• The only way any religion can be redeemed is if it listens to the ones it sacrificed.

• Your suffering is not a sign of God’s distance. It is the shape of God’s nearness.

• When you think about it, being ridiculed by a closed-minded person is a really wonderful trade-off for not being one yourself.

• At first you think the pain goes deeper than love. Then you realize the depth of that pain could only exist because of love. And that changes everything.

• Listen to the people who actually want you to be free.

• Your grief might not get smaller, but your heart can get bigger.

• The speed of your expulsion is proportional to the insecurity of their system.

• Recognize sacrifice as beautiful only in as much as it involves consent.

• Whoever risks the most to tell you the truth is probably the one most worthy of your trust.

• Jesus isn’t the answer as much as the question ask you to partner with God to be the answer. The only thing that matters is faith expressing itself in love.

God is Good – Even Now Summit, May 12–14, 2026.

Hey friend,

There’s a question I never seem to get too far away from. Maybe you can relate:

If God is good… then what do I do with this?

This loss. This silence. This version of life that showed up without asking.

It doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it just settles in underneath things — underneath the way you read a passage, the way you pray (or don’t), the way you move through a day that looks fine from the outside and feels like something else entirely on the inside.

I know that place.

What I’ve come to believe — slowly, sometimes reluctantly — is that the question itself isn’t a problem to fix. It’s not evidence that your faith is failing or your theology is thin. It might actually be one of the more honest things you’ve ever brought to God.

We spend so much energy trying to resolve the tension. Looking for the explanation that makes it all fit again. And sometimes... it just doesn’t fit. And sitting with that — really sitting with it, without performing peace you don’t feel — that’s its own kind of faithfulness.

That’s what I’m encouraging you to make space for in the God is Good – Even Now Summit, May 12–14, 2026.

Not a tidy resolution. Not answers dressed up as comfort. Just:

• Honest conversation about what it means to trust a God when life doesn’t make sense

• Scripture that can hold complexity without collapsing under it

• A community of people who are asking the same hard questions out loud

• And the slow, stubborn reminder that God’s goodness doesn’t evaporate when our confusion deepens

• And I’ll be doing a session, day two, on grief as well as giving away free copies of indigo: the color of grief.

Just wanted to make sure you knew about this event that my friend, and others are putting together!

GET YOUR FREE TICKET

— Jonathan

This email may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Beautiful conversation around prayer, contemplation, change, love, and God with Rev Dr Gayle. I hope you’ll follow her on Substack and pick up a copy of her book on prayer called Wild Geese Rising: Living Prayer Moment by Moment as Contemplative Action.

Wow, super great conversation with the one and only about motherhood, Paul’s idea for masculinity, queerness, Jesus, and so much more. Thank you Mattie and everyone for this fantastic interaction.

1. heterosexuals didn’t have it figured out, so why had we appointed ourselves arbiters of morality?

2. Americanized-christianity was driven by shame about anything sexual.

3. the group that kept telling me homosexuality was wrong was consistently the group putting power-hungry men into positions of leadership.

4. we were spending enormous energy keeping people out of church leadership based on sexuality. but how did we even know what someone’s sexuality was? why were we in the business of finding that out?

5. there were 4-6 passages in scripture that addressed same-sex relationships. after reading them carefully, i had as many questions as answers.

6. the person in the highest office of my denomination admitted they didn’t know exactly what those passages meant. oh, really?

7. started realizing this was less about sexuality and more about power, shame, and an inability to deal with grace.

8. read what jesus said about the eunuch.

9. realized evolution was real — not only in biology and chemistry, but in theology too.

10. cared more about the way jesus lived and what he said than about other parts of the bible.

11. when people in my denomination told me their stance on sexuality hadn’t changed in 50 years, i knew they were either lying, brainwashed, or completely ignorant of all the ways it already had.

12. had one conversation (took only one) with a labor and delivery doctor and confirmed that intersex was a real thing and then decided to have the intellectual honesty to admit that some of this was far more complex than anything i’d been conditioned to believe.

13. some of the gay people i was meeting displayed the fruit of the spirit as much or more than most straight people i knew.

14. that I always feel obligated to stand up to bullies and as un-comprehendable and stupid as it was, I was realizing that the church had turned into a bully.

The more I was willing to talk about any of this (and 15 other points I could’ve just as easily jotted down this morning), the more anxious and, frankly, weird the general church became. Such an odd thing to me.

