Just Keep Swimming LGBTQ Category
Religious Liberty in the U.S. and cat pictures
Posted on November 19, 2020 1 Comment
I ran across this paper I wrote for a Religious Liberty class at McAfee School of Theology, Mercer University. I didn’t think it was half bad, so I’m posting it in my blog. It’s a little thick, so I’m adding some cat pictures. Historical Context of the ControversyThe religion clause of the U.S. Constitution states, […]
Louisiana Black Church Fires: A Psalm of Community Lament
Posted on April 17, 2019 4 Comments
Holy God, we must speak the names. St. Mary Baptist. Greater Union Baptist. Mount Pleasant Baptist. Louisiana smolders. In the names and the smoke our sin is manifest. We do not speak of their pain because the pain is their own—it belongs to their hearts. We do not get to cry those tears. Theirs is […]
Missionary Position: The UMC, Sexuality, and the Global Church
Posted on April 15, 2019 3 Comments
First, I need to acknowledge my white privilege and citizenship in a colonizer nation. Additionally, I am a U.S. Christian in a missionary culture, which has contributed to colonization. That said, I am also a gay female Christian from a rural Fundamentalist denomination, so I also can speak from intersecting places of marginalization. In late […]
Till Death?: The Curiously Ethical Question of Intentional Monogamy
Posted on April 8, 2019 2 Comments
This week’s post is an updating of a one that began as a paper I presented at the 2017 South Eastern Women’s Studies (SEWSA) Conference called Intentional Monogamy: Not Your Grandma’s Sexual Ethics. I’m thinking about monogamy as an act of queer intentionality. Even before I started my MDiv at Mercer, I had been playing with […]
(An) Embodied Prayer
Posted on March 22, 2019 Leave a Comment
Two words concerning prayer life resonate with me this week: intention and attention. I sometimes fret about my prayer life, especially when I hear my fellow seminarians openly talking about theirs; I even have a professor outside of this class who returns our attention to prayer life. This week’s reading reminds us that naming our […]
Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR)
Posted on November 26, 2018 Leave a Comment
This week a group of us from Pilgrimage United Church of Christ (PUCC) went to the 20th Transgender Day of Remembrance ceremony in Atlanta. Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) is an observance every year on November 20 that honors the memory of those whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence. We went to […]
God Laughs, or Fun with Bell’s Palsy
Posted on March 16, 2017 7 Comments
You make your plans, and God laughs. That’s what happened to me over the weekend. Let me go back, though, and start with discovering the Atlanta Freedom Bands, which I wrote about here in November 2014. I recollected how finding the band made me realize how much I had missed making music, marching in parades, […]
On X-Men and Orlando
Posted on June 15, 2016 Leave a Comment
On X-Men and Orlando I’ve been making my family watch a lot of X-men movies this week, as a kind of research project for the new X-Men: Apocalypse. One of the themes throughout all the movies is good versus evil (another theme, especially in X-Men: The Last Stand, is marginalization of people because of their […]
Finding Free: The Atlanta Freedom Bands and Coming Full Circle
Posted on November 3, 2014 Leave a Comment
When I was in fifth grade at Littleville Elementary School, something magical happened. One day, our teacher announced that the band teacher from the nearby high school would be coming to Littleville to talk to kids and their parents about joining the band. It was 1973, and resources for extra-curricular activities–heck, resources for curricular activities–were […]
The Gay Agenda, Or, The Zoo and Me
Posted on October 15, 2014 Leave a Comment
First of all, let’s just get it out there: there IS a gay agenda. Sort of. But it’s probably not what you’re thinking. When anti-gay people speak of a “Gay Agenda,” they make up some items to maintain the politics of fear that have proven successful. Gays getting married. Gays having children. Gays in schools. […]
