I found that my memories were accurate and that there was not a whole lot that I read that I had forgotten. That wasn’t the problem. The issue was that my understanding of the nature of those events was warped. As I began talking about my childhood and teenage experiences with Dan and a few close friends, they responded with shock and sympathy.
I came to the same conclusion that divorce is… wonderful. I don’t mean it isn’t sad or hard or even tragic when it happens. But it is WONDERFUL that we have a choice. That we aren’t stuck. That we can unmake a decision, walk away, start over, or simply realize that who we are now is no longer suited to partner with the person that made sense once upon a time.
That’s the beauty and the frustration of being bisexual: you have the option to ignore the reality of your sexuality but you can also feel invisible – as if no one can know your fullness without intentional effort on your part.
I had so much fun on Ken Kemp’s podcast The Beached White Male. He invited me on the show to talk about deconstruction and what it is like to go through it when you are a professional Christian. Short answer: excruciating and terrifying. Long answer: you’ll have to listen to the conversation.
It’s alarming how often I have read or heard ridiculous misunderstandings about the process of faith deconstruction from those who have never gone through it. Some of it is fear mongering, and some is honest misconceptions by caring people struggling to understand
Attempts to shame, cajole, or threaten people to keep them from coming to new theological perspectives is spiritually abusive. We have got to start taking note of what this looks like and call it out publicly when we see it.
the penal substitutionary atonement theory is just one more toxic belief created by patriarchal Christianity. It does not reflect the nature or desires of God any more than the sexual slavery and genocides seen throughout the Bible reflect God’s purposes. Those things are descriptive of human cultures during those eras, and the Bible records human attempts to understand God with the explanations available to them during their time in history.
Rage has been my friend for a very long time. We have had a complicated relationship full of betrayals and misunderstandings, and truthfully, I’ve been the hurtful one. Rage has stuck by me even when I didn’t love her like she deserved to be loved. When I was around 6 or 7 years old, my pastor’s college-aged son came out as gay. The church was in uproar. I didn’t even know what “gay” meant, but I was heartbroken that the…
I was delighted to be invited to be a guest on the Faith and Feminism Podcast. Meghan and I had a wonderful conversation exploring the reality of Patriarchy and Colonialism in Western missions work. I deeply believe that things can be done better and offered my perspective on how that is possible. You can listen to our conversation here.
As long as I am a deconstructing Christian, my old community can feel sorry for me and pray for me and my doubts and questions. But if I reconstruct rather than return, it is time to abandon me, warn others about me, and pray against me for the spiritual harm that I am capable of inflicting on others