My favorite cover of Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees: The Normals

Hard to believe this video is 25 years old at this point.

When "Christian Parenting" leaves families without the skills for actual relationships

Just had one of those “wait, what did they say?” followed by quickly skipping back, re-listening to the moment a few times, and then transcribing it to put it here.

From the Gravity Commons Podcast episode with authors Kelsey McGinnis and Marissa Burt titled “The False Promises of Good Christian Parenting”, the authors discuss the damage that Christian Parenting books of the 1970s and 1980s have done to Christian parents and children. The focus on immediate, unquestioning compliance, enforced by spankings which were done under the guise of ’love’ not only created lots of confusion about what “love” actually looks like, but (and here’s the part that made me hit pause and rewind) failed to provide parents the tools for actually connecting with their children and those children’s needs.

From about 30 minutes into the podcast:

Kelsey: [This parenting philosophy is] completely opposed to healthy connection; it prevents parents from responding to the child who’s in front of them; instead they rely on these scripts and these ideas and this ideology offered in these books, and you end up with this inability to just relate to the individual child and their individual needs. You’re not supposed to think about their individual needs and quirks first. And it’s just really destructive.

Marissa: It’s destructive in the moment and also long-term. Because this is what parents are practicing day in and day out if they’re following it, which is why in many ways I think it sets families up for estrangement. Because then in adulthood when the illusion of compliance evaporates, there’s no skills. A lot of these resources it’s not just what they told parents to do but what they left them bereft of: an understanding of child development or tools for connection. And in trying to think critically about that requires “peeking behind the curtain” to say “what do we mean by love?” Because a lot of verbal gymnastics are done to say love is hurting the people who are dear to you… A lot of redefinition of terms is happening to say ‘this may feel like punishment to you but we’re going to call it love.’ So when you do that, at a certain point, and you’ve said God’s love is reflected primarily in this moment of cosmic punishment, then it becomes difficult for people to reevaluate because it feels like a complete faith deconstruction.

This resonates with my own experience, and I think with many other kids who grew up homeschooled. What happens when the “illusion of compliance” evaporates, whether that be at age 18, or 25, or 40? If you’ve never had relationship tools that weren’t based on compliance, how do you figure out how to start over and establish actual relationships with people who are now adults and not willing to compliantly agree with you on everything?

In his later years my father lamented multiple times that so many children from conservative Christian homeschooled families grew up and immediately got as far away as they could from their childhood–moving out of state, going low- or no-contact, etc. His observation was that this wasn’t an odd coincidence, but that it was related to those kids’ experience being raised that way. I don’t think he ever connected the dots the way these authors do, but I think he would’ve resonated with them.

[Link] Pushing an Anti-Trans Agenda is Telling On Yourself

I appreciated this post from Todd at anarch.dev yesterday: Pushing an Anti-Trans Agenda is Telling On Yourself. He outlines eight common anti-trans argument patterns and briefly responds to each of them. For flavor:

But what about the children? you think you better understand the needs of a child than professionals and the people who know and love the child…people who are willing to endure a lot hardship together. Petty tyranny strikes again. Also, this reason is usually a cover for one of the other reasons. We can tell because you haven’t done much of anything to address the much more numerous and grave harms to children, but are now fixated on this alleged one.

No lies detected.

Some of my favorite responses were at the end, including to the objections “But sports…”, “It’s not natural”, and “It’s against my religion”. It’s a quick read, and something I think I’ll bookmark to just refer back to from time to time.

For Epiphany: Brian Zahnd's Meditation on the Magi

I really appreciated Brian Zahnd’s meditation on the Magi this morning. Riffing off of T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, Zahnd considers what having one’s eyes opened to Jesus may really cost:

When the Magi made their way home, we’re told they went by “another way.”
Of course they did.
Once you see the King, once you have the Epiphany—
You have to travel through this life by “another way.” (Or betray all you have been granted to see.)
And to an “alien people clutching their gods”—
You will seem at best odd, and at worse…well, something quite bad.
Truth doesn’t come cheap.
The hard journey to a real Epiphany will cost you more than some…
Gold, frankincense and myrrh.
It will cost you the way you look at the world.
Something will have to die. And you may well mourn it.
To really see the birth of Christ for what it is,
Will bring you face to face with death—
Death to what you were once so comfortable with.

Zahnd specifically relates this death to his own journey dying to Christian nationalism and the pursuit of political power. But his final question is gripping regardless of your country or century.

The old magi says, “I should be glad of another death.”
What about you? Are you ready for the Birth of the New?—
If it means the Death of the Old?

