Category: Faith

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

"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…