Then again, that is probably the pattern that all of us (myself included) are culpable in creating. When backed into the corner of our own darkness, we tend to fight the light. Like negative phototactic bugs (cockroaches, for instance) we run from any truth shed in our direction until we learn that the light is our friend. Then we have a conversation and decide to be positive phototactic bugs (like moths) and start flying to the light. Of course, we always wind up flying too close and burning up, and though I categorically reject sacrifice as something that’s redemptive in and of itself, I will say that in the end, we all burn up, so better it be in the fires of love than the fires of hate. (Song of Songs 8:6)

Our world is bonkers right now, isn’t it? Bonkers, it’s an old Greek word. Seldom used. But reading Rebecca Solnit recently, I was reminded of something. I think her take on supernovas and how they pertain to our problems is important. She writes in The Beginning Comes After the End:

“But I wonder if this backlash is a supernova. When some stars die, they don’t dwindle at first; they explode in size and release staggering amounts of light and energy. Astrobiologist David Grinspoon remarked to me, ‘If we didn’t know about the inner hidden or less obvious workings of these aging stars they’d appear to us as if they were gaining strength and becoming something larger or more powerful.’ Instead, it happens because the star is dying, often because it’s collapsing under its own gravitational weight.”

Her point is that the chaos we see all around us might simply be the old stars of institutionalism collapsing under their own, already dying and dead, weight.

I think that might be the case. So, keep moving forward. Love mercy. And justice. And don’t make people victims of your old religious system. People are a mess, both gay and straight. And people are beautiful, both gay and straight.

The old gods (power) are dying and the even older God (love) remains. Live from love.

➣Coming up this week is a conversation with the one and only

➣Today’s Idea: The Limits of Description

Limits of Description

PART I
Easter season is always a great time to get caught up in conversations about literal or metaphorical resurrection. 😄 I posted something last week suggesting there’s room to go in either direction, and ... there was pushback. Which is fine, honestly. It’s just an opportunity to think through some things together. This post is an extension of that.

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At one point someone suggested that a metaphorical reading of the resurrection means a person doesn’t really trust Jesus; they said that accepting the literal resurrection is the only way to demonstrate faith. But couldn’t the opposite be argued? Think about it: the more literal evidence one requires, wouldn’t there be less need for one to have faith?

And speaking of literal — a “literal” reading assumes something you can check the words against, some kind of stable background. When you read “a rainbow appeared after forty days of rain,” you know what rain is, what rainbows are, what days are, what forty means. The literal reading works because experience anchors it.

But bodily resurrection has no such anchor. No prior experience. No comparable event. No category in human history to run it against. Which means when someone says they’re reading it “literally,” they may be doing something stranger than they realize; that is, they may be taking language at face value for something that, by definition, exceeds the face value of any language. 🤔

I’m not saying it didn’t happen. Neither am I saying it’s certain that it did happen.

The resurrection accounts themselves are, well, strange. Jesus’s post-resurrection body was able to be touched, but also to pass through walls. Jesus was recognized and unrecognizable in the same conversation. What was going on? I don’t think the writers were trying to be evasive. I think they were straining against the limits of language to describe something they had no experiential anchor for. Again, there was nothing to compare it to.

To pretend there was consensus, in fact, actually devalues what the text itself says. Consider that those present at the ascension still had doubts. Of all the people who didn’t have doubts, you would’ve thought those would’ve been the people. But, nope. So many people today want to fight for the literal, the verifiable, the concrete — and yet even for those who were there, doubt was still very much part of the equation.

👉🏼 To say the resurrection may be metaphorical is not to say it’s less than real. On the contrary, it may be the most real thing, but just not reducible to any known category.

The future of our world may depend on our ability to hold space for the person who needs a locatable, datable, empty tomb and the person who experiences resurrection as a truth too large for any single account to hold. Can’t we do that? Aren’t both welcome to believe in the hope of something beyond death?

And strangely, isn’t the atheist welcome too?

It took me a few years to really hear what my atheist friends were saying. When they told me they found comfort in believing there was nothing beyond this life, they weren’t being provocative. They were being honest. I kind of get it now. Life is fatiguing. Overwhelming. For some, the thought that it would simply end is genuinely welcoming. And I’ll say this, there’s something to be said for a good nap. Maybe death is something like that. Falling asleep. Letting everything go.

And one beautiful thing about that framework is that it makes the present matter. There’s no deferring life to some hereafter. What’s here is worth paying attention to.

Does atheism have limitations? Sure. But so does every other framework on offer.

PART II
Meanwhile, in a country where we love to argue literal or symbolic resurrection, there seems to be a great deal of literal death-dealing going on. 😳 The U.S. has been at war for 229 of its 249 years — roughly 92% of its existence!

When the current administration, overwhelmingly endorsed by christians, announces it needs another $1.5 trillion to fund a war with Iran (an announcement that arrived on Good Friday, no less), it should give us pause.

War is wrong. It always has been, but perhaps never more so than now. It used to kill more soldiers than civilians. That changed over the last century. Now it’s overwhelmingly civilians. For every one soldier who dies, imagine eight women, children, and elderly people dying alongside them.

