It’s a simple sentence, really, but when I first said it out loud, it felt sort of…liberating? Like I had given myself permission I didn’t realize I needed.

If you’ve read my books or followed my work over the past few years, you might know that my family made a pretty unexpected move—we left the city and ended up on a small farm. It wasn’t some long-held dream or five-year plan. Honestly, it surprised us as much as anyone.

Not long before that, we had been living in Los Angeles, right on Sunset Boulevard, in a small apartment that belonged to a cluster of small apartments. It was something like an intentional community, the dozen or so of us strangers choosing to live life together. That move was intentional. We wanted to be in the middle of everything—to walk to bars and restaurants, to wander the city, to maybe even catch a game at Dodgers Stadium across the street, on a whim. More than anything, we wanted to know our neighbors intimately, as we had just before that on Madison Avenue, where we had weekly dinners with them, taking turns cooking and prepping, sitting for long hours on porches with cheap wine and half-developed thoughts about God. We chose that life on purpose.

But then the pandemic happened, and well, the things we planned didn’t happen. So when we moved across the country the following year, the plan was to try again. We found a small house in the city, in a part of town that was not overly polished, yet. Not fully gentrified. It was walkable to some places we began frequenting, and we loved it. We drank Diet Cokes with Jessie across the street; we had play dates with the dog and his humans a few houses down. I walked to prenatal yoga on Sundays and met some of my closest friends.

And then, in the span of a single year, I had a baby and wrote my second book, Sacred Belonging, and my feelings simply started to…shift. This is what happens to me when I write books (and well, have babies, of course): they change me.

By the time I finish a manuscript, I’m not the same person who started it. Something in me has moved, deepened, rearranged itself. Writing, for me, is less about putting ideas on paper and more about living them, letting them get into my body, my routines, my decisions. That is because I cannot write about something from a distance. It has to touch my life first.

Writing Abuelita Faith, for example, was formative for my faith. As I wrote, I was also deconstructing and rebuilding—reclaiming the wisdom of my ancestors, allowing my abuelita’s stories to sit alongside my theology as something sacred and trustworthy. It was healing work.

And then I wrote Sacred Belonging with a newborn in my arms, studying postcolonial theology at Vanderbilt, and asking big questions about the world my daughter would grow up in. I found myself noticing how deeply the logic of empire shapes everything—how we think about time, productivity, money, even our own bodies. The world has a way of training us to become efficient, useful, constantly moving pieces in a machine. And I didn’t want that to be the only story my daughter inherited.

Around that same time, my father-in-law passed away suddenly. It was a disorienting, grief-heavy season, and we found ourselves swirling in existentialism: losing parents, becoming parents. My father-in-law had lived on land that he cared for deeply. It was where he died one day, his body becoming one, returning to the same soil he had tended. Months later, we sold his small ranch home in rural Arkansas, and with that, partly, the opportunity opened up for us to buy a home in the woods. My husband felt the pull to honor his father’s memory by working with his hands, staying connected to the land in a tangible way. And I felt the pull not to pass on the gospel of hustle to my daughter. So we made the decision to move—out of the city for the first time ever and onto a small farm. We got chickens and goats and pigs, and for the past three years we’ve been figuring it out as we go.

And let me tell you—no one really prepares you for how much loss comes with this kind of life. We’ve lost more animals than I ever expected. Chickens, especially, are shockingly fragile. Bees, God, losing those bees still aches. There have been failed gardens, hard seasons, moments where I’ve thought, what are we even doing? And don’t even get me started on trimming goats’ hooves or raking caked-on chicken poop that’s been sitting on damp wood for months. And the ticks. THE TICKS. It’s humbling work in every sense of the word. But somewhere in all of this, I’ve started to see my story differently.

My life, like so many of ours, has been shaped by forms of exile, both physical and spiritual. In one way or another, they’re made up of the periods that define our leaving one place—one way of being, one way of knowing—and stepping into another.

For some, that departure is literal: leaving behind a homeland, a language, a culture, a set of customs that once rooted us. For others, exile is more internal—subtle, but still disorienting. Many of us have walked away from belief systems that once gave us a sense of certainty. We’ve left behind rigid theologies, narrow interpretations, harmful hierarchies—what once carried us but eventually could no longer hold the fullness of who we are.

Some of us are exiled from the faith traditions of our youth—not necessarily because we wanted to leave, but because we grew, we questioned, we refused to stay silent. And in doing so, we found ourselves on the outside of something we once called home. And stepping away from those things can feel like entering unknown land.

There’s a word for that in-between space: nepantla. It’s a Náhuatl word (I talk about this in Abuelita Faith!) for an in-between state. It is unstable, unpredictable—the uncertain terrain that we cross when changing from one place to another. There’s loss in it, and there’s also growth. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also deeply transformative.

And yet, somewhere along the way, we’ve been taught to feel ashamed of that in-betweenness. We’re told that stability is the goal and permanence is the ideal. That you’re supposed to pick a place, a belief system, a way of life, a hobby, a job, a relationship—and stick. with. it. Forever.