My 2025 Reading in Review

If you’d asked me about my year in reading, I would’ve said I didn’t feel like I’d read that many books this year. Then I looked at my total: 93 books, the most in any year since I started logging books in 2007. Per my Bookshelf site, those 93 books comprised a little over 30,000 pages of reading. I guess it was a busy year.

Because I Feel The Need to do Stats

Fiction: 49
Religion / Theology: 22
Science: 8

That leaves a handful in biography, literature, and history. Not too bad a mix.

Books written by authors who aren’t/weren’t white men: 38. Still not a great split but progress in diversity for me compared to previous years.

Some Favorites

In no particular order, the books I gave 5 stars this year… far too many to be a useful selector, so I have bolded the handful that are particular standouts:

  • The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Into The Unknown by Kelsey Johnson
  • Language for God in Patristic Tradition by Mark Sheridan
  • Reading While Black by Esau McCauley
  • Jesus and the Forces of Death by Matthew Thiessen
  • The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut
  • The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili
  • The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
  • Damascus Station by David McCluskey
  • The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  • Where God Happens by Rowan Williams
  • The Framed Women of Ardemore House by Brandy Schillace
  • Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
  • The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind
  • The Seventh Floor by David McCloskey
  • The Not-Yet God by Ilia Delio
  • The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
  • To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
  • The Transforming Fire of Divine Love by John H. Armstrong
  • Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
  • Beyond Justification by Douglas Campbell
  • The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart
  • Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
  • In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
  • Royal Gambit by Daniel O’Malley
  • Holy Hurt by Hillary L. McBride
  • Inverted World by Christopher Priest
  • On Repentance and Repair by Danya Ruttenberg
  • The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell

About those highlights:

Say Nothing is a harrowing account of The Troubles in Ireland. The author doesn’t try to moralize, but just recounts the facts… an approach which makes the violence even more horrifying somehow.

In The Not-Yet God, Ilia Delio brings her most complete structure so far to her work interpreting Teilhard in light of modern quantum theory. Utterly fascinating to me.

Alternate history in astronaut land. Unabashedly loved this one.

This is what speculative science fiction should look like. So good.

Random Observations

My first and last books of the year were the first and last books in K. B. Wagers’ NeoG series.

My attempts to read some “classic” literature were mixed. Middlemarch: so long. In Cold Blood: as good as advertised.

Here’s to some more good books in 2026!

This is not usually how wine gets discussed at the office...

I attended a Town Hall meeting at work today where the president of our business and his staff talked and took questions. As a part of the Q&A, someone stood up in the back and asked this question (I’m paraphrasing here):

“I’m reminded of an old wise saying: ‘do not put new wine in old wineskins, because the wine will expand, the skins will burst, and the wine will be lost.’ With some of these [new work things] being a sort of ’new wine’, are there ‘old wineskins’ we should be aware of and risk that we should mitigate?”

I immediately, of course, recognized the Biblical reference, and appreciated that the questioner didn’t explicitly call it out, but just kept the wisdom of Jesus’ saying. But it was striking to me how few people in the room appeared to recognize it, how it took each of the leaders in the Q&A a second to really parse through it, and then hearing people after the meeting commenting on that question and how deep and profound it was.

I’m not telling this story to complain about Biblical illiteracy; it is what it is in our world today. But I find myself thankful for the coworker who asked the question, and hopeful that the saying will worm its way into a few peoples’ minds today, maybe even to the point where they decide to look it up.

Had Jesus Never Lived…

“Truth is, had Jesus never lived, we could not have invented him.”

A remarkably persuasive thought from Walter Wink in The Human Being.

Jersak: the immutability and impassability of God's love

Just after posting yesterday and mentioning Thomas J. Oord in passing, Bradley Jersak’s “Cordial Pushback” on relational/open theology hit my inbox. While I’m not deeply enough into open theology or process theology to have an informed opinion on a lot of what Jersak’s saying, I did particularly appreciate this point he made about the love of God:

The biggest stumbling stones for RT [relational theology] teachers seem to be words such as immutability (that God’s essence doesn’t change) and impassibility (that God is not subject to fleshly passions). These terms have nuanced definitions that need to be handled with care lest we misrepresent them.

First, what is immutable? God’s love. God’s love is immutable in the sense of that God’s covenants are marked by faithfulness versus fickleness. He is not like other gods who turn away or turn against their subjects on a whim. The doctrine of immutability insists that God’s love is constant and infinite—always higher, wider, longer, and deeper than our comprehension. Thus, God’s love does not rise and fall or come and go—God’s love is an ever-flowing spring that never runs out.