The “enemy” being targeted is increasingly just people trying to live their lives. That’s unconscionable, regardless of political persuasion. 💔

And the money. I’m doing my taxes this week—yes, I’ve procrastinated—and I’m already angry about sending money to Washington, to pay for war.

And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why so many rarely seem to care about the way war victimizes our own soldiers. It’s a testimony to our sacrificial system, actually, the way we send young people off to fight and experience truama. (”Better that one man suffer than the whole nation.” Isn’t that what the religious leaders in Jesus’s day said?) According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, 👉🏼 at least four times as many active duty personnel and war veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died by suicide than in combat. (costsofwar.watson.brown.edu)

So what does Part II have to do with Part I? This: What does it matter whether someone believes the resurrection is literal or metaphorical, if they refuse to extend its lesson to their neighbor? The lesson being that Jesus shows back up—not with vengeance against his enemies, but with love. ♥️

This is an indictment against all of us. Sadly, a christian nation we are not. Honestly? I’d rather be an atheist nation and actually pursue peace than be a christian nation (literal or symbolic) and pursue war. Would atheism lead us to peace? Ha, probably not, but clearly religion-ism doesn’t, so why. do. we. pretend. otherwise?

Meanwhile, you know what would lead to peace? Emulating the way of JC.

So, if you’ve been bullied in the past; told that you have to believe “x, y, and z” in order to be a christian, well, I’m here to suggest otherwise. Just do this ... just take it a concept at a time, be patient with yourself and with others, believe what you can and don’t worry about what you can’t ... and through it all, do your best to not return violence for violence (anger for anger, insecurity for insecurity, etc.) ... rather, be like JC, who didn’t consider equality with God something to be grasped; who took on the form of a lowly servant and loved everyone.

Amen and amen (and share this with a literal friend.)

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PS - Hey, if you’re in the OKC area this weekend and you’re interested in faith communties, or new ways of leading, or credentialing pastors, theologians, spiritual directors and endorsing chaplains within a new and expansive theological mindset, then you might as well join us for the curian network’s get together. People like and and , , , , , , , , , , and others (that have substack profiles that I’m probably forgetting to insert into this post right now, so I apologize!) will be there!

Loved this conversation with Josh and Jim about meaning, meaning-making, (the meaninglessness of me trying to make meaning!), love, Jesus, christian atheism, josh’s tattoos, and the recognition that giraffe’s are christians.

—-

✛Upcoming Stuff - Upcoming conversations with , , , and .

✛Hope You Know About - I’m really proud of these two organizations: lovehaiti.org and thecurian.network. Maybe you’re someone who likes to pray for things and/or give to some things. In either case, you are welcome to interact with these nonprofits. Thank you.

I Don’t Know How to Pray Anymore and You Can Too

Are you like me? Has the crack in your faith done a number on your prayer life? Surfaced a question you can’t quite shake? A question that goes something like this?

What if divine power was never the power of domination but the power of presence? Not imposed from above but woven through, moving with all things toward more than any single purpose. Not power over. Power with. Present to everything. Open to more than one end.

Yeah. That one. It’ll mess with your prayer life. Ultimately, I think there are more honest reasons to pray now than ever before, but the transition hasn’t always been smooth. Here are eight reasons that keep prayer in the mix for me. Maybe they’ll be helpful for you too.

Why I pray:

① -Jesus prayed. I’m a big fan. I’m trying to do stuff he did.

② -I’m part of a tradition that prays. Do I agree with everything that tradition has done or is doing? Ha, no. (Reminds me of an old Smothers Brothers bit where Dick asks Tom, “Would you jump off a bridge for that guy?” Tom snickers: “Not again.”) That’s about right. Not again.

Still, the tradition has had some good stuff and either way, it doesn’t get to define me out of itself. I’ve inherited enough good alongside the wreckage that I’m claiming my seat and my own understanding of what prayer is or isn’t. Idk, but being a christian who doesn’t pray feels to me like a poker player who never bets. You can sit at the table. You can study the cards. But eventually you’re going to want to risk something.. 🤔

③ -Prayer helps me slow down, to increase the interiority of who I am, and hold things. Look, I’m no longer trying to fix things when I pray. I’m trying to get myself in a position where I can hold all the awkwardness, much of which, isn’t really fixable. Some people meditate, take walks, or are intentionally quiet for portions of the day. Some people pray. Oh, and some of us do all the above. The point is, it helps me. Do I have empirical evidence? No. I can only trust that I’m telling myself the truth.

④ -It’s true that I’m not really trying to fix things when I pray, but also, in a larger sense, I pray because by faith I think I might be influencing things to align with uncontrolling love, and in doing so, I’m imagining a better world in the future. Sometimes, in prayer, I sense something like hope or patience or idk what to call it, and when I do it helps me actually be the kind of person I want to be. And look, if that’s true, then prayer is encouraging me to live differently. And if I live differently, it influences those around me. And maybe they influence others. It doesn’t take long for one to see that, well, of course, it’s layered, indirect, and much more complex, but in this way, the whole world (community, govt, ecology) might be influenced.

