authority, and strict gender roles for men, women, boys, and girls…

In medieval Europe, when books were copied by hand onto scraped hide, monks would painstakingly illustrate the first letter of important pages and fill the margins with figures and designs. Text was expensive and the illumination of texts was often a spiritual discipline that venerated the writings. I thought during this year's Lent I was violating my discipline of falling in love with the ordinary when I stayed up late nights cutting illuminations from medieval manuscripts and inserting them into my blog…

Back in 2004, on our honeymoon in Central America, visiting the remote sites of US-inspired massacres, I caught giardia, an intestinal parasite, and I held onto it for five years despite multiple courses of antibiotics. I spent many Saturdays napping, barely holding it together from the week. I felt like my insides were falling apart. My body's natural healing processes were disrupted, and I developed carpal tunnel, a sometimes painful musculo-skeletal disorder. I found that I couldn't digest lactose and a number of other things. Giardia is hard to test for, and I proved this by testing negative for it…

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. We believe we believe something when we tell others we believe it…

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. There will always be room for the mystery that has propelled humanity since the inception of language. In college, I wrote a program to describe the behavior of ants. When they found food, they laid down "pheromones" as they carried it back to the hive…

Noble Friends, The Grow Your Own Farm-to-Table campaign was a total success!!!! We raised $10,770, with another $1,000 and change pledged. That makes it possible to even build an iPhone application if grassroots folks want it!!! I'm overwhelmed with gratitude. So many of you responded with such generosity. So many of you helped by sharing and encouraging me. THANK YOU…

Definitely, I'm not one much given to joy. I'm far more likely to escape from normal with a fantasy novel than I am to delight in the cutting of vegetables and the washing of dishes. I'm not so rare a bird as Brother Lawrence, who can practice the presence of God as easily as whistling. No, for me, practicing the presence of God in the midst of the ordinary is a thew-straining effort. Thews being what characters in fantasy novels strain when they're wielding a battle axe or rescuing a distressed maiden. Which we feminists no longer do…

Paper economy. The term reminds us that our economy was once literally based on pieces of paper. Economics is our society’s primary method of keeping track of value. The problem is that the economic system of value-keeping, the paper economy, is out of sync with the earth. We don’t need Wendell Berry to remind us that an ecological catastrophe has arrived. And yet the logic of paper, economic profit, is the primary decision matrix for states and multinational corporations…

Our scripture today sounds like a cacophony, does it not? All those voices. Job, scratching his sores in the ashes of his life with a shard of broken pottery. Elijah, splitting a bull into four blood-soaked pieces and calling down the fire of God to defeat the prophets of Baal. Sort of a my-God-is-bigger-than-yours. St. John of Patmos telling us that if we trust ourselves to the sword we will be slain by it. And then the Roman centurion. The boss. He recognizes power in Christ because he himself has power on earth. Heal my servant! he says My earthly power is profane next to yours. And Jesus does…

I really enjoyed the article, "Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig? 'Femivores' have made DIY domesticity cool. But critics who blame feminism for obesity and fast food have it wrong." As a man who identifies as a feminist, I'm going to comment on this article from my own perspective…

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. That is to say, the church must differentiate itself from the State through nonviolence, or our concepts of God will be read as totalitarian and frightening…

People have asked why I critiqued "Idolatry of God," and pointed out that Rollins' earlier works were much clearer on God. Oddly, there seems to be a criticism/dialogue phobia in the emergent church. As for me, I find spiritual and intellectual critique invigorating and healthy and was rather baffled by the strong response Micah Bales' post got. So I found my old copy of "How (not) to Speak of God" by Peter Rollins, and started poking around (it was lost for the last few weeks)…

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. -Rock-biter, in The Neverending Story…

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…

my books are my mind spilled out in pages scattered across shelves i am sifting through my ancestors the sacred and profane remembering and forgetting i am becoming my path is a line of green highlit fire I am a thousand flames words called forth from the black ink to think is to divide: each letter infinitesimally smaller: the beating of a heart god i love the fire pressed through me called forth by the word into difference yes i am fractal infinitely recursing into flaming colors books within books are written as my soul exults in the infinity of……

it is 9 o'clock in the morning and my brain is full of tongues i woke to a president's plan for an ailing economy pressed through a recalcitrant congress ground finer still by the pecking fingers of reporters stuffed into the airwaves like a sausage. my dreams were cobweb clinging in my mouth I prayed in the light as I waited for the snooze my dream persisted like hope but soured a sharp toothbrush punctures my reverie not unpleasant…

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, is is a sacrament; when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration...in such desecration, we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want. -Wendell Berry If we're going to reform our nation's unsustainable agricultural system, we're going to need to tackle economic inequality. That is to say, when you can't afford fresh arugula, you definitely can't afford organic fresh arugula…

