Commentary

But while my ethical objections led me to atheism, my trauma led me back to Christ. Simply put: I had a relapse and sought out a faith community because I needed to be around people. Praying helped. Being around people helped. Devoting myself to something bigger than myself and to Christ on the cross was an incredible comfort while I searched for effective medical treatment.

During my time in college and graduate school, I accumulated something like $50,000 in debt. So, you’d imagine I would be particularly excited about the prospect of Biden forgiving some of my debt. But I already paid off my student loans! Does that mean I rue others getting theirs forgiven? No! I am happy that other people may receive debt forgiveness even if it doesn’t apply to me.

If God tends to the lilies of the field, how much more will God protect the poor and oppressed (Matthew 6:25-34)? This is the correct definition of divine providence: God cares for, loves, and empathizes with the meek who will one day inherit the earth. This is the providence that theologian James H. Cone imagined in his seminal work God of the Oppressed: “God has not ever, no not ever, left the oppressed alone in struggle. He was with them in Pharaoh’s Egypt, is with them in America, Africa, and Latin America, and will come in the end of time to consummate fully their human freedom.”

Twitter is a strange thing — if it’s any singular thing at all. If it does come to an end, I hope we’ll look back reflectively and carefully, learning from what we got right, what we got wrong, and growing into the future.

While Rethinking Sex maintains a nearly secular perspective throughout, toward the end of the book she draws on 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas’ definition of love, which is that we should be “willing the good of the other” and creating goodwill in our relationships and interactions with other people.

I wish I could say that my journey into beekeeping began in some profound manner, especially as a person who has spent years working on policies that impact the environment and food security. But the truth is that I started playing The Sims 4 to keep myself entertained during the pandemic, and the game had a beekeeping feature. As I played, I thought, “I can do this.” And that is how my beekeeping journey began.

So when I read about people like Katie, one of many affirming parents who are leaving Texas because of the threat of having their transgender child taken from them, I think of the way the women at the tomb fled in fear. And when I hear Maddie, a trans girl in North Carolina, say, “If I didn’t have my hormones or my [puberty] blocker, I’d be very unhappy, and I wouldn’t want to leave the house sometimes,” I think of the disciples with the door locked on Easter evening.

Many of the white evangelical churches I have visited and grew up in framed Good Friday as a celebration. I have attended services that centered around dramatic skits or clips of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in order to evoke an emotional response. Another service treated Good Friday like a visitation where congregants were encouraged to reflect on their “friend Jesus” and share words of gratitude.

I admit that if you catch me on a bad day, I might join the chorus demanding that the government take aggressive action. As a former Catholic, I often contemplate how the law may have helped the Catholic Church hide its crimes against children. But in an effort to find some common ground, my position simply is that religious institutions should have to earn the exemptions in the same way that secular nonprofits do. This means that they would have to show how much money they bring in and how they spend it.