Conversely, if I can pray with an imagination that’s been filtered through the idea that the whole world (community, govt, ecology) might be different, then in some sense, I’m bringing the kin-dom of love into the present, which might be the very thing Jesus was getting at when he taught us to pray “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

⑤ -I pray because of science. Seriously. Consider physics and the discovery that once two particles are entangled, they never fully lose each other. Separate them by millions of miles, change the spin of one, and the other responds — instantly, without any known communication between them. Distance doesn’t matter. Space-time coordinates don’t matter. They remain, somehow, in relationship.

I bring this up in the context of prayer because prayer seems to me less about private transactions with God and more about entering a fundamentally entangled existence with one another, with creation, with the cosmos itself. Romans 14:7 puts it simply: none of us lives or dies to ourselves alone.

If particles can affect one another across impossible distances, it suggests the universe isn’t finally made of isolated material substances, but of deeply entangled fields of energy and relationship. The scientist and theologian Ilia Delio calls this undivided wholeness. I think she’s onto something. And I think our prayers participate in it. If so, maybe this is all just a divine entanglement.

⑥ -I pray because I keep feeling the invitation to do so. Meanwhile, St. John of the Cross said: “When you feel the nudge to draw close to God, it’s because God is drawing close to you.” I think about that a lot. Idk if it’s true, but idk if it’s not true either.

⑦ - I keep after prayer because for me, prayer is grieving. And I’ve needed to grieve a lot. I’m niether proud of that nor ashamed of that. It’s just the reality. And look, if you can grieve without prayer, good. Go for it. But whether you consider it prayer or not, the world needs people who can grieve; that is, people who can name justice and then lament all the injustice. Out loud. Personally and communally. Yeah, for me, much prayer has been grieving, which leads me to the last reason …

⑧ -Because honestly? In many instances, I don’t know what else to do but to pray.

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is an American Episcopal priest who serves as the 12th Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. and I were thrilled to talk to any queer woman of Indian descent who is also a pastor — but to do so at the intersection of everything happening in our world and what this podcast is about was an honor.

Meanwhile, you can find the audio portions of these podcasts over on our podcast called Off-Canon. It’s on podcasting platforms everywhere. Share it. Like it. Bop it. Twist it. Leave a review.

✌🏼

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My highly scientific analysis of Christian movements. When I first started this, believe it or not, I was trying to be serious, but then the snark snuck in and i just couldn't stop. 😂

Mainline Protestantism: Our commitment to institutionalism increases as our membership decreases

American-Exceptionalism-Megachurch: God’s blessed America. And our church. Have you not seen our parking lot?

Therapeutic moralism: JC as life coach, except hold the cross

Contemplative/Mystic: Enneagram tests and $40 candles

Trad-Cath/High Liturgy: Bronze age answers to digital age questions.

Charismatic Signs and Wonders: Power cosplaying as Spirit.

Liberal: the only thing we got left: “God is kind.”(Hauerwas)

Entrepreneurial / Church Planting: 2026 branding, 1956 theology.

Prosperity Gospel: Our problem is your lack of faith.

Christian Nationalism: Render unto Caesar, well, actually everything.

Reformed: We take no responsibility for how our doctrine fuels the world’s systemic injustices.

Neo-reformed: Same as reformed just bearded and podcasting.

Influencer types: Is our faith really inseparable from our platform? I mean, really?

Quaker/Anabaptist peace tradition: We live what Jesus taught but everyone ignores us.

Fundamentalism/KJV-only types: We have separated ourselves from the world and from education.

Southern Baptist: God can call a woman to go anywhere in the world except to the pulpit.

Evangelical: Diverse website, monolithic board.

White Evangelical: Same except the website isn't diverse.

Post/Ex Evangelical: Honestly, the Evangelical part says as much as the post or ex part.

Mormon: Salvation is a group project and trust us, the group has a dress code.

Girardians: if you don't see the efficacy of scapegoating, we’ll be happy scapegoat you.

Open and Relational: We’re  just making this up as we go!

Share this with a friend. But only if they have a sense of humor. Also, feel free to add to the list. Maybe we can laugh our way to a better iteration of religion, if not humanity!

👇🏻

I'm in Nor Cal this weekend hanging out with friends at the Ember Gathering and Heirloom East Bay. And hey, if you're in the area come hang out with me on Sunday at Crosswalk Community Church where I'll be with my friend, Pete Shaw, getting a chance to talk a little indigo: the color of grief. (Honestly, it’s nice to have friends.)

JF