May 21Enough is Enough: Thoughts on Suffering and an Absent GodThis article was originally published on my blog Weird Name on November 18, 2016. Current events have been updated accordingly. There are a lot of reasons why I abandoned the chore of mustering belief in the God I was taught about when I was younger. One of those reasons is…Exchristian8 min readExchristian8 min read
May 21, 2020Thank God I’m an Atheist: COVID-19 EditionI spend a lot of time thinking about the years I spent all-in with evangelical Christianity, mostly because I spend a lot of time writing about them. Often, my focus is on my personal history and how the messages I received shaped me, both then and now. There are a…Atheism5 min readAtheism5 min read
Mar 20, 2020The Knowledge of Good and EvilAccording the story I grew up with, the world started in a garden. It was a perfect place, full of lush vegetation, inhabited by two innocent people and every kind of animal. Well, it was almost perfect. One of the animals — the snake — had a plan to trick…Good And Evil11 min readGood And Evil11 min read
Nov 13, 2019Member-onlyOn Writing (and Re-Writing) My Own StoryFour years ago I started my blog Weird Name by writing a bunch of essays about losing my religion. Literally, I used R.E.M.’s …Writing7 min readWriting7 min read
Sep 26, 2019Rethinking the Golden RuleLearning I Need to be Nice to Myself (Despite All Messages to the Contrary) If you were to create a bar graph comparing the frequencies of the different types of compliments I’ve received over the course of my life, the column for “polite” and all its synonyms would tower over the other affirmations like the Burj Khalifa soars over Dubai. When my mother took…Christianity10 min readChristianity10 min read
Aug 27, 2019A God By Any Other NameI’m currently reading through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. It’s a book I started for the first time about five years ago, but I didn’t get too far into it before I met the man who would eventually become my spouse and I got distracted. You know how it goes…God6 min readGod6 min read
Jul 23, 2019Member-onlyWhat Is Love?We act as if the definition of love is, to borrow words from one notorious explorer of the subject, a truth universally acknowledged. We say that all you need is love. We reassure each other that love trumps hate. …Exchristian11 min readExchristian11 min read
Mar 29, 2018Too Good For GraceThe words in the second half of this sentence will likely induce a little laughter in those who know me well, but the truth is that I’ve never seen myself as a perfectionist. To me, perfectionism is not being okay with getting a 98% on a test, whereas I have…Christianity4 min readChristianity4 min read
Dec 18, 2017Love and Luck: A Nihilist PrayerYesterday, as my partner and I were returning from lunch, driving wordlessly along the winding forest road that takes us to our house on the southwestern outskirts of Portland, it occurred to me: I got what I wanted. I got the thing I had been praying and pining and sweating…Atheism2 min readAtheism2 min read
Sep 12, 2017Amateur Attempts at Feminism From A Former Complementarian ChristianI’m pretty sure I’ve always been a feminist, just like I was always a critical thinker, and was always secretly okay with people being gay despite what I was told I should think by the tradition in which I was raised. Unfortunately, I’ve also always been a rule-follower. Not out…Feminism6 min readFeminism6 min read