The echoes of a night drift through my screen mesh. A man explains fervent against a Crown Vic's acceleration. Crickets pulse aloof as tree branches rustling above. And why does a horn slice insistent across the rustling of dry leaves? Anonymized by distance, a dog yelps in pain incomprehensible. Our city vast as starscapes whose lights yet travel to our eyes. i am a distant hope i make no sound my ballpoint is a ninja…

"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." - Arundhati Roy. Who could have imagined an economy in which gentle vegetables were subversive? But this is our world. A world where a vegetable, whose growth is imperceptible to the naked eye, can spider a crack into the concrete of our industrial food system. We find ourselves in a food economy that sickens us…

Remember the Occupy encampments? We set up a church there. Here are pictures of us in prayer at the encampments. In those days, it felt like the Occupy movement was a fulcrum so placed as to move the world…

the day barks: a hound set to guard by inner clockworks officious, vigilant exhaustion nine thousand anonymous lapping at the will an attriting ocean once again it bays thirsting for work and feed "i am (i am)" yes, and i am i say but less in the dawn oh the ceaseless dawn! calling me to life from wordless desire ah how it tracks me 9 thousand distinctions shattered from a single pane and the wind carries a howl through the broken glass…

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. There was a time before the Mind when all information, all knowledge, was stored in these inert paper volumes. Isaac knew from some distant memory that the secret to books lay in the study of their pages, with the eyes scanning back and forth…

I remember the hammocks staring up into the meshed leaf canopy a midwesterner in paradise still working i remember the hammocks of paradise high in the leaf canopy i strove against the leafcutter ants against the green-hued sun to build a haven where all things stay where put i remember the hammocks where i strove in my mind as my body rested…

Bill McKibben writes that oil companies have, on their books, enough oil to create at 18 degree (Farenheit) increase in global temperature. Wow. That's just what we're planning to burn. If you haven't, go read his article. Post it to Facebook and Twitter, and then come back here. While I agree with McKibben on nearly all his points, I find him impatient on the power of individual transformation…

Micah Bales asked a deep question. He suggests that the wealth in property we’ve inherited is hindering our work for social justice. He talks provocatively (as a spiritual challenge, he clarifies) about “burning the meetinghouse.” He asks, “What would happen if we put the movement of the Spirit ahead of property management…

At Wild Goose, I was humbled to be among justice-seeking Christians seeking to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. I see a deep connection between the personal practice of simple living and activism for social change. While I struggle to live justly, particularly in my everyday purchasing decisions (as Julie Clawson advises!), I often don't live as simply as I could. Sometimes I take shortcuts, going out for lunch, driving my car to work, or buying something to solve a problem that actually requires time I lack because of overcommitment…

Generally speaking, my generation is a practical generation, and I am challenged by my faith to be a practical person. Don't get me wrong: I love all verbal and theological things: story, theology, politics, and history, perhaps even inordinately. But I believe in places. I believe that relationships, rooted in love, transform us. And it just so happens that most lasting human relationships are formed around the table. In the Eucharist, the ordinary is made sacred…

Originally published in Justice Unbound. "The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us." -- Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination. I do not know how to be a pastor. I'm an organizer. I organize the church for grassroots democracy, and sometimes I do pastor-like things, but I am a layperson…

"I am a man of unclean lips, from a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts (Isaiah 6:5)." Isaiah is an institutional reformer. He's a part of the priestly class. He's a part of the problem…

When I am faced with dishonesty and fraud on a systemic scale, I ask questions of God. But as I trace the origins of injustice, I am directed back towards humanity. The question becomes: what can we do to end injustice? The Washington Post reported on the massive falsification of documents by banks: "Employees at major banks who churned out fraudulent foreclosure documents, forged signatures, made up fake job titles and falsely notarized paperwork often did so at the behest of their superiors, according to a federal investigation released Tuesday…

Sometimes, I think, church can be dis-empowering. If I were to try to put it into my own words, the church's project is to empower each person to open themselves to the river of the Holy Spirit which transforms and renews the whole person with a continual work of healing love which moves from the inner to the outer, transforming a person's personal, economic, and political relationships as well as their material place in the world. Is that our normal experience of church? Is this how we feel transformed by our church experience…

Oh Lord, save your servant who trusts in you. -Psalm 86 A prayer lifts up from the city, like the smoke of incense. A single prayer, in the myriad of others, a strand of smoke amidst a great burning. Oh Lord, why do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? -Psalm 10 But God is listening. God hears the prayers of God's people. The question is, are we listening? For God, who hears the prayers of his people, is calling us to listen as well. God's justice is a collective project…

Isaiah 58:3-24 "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin…

How does a Christian live in a power-mad world? A world that, from the perspective of the Beatitudes, is upside down. A world where the poor are getting poorer, and the rich are getting richer? Where nature herself strains at her bonds: straining for release from the carbon blanket that presses against her too hotly, maddened by a thousand poison-filled wounds? What does it mean to be a Christian in a world that is crucifying the poor and the environment on the same cross…