Further, God’s love is impassible. This does not mean God is unfeeling or unresponsive (like cold, hard granite). No. We never say that. Rather, this means that the ever-flowing spring of God’s love is not conditional on our response. God’s mercy is not turned on and off by our behaviour. Nothing can separate us from divine love.

When God sees and hears our cries, we do see a response of compassion and care, where God ‘comes down’ to help. BUT that response arises from God’s own heart, from the depths of God’s loving nature. He is responsive, not reactive, and consistent rather than codependent. Simply put, impassibility means that God’s love is not subject to or jerked around by our passions. In Christ, we see the nature of God as empathetic (co-suffering) and Cyril will say he ‘suffered impassibly’—meaning voluntarily rather than constrained.

Just beautiful.

Zahnd: Believing in an interventionist God

Brian Zahnd has a post today that I needed to hear: I Believe In An Interventionist God.

In my journey out of evangelicalism and into some broader, more historic practice of Christianity, I have struggled with prayer. As I wrestle with questions about what even is God, really—thanks Teillhard and Ilia Delio!—and whether God’s nature is to compel anyone or anything—thanks Thomas J. Oord!—I vacillate between wanting to fall back on a sort of naive presumption of the evangelical god and wondering what even the use of prayer is. And yet, at some part of my core deeper than the intellect, I know there’s some real value, use, and need for prayer. It means something.

Zahnd observes:

Prayer is the oxygen of faith. When we can’t pray, we can at least say our prayers. When the tide of faith has receded far out to sea, liturgical prayers—prayers that we did not compose—can sustain us until the tide comes back in. It’s the vetted prayers passed down through the ages that best sustain faith in a dark night of the soul. The soul that can hold on to the prayers during the dark night will eventually arrive at a new dawn.

He’s right.

In this time the liturgical prayers from the Book of Common Prayer have been so valuable for me. For a closing prayer at the end of last week’s diocesan convention a priest broke out this beautiful familiar prayer from the Compline, and I was unexpectedly immediately in tears:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night,
and give your angels charge over those who sleep.
Tend the sick, Lord Christ;
give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering,
pity the afflicted, shield the joyous;
and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

Zahnd understands the temptation to look around at the world and just ask “what’s the use?”. But that way lies a dead, shriveled faith.

[P]rayers go unanswered, children die of cancer, and even the most faith-filled suffer “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” God intervenes, but from our vantage point not nearly as often as we would like. It does create the temptation to fling our hands up in despair and say, “I no longer believe in an interventionist God.” I understand this impulse, but I think it is mostly an attempt to seal ourselves off from potential disappointment. We give up praying lest we be disappointed, or we pray such safe prayers that we no longer run the risk of being disappointed. But if we are to have any hope for a life of vibrant faith, we have to run the risk of disappointment. Faith by its very nature is a risky venture. So I choose the risk of disappointment. I do this because it is my experience that God can help me bear disappointment, but if I quit engaging with God by ceasing to implore divine intervention in our world and in my life for fear of disappointment, my soul begins to waste away. I don’t want to live in a world where God seems absent just because I don’t want to risk disappointment.

And I love that when Zahnd gets down to what he does believe about prayer and God’s engagement in the world, he ends at a conclusion that fits in just fine with Teillhard, Delio, and Oord:

I actually believe—though I cannot prove it—that God is in a constant state of intervention in the world. I hold to the seemingly outrageous idea that God is never not intervening in the world! God is love, and God is always loving the world. God’s intervention is God’s love. God’s intervening love may rarely (if ever) be coercive and controlling, but the intervention of love is there nevertheless. What God’s loving, though noncoercive, intervention looks like exactly is hard to tell, but I suspect that has more to do with our own spiritual blindness than with any imagined absence or ambivalence on God’s part.

I am slowly feeling my own reactionary, deconstructing pendulum reach the apex of its swing and head back toward a better resting place. Slowly finding my voice in prayer again. But I am supremely thankful for the written prayers—I like Zahnd’s word here, vetted prayers—that have sustained my faith in the interim.

Familiar hymns, alternate tunes

Yesterday in church we sang “My Hope Is Built On Nothing Less” as the recessional. But rather than singing it to the tune SOLID ROCK, which was traditional in my childhood churches, the setting in the Episcopal hymnal is MELITA, which is best known as the US Navy Hymn “Eternal Father, Strong to Save”.

My brain being what it is, it spent the rest of the afternoon processing through what other hymn texts have the 8.8.8.8.8.8 meter and could be sung to MELITA. While Hymnary lists hundreds of them, in the end my brain fixed on one and wouldn’t let go: “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”.

I mean, I’m not advising it would be a good match… but it’s a metrical fit. Kinda creepy.