But why?

I think about this as a Latina raised in Miami, now living in the South. A third-culture kid, if you will. As I write in Abuelita Faith:

“Why have we let the dominant culture victimize us in our in betweenness? Why do many of us feel bad, less-than, plagued by it? Has the dominant culture so convinced us that permanency—in location, in belief—is somehow holy? What if instead of being ni de aquí ni de allá (neither from here nor from there), we are de aquí y de allá (from here and from there).”

Why have we been made to feel like changing, evolving, or existing between worlds is a failure?

That question has been sitting with me lately, especially as I’ve come to another realization: I don’t think I want to live on a farm forever. And saying that doesn’t feel like failure. It feels…honest? Because this life—it’s beautiful, and it’s hard. It’s slow in some ways and relentless in others. It has given us so much, but it also asks a lot from us.

And also, right now, it still feels right.

I still want this because I want my kids to learn to love the unloved things: “May we raise children who love the unloved things—the dandelion, the worms and spiderlings,” as Nicolette Sowder writes.

I want them to know the land like they know their own souls (and I write this knowing that few humans explore the depths of either). I want them to know that their days need not be rushed—that they can follow the patterns of the seasons (I also say this as someone who rushes her kids out of the door more mornings than I care to admit). There is no perfect way to do this—just the honest way, the intentional way.

Maybe, one day, when the time feels right, we’ll leave this life too. Maybe we’ll wait until our animals live out their natural lives. Maybe we’ll sell them or give them away to other farms, other families. Maybe we’ll end up back in a walkable city, surrounded by smog and traffic and sirens—and maybe we’ll love that life as much as we love this one. Or maybe we’ll stay. Maybe we’ll grow our farm, get a horse, a cow, some ducks.

Because here’s what’s worth repeating until our faces turn blue: it’s okay to change your mind. It’s okay to shift course when it feels right. It’s okay to love something for a short time. It’s okay to love it for a long time. It’s okay to try something and realize it’s not for you. It’s okay to fail at things—like baking sourdough for an entire year and still not getting it right (I have made peace with this). It’s okay to pick up a new skill, like knitting, and make absolutely terrible sweaters.

It’s okay to keep trying anyway.

It’s okay to build a life that fits who you are right now—and to trust that when you change, your life can change too.

“I don’t think I want this forever, but right now, it feels right.” And for now, that’s enough.

On another note:

It was so fun to be with some of you in Nashville with ! In Cleveland for the Space for Grace conference (y’all, we had Cuban food and a Latino jazz band that played during my time sharing), at Princeton Theological Seminary for their IYM conference! and Portland for Creator’s Lab! What a beautiful, full, busy, exhausting month.

I will be in NYC the weekend of May 17th! I’ll be preaching at St. Paul & St. Andrews in the morning, and doing an event with Middle Church in the afternoon! If you’re in the area, check my social media for more details in the coming days!

One last thing!

In a moment where our world aches, it’s refreshing to witness Christians of color who are rooted in the work of peace, justice, and contemplation. That’s why I’m eager to share the PAX Fellowship: Nine month cohorts for Christians of color, ages 25-45, committed to ushering in peace and justice through their craft and call.

There are several cohorts offered grounded in belonging and mentorship to amplify voices we need for this cultural moment including Contemplative Activism & Spiritual Formation, Poetry, Songwriting, Writing as Spiritual Formation, Writing for Social Impact, Women in Leadership, and Men in Leadership.

Every cohort receives expert teaching, group mentorship, peer discussion, one-on-one spiritual direction sessions, a contemplative handbook by writers of color, and an in-person retreat in Scottsdale, AZ this fall. If that sounds like you, or someone you know who’d be a good fit, recommend them here, or apply today at www.madeforpax.org/fellowship. Applications are open now through June 15th!!!!

Abuela died last Friday. It’s been a long time coming. She had been in hospice for months, and still—knowing I am alive in a world she no longer physically inhabits—that I can’t hop on a plane, stop by her tiny duplex (the home that raised me), hold her fragile, cold, bony fingers in my palm, or bury my face in her neck—feels suffocating. God, what I would give to hold her one last time.

I told Taylor the morning it happened that I wish we could physically carry memories with us, like charms around our necks. The scariest thing about grieving someone so close is the fear that their memory—their scent, their voice—will one day slip from your mind forever. And then what?

I don’t know what I believe about heaven anymore. I used to imagine it as streets of gold and gates of pearl, but I’ve learned too much about the Bible to hold onto that kind of certainty. Now, when I think of heaven, I think of domino tables and salsa music and Cuban cigars. I think of Luis Miguel playing in the background and dripping mango slices laid out on the table, wet hands reaching in, slurping them up like candy. I think of cafecito—those tiny plastic tazas being passed around like shots of vodka.

My life feels like it fundamentally changed overnight, and yet, in many ways, it didn’t. I haven’t really been able to talk to Abuela on the phone since her dementia progressed. For the last year, my visits were mostly spent watching her sleep, waking every few minutes to ask who was there. “Katy,” I’d tell her. “Ay, Katy, te quiero tanto,” she’d say in return. Even in the final stages of her illness, she never forgot me.

