There is literally no demographic more interesting than queer religious people. Even if you never had much of a crisis in faith (like me), we are still forced to reconcile what we believe in with our own existence in a way that straight religious people, and nonreligious queer people, will never fully experience. I once spoke to a lesbian minister of a queer-centric nondenominational church who said “the god you believe in is always a reflection of self, which is why queer people see god as so much more loving and forgiving than other people do. Our god is a form of self-love and acceptance” and i will never forget that.
“The female writers, for whatever reason (men?), don’t much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times. Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence. Murder is de rigueur in the genre, so people die at the hands of others—lovers, neighbors, obsessive strangers—but the body counts tend to be on the low side. “I write about murder,” Tana French once said, “because it’s one of the great mysteries of the human heart: How can one human being deliberately take another one’s life away?” Sometimes, in the work of French and others, the lethal blow comes so quietly that it seems almost inadvertent, a thing that in the course of daily life just happens. Death, in these women’s books, is often chillingly casual, and unnervingly intimate. As a character in Alex Marwood’s brilliant new novel, The Darkest Secret, muses: “They’re not always creeping around with knives in dark alleyways. Most of them kill you from the inside out.””
I actually got chills reading this article, because this is someone who gets it. I mean, “The female writers, for whatever reason (men?), don’t much believe in heroes.”
“Jesus never called for his disciples to Christianize culture. To make every aspect of culture about Christianity, and to marginalize and minimize those who were not Christian. He didn’t even call us to convert everyone to a new religion called Christianity- that’s not what the Great Commission is all about. No, Jesus called us to go into the world and proclaim good news- news of liberating love for everyone- and to make disciples, or in other words, invite people to follow in the example of Jesus. To emulate the life Jesus lived and work to create the world he dreamed of. And did you know that you can do that without ever making someone a Christian? In fact, did you realize that when Jesus told his disciples to go into the world and preach the gospel, there was no such thing as Christianity- it didn’t exist. He wasn’t telling them to make people Christian. He also clearly wasn’t telling them to make people Jewish- we find that out in the Book of Acts. He wasn’t asking them to ask anyone to convert from their religion, or their culture, or their social setting. Rather, he invited everyone in every culture and context to embrace a path of self-sacrificial love for the good of their friends, neighbors and enemies.”
“I cleaned my apartment when no one was coming over, and cooked elaborate meals with no guests in mind but myself. I began to learn to say “no” to things, to define space for myself. I considered decisions longer, and hurt people less. With no one else’s needs into which to escape, it becomes much more difficult to skid through life on self-delusion and comfortable ignorance. Living alone is a confrontation with the mirror, a removal, if only for certain hours of the day, from the social contract, outside the systems of manners that grow up around women like strangling vines. It is becoming the witch in the forest, powerful and watchful and silent, setting visitors on edge. […]
The things I miss could be seen as childish, a state of being in which I was never obligated to consider anyone’s needs other than my own. Women are pushed out of childhood so quickly, shoved without ceremony into the heavy social obligations of adulthood. Living alone is a reminder that we can make our bodies antisocial, hoarding our selfishness and our silence. Loneliness and solitude are privileges of thoughtless and full-throated adulthood traditionally handed to men and kept from women. They are the strange and rich pleasures of the world beyond the social, beyond the structures of home and family.”
i'll apple your turnover 