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vision-making and rabble rousing

First, I want to thank everyone for being patient with me, my work, and this space while I’ve attended seminary. Many of you have been loyal Patreon supporters over the last several years despite the lengthy pauses between posts and updates, and I very much appreciate it.

I took a good long break over the holidays, and I’m starting back to seminary this week feeling well-rested and excited about the work I’ll be doing. It’s my last semester, so most of my time will be taken up with my capstone project which I unfortunately will not really be able to talk about in a lot of detail, although it’s incredibly exciting and fulfilling. I joined the board of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education a little while ago, and am helping out with their organizing and lobbying efforts– which will be a part of my seminary degree. That’s going to be keeping me incredibly busy this spring.

Looking ahead, especially past graduation, my plans are to really dig back into my writing. Seminary takes up all of my reading-writing-researching energies (a big reason why my World History and Cultures series has been languishing), but I’m really starting to feel the itch to return to the topics and audience I care about the most. Ask me sometime about progressive Christianity’s limited scope and audience in academia and I will get up on a soapbox and shout for an hour, maybe more.

My hope is, after graduation, to take a short break and then start working on a book proposal. Remember way back when I said I was working on a book about how complementarianism = abuse, and you’ve barely heard more than a peep about that since? Well, one of the reasons I went to seminary is so that I’d look more credible as an author, and –fingers crossed– I’ll have a book proposal to start sending out to agents by the end of this year.

I’d also like to start speaking more. I just got back from the Q Christian Fellowship conference in Chicago, where I spoke on queer hermeneutics (my breakout session title was “Reading the Rainbow” because I’m a 90s kid). I think the workshop went really well; my goal was to help bring some playfulness, joy, and redemption to a book that has been used as a weapon against so many of us, and I think I was successful. The interpretations and themes the groups shared …

Larry the Cucumber dressed as “Larry Boy,” telling Bob the Tomato “I laughed, I cried; It moved me, Bob.”

I wish I could’ve recorded the session just so I could have the twenty minutes at the end when everyone was sharing what their group had come up with. It was delightful– I’d been working with the passages I’d chosen for months and some of what was shared had never occurred to me before. I couldn’t have been happier.

So here’s to 2019: may it be filled with triumphs for all of us, great and small.

(If you’re curious about what I was reading and playing, here you go: Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, Deborah Harkness’ All Soul’s Trilogy and Time’s Convert, Skyward by Brandon Sanderson, and Spinning Silver by Namoi Novik.)

Photography by Yamavu
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