This is not the exvangelical musing that I intended to write this week. But let me tell you about a brief conversation that I overheard in the break room a few days ago, so you may understand why this particular topic was suddenly one that I simply couldn't resist. Seriously, it was basically handed to …
Continue reading Exvangelical Musings: Tree-Huggers for Christ – An Ecocritical Bible Study
Today's dispatch comes from my friend Shana Nielsen, who like me grew up in the Evangelical Church and is now walking a path in which she is processing her experiences within it and coming to recognize its theology and practices as emotional and spiritual abuse that we carry with us long after leaving. She has …
If you were an evangelical teenager in the 90s, you listened to DC Talk. They were the compass by which all Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) was measured. There are plenty of explanations for their surge to the very top of our greatest rock stars, but the primary reason was because they were more wickedly talented …
In 2018 -- 12 years after walking away from the church -- I finally went to therapy and confronted what I came to understand was trauma I still carried from my religious upbringing. The more I realized that I still carried so much trauma within myself, the more I knew that I needed to confront …
Continue reading My Story: A Dream of a Million Feathers – A Tale of A Repentant Abuser
Marlene Winell's book LEAVING THE FOLD, in which she coined the phrase "religious trauma syndrome," was immensely helpful in my own healing -- particularly in recognizing the ways I still carried abuse and trauma from my experience in church. (I left the church in 2006, but did not read the book until 2018.) For example, …
Continue reading Exvangelical Meditation: The Sin of Pride and Religious Trauma
Surviving the Spirit 