God Thought 1

Create hope at home.
Spread it wide.

Do the gospel at home.
Tell it wide.

Love God at home.
Understand God widely.

Book Idea

The Best Among Us: Progressive Profiles of Courage

Although I feel like this book exists (in different forms) under different titles.

There are many similar books in the world, though they seem to reach different audiences.  Do I write a book that exists in similar forms, or do I lift up those books that exist?  How do you build an audience without creating content, though?  I would make an awesome curator of media, but that's not, like, a thing...

is it?

Book Title?

Jesus Talk

Thinking about...

Creating retail component... I don't want to give too much away, because I feel like someone could steal my ideas (!), but I would need to figure out not only most advantageous and honest tax filing body type and figure out how to do something that has a top-to-bottom chain of supplies and labor that are just and sustainable.

As well as some online content.

Maybe an app.  Not that I know how to make an app.

A Few Book Ideas

in the works.

-An Honest Bible Study (incorporates scholarship and interpretation)

-New Year's Resolution: Build a Spiritual Life
a year of easy ways to start finding your spirit
or Finding Your Spiritual Path (in a year, because who has time?)

-Whatever Wisdom: Modern-Day Parables and Pop-Culture Proverbs

-A Potty-Mouthed Young Minister Challenges the Church
or Church is Boring, Jesus is Cool, Don't Tell Me What to Think

projectile ideas

Truth

spinachandmushrooms:

Front of my notebook. #seminary

Sharing Faith

"Regarding the Spirit as animator of the church, here I highlight that pedagogy ‘in the Spirit’ is to have both a genuine hospitality and an 'outward-bound’ orientation.  Clearly, it is possible to bond people into a closed or elitist group that has a sense of communal identity but is turned in on itself.  The pedagogy of Christian religious educators should never encourage any kind of sectarianism; it is to help create a welcoming and inclusive community and 'lead them out’ into solidarity with any human community in which God’s Spirit is moving to bring about God’s reign for all creation."

— Thomas H. Groome, from “Sharing Faith”

Animal Agriculture

I went to UCC.org and searched for “global warming.”  The first link that comes up offers ways that we can help reduce our carbon footprint.  Under ways we can do that with food, it says:

• Food: grow a garden for vegetables and herbs, support your local farmers through a CSA, limit packaging and waste, start a compost pile.

I am disappointed that this says NOTHING about reducing consumption of animals, even though animal agriculture is the LEADING CAUSE OF GREENHOUSE GASES.  Reducing animals consumption will do more to slow global warming than ANYTHING ELSE, but no one suggests doing that because it’s an ugly thing to talk about.  People like eating meat and they get really defensive about it.

You know what else people are defensive about?  Their homophobic views.  The reasons they don’t support social safety nets.  The reasons they “deserve” wealth and people in poverty “deserve” that.  Alcoholism.  Racism.  Sexism.  Why they drive a giant vehicle even though they don’t haul things.  Why they don’t recycle (it’s too hard!).  Why they don’t compost (ew!).  Why they shop at giant corporate stores who abuse people in many ways.  

Yet we all understand that these are important things to speak out against because we understand that while it can be difficult to talk to someone about these things, they matter.  Yet when you say that folks should try to adopt more earth-friendly eating habits, you’re an extremist.  You’re a terrible person.  

If I called someone out for eating beef, I would come off as a jerk.  If I call someone out for saying “f*g” or “p***y” or driving a Hummer, though, I’m brave and awesome.

I understand that no one likes being judged.  I don’t say things to my friends and family who eat meat in front of me every single day because I understand that it comes off as judgement.  However, when we talk about any of the other issues above, we are promoting justice.  When we talk about promoting vegetarianism or veganism or simply REDUCING animal consumption, I’m a judgmental jerk. 

All I know is: science is on my side.  97% of scientists agree that global climate change is HAPPENING and that it is because of HUMAN activity.  The largest contributing factor to global warming is animal agriculture.  17% of greenhouse gases are caused by animal agriculture.  

I’m ONLY talking about the environmental impact, too.  Animal agriculture is mostly inhumane,  funded by our tax dollars to keep costs ARTIFICIALLY low, disproportionately abuses undocumented workers, with NAFTA it impoverishes farmers in developing and impoverished countries where their styles of animal agriculture are NOT cruel and inhumane, it breeds disease, and the unhealthy amount of meat that we eat contributes to health epidemics like heart disease, high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, etc.  

Seriously.  Reducing animal consumption is the right thing to do and I’m a giant jerk for even writing this.

Women Preaching

"In the New Testament story of Luke-Acts Anna and Mary speak as prophets, as do the four daughters of Philip (Acts 21:9). Mary learns from Jesus the teacher (Luke 10), and Priscilla teaches. Yet, when the women face the empty tomb and embrace the mission to tell the disciples what they have seen, ‘the story seemed like nonsense, and they refused to believe them.’ Women are taught by Jesus and speak for Jesus. They pray and they prophecy. Yet, even so visibly embraced, welcomed, challenged, and given the task of proclamation, the world will not listen."

— Turner and Hudson, “To be Saved From Silence” in Saved from Silence: Finding Women’s Voice in Preaching (St. Louis: Chalice Press) 1999, 88.

Is anyone else concerned...

about some of the things happening in and near the Holy Land? 

I'm concerned that what is going on in Gaza, Syria, and Iran, including international interplay between these places and their governments (as well as, potentially, North Korea, given its alliances).

I'm concerned that a war in the Middle East could result in destruction of countless places of religious and historical significance, including a multitude of holy sites.  I'm concerned that it could result in the effective genocide of the Palestinian people. 

I'm just concerned. 

Oh, Hey

So I haven't been utilizing this space much lately.  Life went in directions I didn't necessarily anticipate after grad school.  So here's a bit of an update.

I finished my Masters in May, so I'm officially hella smart and probably a stable genius.

I accepted a job as Director of Young Adult Ministries at a church in the peninsula, but ended up having to walk away from that opportunity because my husband and I bought a home.

For those unfamiliar with the Bay Area, it's dense and expensive, but also many kinds of amazing.  I've grown up here, as have generations of my family.  I love this place and want to stay here.  My spouse and I moved an hour or so from my hometown and the the beautiful city of San Francisco to a small town in the mountains.

I totaled my car the week we bid on our home and until a few days ago, I was essentially under house arrest in the middle of the mountains.  I am now the proud grateful driver of a 15-year-old Mazda.

Long story less long:  My ministry plans for an urban, millennial ministry need some re-thinking.

We'll see what happens.

Hello Again

Wild flowers in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

After Watching "Lover's Walk"

Queer Theology and Identifying Categories

I'm thinking of criticisms of how queer theology/theory’s ideas of unravelling identity has damaging effects in the lives of those for whom identity is formative and in practicality, have everything to do with how people live.  

In considering suggestions that identity is not given, but made, I think of how this idea might play with the “born this way” narrative.  I think each perspective may effectively erase the other in ways that oppress particular experiences of the world.  The “born this way” narrative is a powerful one that combats harmful worldviews that oppress LGBTQ people, but it also erases experiences of identity that are more creative or consciously self-directed and equally as important to those who hold them.  The reverse is also true.  I also share in the criticism that queer theologizing and theorizing that is not carefully and intentionally done can have the effect of obscuring oppressive forces and thereby reinforcing them.  Goss calls for solidarity, but I wonder how that solidarity plays out if part of the work of queering the world is to upturn forms/categories of identity that are ways we discern and call out oppression.

Also, in considering the call for a heuristic narrative, I wonder the degree to which queer thinking resists narrative...

After Watching "Revelations"