Melissa Florer-Bixler's book Fire by Night: Finding God in the pages of the Old Testament is a must read for Christians who struggle to make sense of or to find meaning in the Hebrew scriptures. Though her theological and Biblical interpretation skills are clearly evident, Florer-Bixler writes in a wonderfully accessible, narrative style that I …
Continue reading Recommended reading: Florer-Bixler’s Fire by Night
This is a scary time and as someone with Complex PTSD, I am personally struggling with the stress and anxiety that the Corona virus pandemic is causing. It's hard to know whether to turn off the news and stay off of social media because it can be overwhelming to be inundated with the updates, or …
It's that time of the year when we arbitrarily flip the calendar to a new year. This time we are also entering a new decade with what I hope is twenty-twenty vision - pun intended. As I look back on a decade fraught with emotionally eviscerating pain, I want to remind myself that there were …
Continue reading Looking back and forward with eyes of grace.
Once upon a time... I was a bigot, brazenly proclaiming my bigotry towards God's beautiful and wholly beloved LGBTQIA rainbow children. Once upon a time... I was completely unaware of the racism I carried within me that sometimes came out of my mouth. Once upon a time... I had no concept of white privilege or …
Holy God I lift up Donald Trump, the currant occupant of the White House, in whose hands rest an enormous amount of power, and I pray Holy One, that you will with astonishing grace pierce through the hardness of his heart that has led him to behave in such reprehensible ways. Holy One, Trump's words …
In 2015, I was in the midst of an existential crisis. The right livelihood I had attempted to carve out for myself as a permaculturist (see Go Golden chapter seven for an introduction to permaculture) had not worked out as planned. I was struggling to find work, living in a tiny attic bedroom we were renting from …
The following is an excerpt from the manuscript I am working on entitled Traumatic Episodes: Finding Grace in a Life Lived with PTSD. It's very much a work in progress. There will be journal-like entries (as with the one below) along with narrative chapters covering different time periods in my life. (Petros the Stress Demon is my …
Around three years ago, I attended church for the first time in a many years. Prior to that I had rejected the fundamentalism of my youth and as a result ended up spiritually adrift for a long time. When I left the church in 2003, for more details see my forthcoming book from Wipf …
One of the things that gets me riled up is the conflation of things done in the name of a religion by fundamentalists with the actual teachings of said religion. Case in point, America in 2018 is being enthralled, in the most negative sense of that word, by fundamentalist "Christians" who are gleefully celebrating every …
Love, grace, compassion
The Tattooed Theologian 