God Bless and Be Well
What does church look like when the Baptists go online in a science town?
On the pulpit, directly in front of the camera, sat three new sacramental objects: a large bottle of Purell, a bar of Irish Spring soap, and an opened canister of Lysol disinfectant wipes. In the background sprawled the wood-paneled sanctuary of the Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church. For this, their first livestreamed service, on Sunday, March 22nd, wooden chairs were set up in three concentric rows. Five church leaders sat in these chairs, leaving plenty of empty seats between one another. Binkley is located less than five minutes’ drive from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on a shady lot just beyond the grocery store, but this was the first time I had seen the
Prophetic Confinement
“Go, be confined inside your house!” Pandemic parallels stretch back as far as the sixth century BCE, when even the prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah were restricted to their homes during their ministry.
A New Ramadan
This year’s Ramadan promised to be different before it started.
Apocalyptabuse, or How to Survive “The End”
Call this fantasized thinking apocalyptabuse: the demoralizing mythic-psychic warfare that deprives people of hope, makes us fear that The End is near, and thereby cuts off our aspirations of any earthly life to come.
Dispatches from Isolation, Vol. 1
Abandon most of your plans, except for the quiet house in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a promise of isolation that you desired before it was mandated.
The Empty Tomb
How could we anticipate something so seemingly simple as peace, when something as violent as a virus is tearing through our lives, our traditions, our loves?
It’s the End and Nothing Feels Fine
I don’t use the word “apocalypse” or “apocalyptic” lightly. I’m a scholar of bad endings. And the pandemic that we face right now feels like it could be a very bad ending.
Holy Shit
I thought: What would the rabbis say about the giant inflatable colon? As a colon cancer survivor, will I ever see shit as just shit again?
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