The Truth Shall Set You Free

One of my fellow Augsburg alumnae shared this- it is about being a Black woman leader in the ELCA, but many of the issues she speaks of are the same in Pagan, Heathen & UU as well as non-religious mostly white communities

Embracing My Shadow

I’ve written before about my beloved albeit broken community; about my church and why I continue to be engaged with a community of faith. I am a member of and leader in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), one of the largest Protestant denominations in this country. My church has approximately 3.8 million members in around 10,000 congregations across the U.S. and the Caribbean. This church is a historically white church, founded by a German Catholic monk named Martin Luther. He never wanted to start a new church, he wanted to reform the Roman Catholic Church. Luther felt like the church was not speaking in the language of the people and that the church had lost it’s prophetic voice and leadership within society. His 95 Theses marked the beginning of what we now call the Protestant Reformation. In 2017, Lutherans around the world will mark the 500th anniversary of…

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Society for Disability Studies and Karen Nakamura

Interesting- account of anthropologist Karen Nakamura’s studies of Deaf/deaf and schizophrenic communities in Japan. Wonder if there’s anything relevant to disability issues in Shinto or Zen Buddhism?

Mad Trans Dreams

I spent the last four days at the Society for Disability Studies conference (SDS). This conference has a lot of serious problems, including high financial cost, plenty of jargon, and ongoing racism. It’s also amazing in some ways, including great people, better accessibility than any other academic conference I have attended, more undergraduate presentations than any other academic conference I have attended, and fantastic conversations. I decided to go mostly because it would give me a chance to hear presentations by people whose work I admire. One of those people is Karen Nakamura.

I first heard Dr. Nakamura speak at a queer disability symposium at NYU a few years ago. I was so excited about her work that I rushed out to buy her most recent book—Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan. In Disability of the Soul, and the accompanying short films, she shared some…

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Capitalism, Neurotypicality, and the War on Consciousness

Sean articulates many thoughts I’ve had over the years about being autistic. Also why I Just Can’t Deal with mainstream autism groups anymore.

Why I Am Not an Heathen (Though I Kind of Wish That I Could Be)

What she said (with personal life story variations)

Pagan Church Lady

This (long) post has been a long time coming.  I’ve referenced my feelings about personal background and development in some other articles and have been spending a lot of time trying to explore myself in relation to the modern Pagan movement and Heathenry.  Although the title was inspired by Bertrand Russel’s piece “Why I am Not A Christian” I won’t, as he does, seek to deconstruct the idea of a particular deity.  I will, as he does, explain why the values expressed in the religion in question do not fit mine, and why that leaves me in a difficult place.

Let me begin by explaining that I’ve had a love for the Aesir and Vanir since childhood.  I first read of them in children’s fiction when I was four or five and rapidly advanced to reading more adult storybooks about them.  Later on I discovered source material like the Eddas…

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My husband is more to me than a living jar-opener

Commentary on reblog below: A lot of Millennials (or Gen Xers) who grew up in apolitical or conservative households are going to be clueless about what feminism is unless they actually go out their way to seek out alternative information. If their info is only from the so-called “mainstream” media than it will have a rightward bias that feminists all want to castrate men, outlaw makeup etc. If these ladies are actually organizing something (even something stupid) then I can’t really call them apolitical, but they still are very uninformed. I also find it telling that sign mentions being “cool” with sexual orientation but assumes male/female relationships and complementarianism, (complementary gender roles) which is a idea some conservative Christians use both to justify traditional hetero marriage and exclude same-sex relationships. Maybe it’s “gay people are fine so long as they’re celibate”. Thank you, how generous!

Now, I don’t mind people who don’t call themselves feminists, (perhaps based on issues with some feminists not being intersectional enough) but act on feminist principles, I’ll take that over people who call themselves feminist but act like bad ones, like the Michigan’s Womyn’s Music Festival.

Fit and Feminist

If you’ve been on the internet at all in the past week, you’ve probably already seen the Women Against Feminism tumblr going around, or at the very least read about it.

I didn’t think too much of it when I saw it, for two reasons. For one, most of the women had a tenuous grasp (at best) on the definition of feminism, one that seemed like it was informed in its entirety by Rush Limbaugh and Jessi Spano, and also the belief that “misandry” jokes are actually serious.

The other reason was that most of the “women” actually looked like teenage girls. Considering that I was super into Ayn Rand when I was a teenage girl, I can’t get too far up on my high horse with regards to the contributors. Let’s just say that if Tumblr was around in the late 1990s, I’m sure there’d be a photo of…

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