How do you begin to reflect on a life this full—this hard, this sad, this joyful? How do you hold all of it at once—the surviving and the thriving, the beauty alongside the resignation of making do with what life gives you? Abuela didn’t want to live most of her life without her husband, her love, and yet she did. She didn’t want to be buried so far from her people, her land, and yet she was.

But her life was also unimaginably full—full of love and meaning and purpose. It was long, and it was difficult, and it was beautiful. She was so loved—God, she was loved. It feels like when she died, something in me died with her.

The day of her funeral, the room was full of people she had sewn for and cooked for and danced with. People she sat around domino tables until 4am with. People who told me they hadn’t seen me since I was “this big.” Abuela lay in her casket, her body stiff, her face painted with makeup she never would have worn, her hands folded across her torso, and most of the people who loved her stood at a distance. Few people approached her. Everyone talked about how she was no longer suffering, how happy she was in heaven with Papi. And all I wanted to do was scream.

It is deeply uncomfortable for us, as a people, to be around death. I understand that. I do not judge people for how they grieve or for how our society handles death. But all I wanted to do was wail. I wanted my grief to reach the heavens. But instead, I stood beside her, by myself, and ran my fingers through her hair. I cried and I cried and told her I loved her. And every time I stepped away, concerned people smiled and looked at me with pity.

When it came time to drop a rose on her casket before it was lowered into the ground, I imagined myself holding onto it—going down there with her. I felt the cold dirt smack against my face. But I didn’t do that. I placed the rose gently because to do anything else would have been inappropriate. It would have caused a scene and we are so disconnected from grief that to witness it fully embodied feels offensive. We are respectable people, and respectable people behave a certain way. So I cried—silently, appropriately. We buried her during Holy Week, between Palm Sunday and Good Friday—on the day the Church commemorates Judas’s betrayal. “Spy Wednesday,” they call it.

“I’m drowning in overwhelm and grief,” I told my husband this morning. My kids, sensing my distance, have needed more of me, and today I found myself hiding in the bathroom because I couldn’t take it. “I don’t know what I need to recalibrate,” I said.

And then I read that in Poland, young people throw an effigy of Judas—a crude figure representing a specific person, often used in protests to express anger, mockery, or contempt—from the top of a church steeple on Spy Wednesday. They drag it through the village, beating it with sticks and stones, and what remains is drowned in a nearby stream. I read this and I thought, what better response is there to betrayal? What better response is there to greed in exchange for human life than something so embodied, so visceral, so honest?

So today, I will put on a movie for my children, step outside into the woods at a respectable, appropriate distance, and I will grieve. I will scream and I will wail. I will holler at the cruelty of life—how it takes from us when we are not ready. I will echo the words of Jesus on this Good Friday: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And then, when I am done, I will go back inside. I will turn off the TV and make my kids a snack and I will tell my children about the beauty of Abuela’s life. I will be grateful for how long it was, for how many people knew her, loved her, carried her with them. I will sing her favorite songs. I will laugh when I remember her silliness.

Because this—all of this, appropriate and inappropriate—is what it means to be human, fully alive in this cruel and beautiful world.

Thank you to every single one of you who loved her, too, who knew her through this work—those of you who emailed me about your abuelas, who remembered and shared about the dead and their stories of survival. It is one of my deepest joys to know she changed so many lives. I am forever, forever grateful. Unimaginably so.

Friends, talk to me about grief. All of it. I want to hear everything you’ve got.

And last week, Laurie’s proximity to political power was on full display when he was invited into the Oval Office—where he joined several other evangelical leaders in praying over Trump.

When pastors stand that close to political power—speaking publicly about faith, morality, and the future of a nation—questions of credibility and accountability become crucial, especially since their leadership then becomes part of the public moral debate.

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“The LORD regretted that he had made humankind on the earth, and his heart was deeply grieved.” (Gen. 6:6)

I keep returning to it because I wonder whether God might feel the same grief now, looking at the world we’ve made.

I hesitate to focus on Trump here, because our problems are bigger than any one person. I’m no fan, obviously, but I worry about how much attention we give him as an individual, as though he alone explains our political moment. In doing so, we often forget that he is a product of the system that created him. This is why, when I critique this administration, I always return to the larger framework of empire—a system that has shaped and dominated our reality long before Trump ever appeared on the scene. I don’t claim to do this flawlessly, of course; I’m human, and my emotions inevitably color the work I produce.

Perhaps this is why I was struck by a line in a TIME article released today:

“Since returning to office, Trump has authorized attacks on eight nations, three of which have never before been directly targeted by U.S. forces. No modern American leader has ordered assaults against as many countries in such a short span of time.”

And it made me think again of Genesis.

Last week, a girls’ school in Iran was bombed, killing more than one hundred students. This comes on the heels of the release of the Epstein files, revealing again the countless children who suffered unimaginable trauma because of Epstein, his cronies, and the network that protects them. And then there is Gaza. Since October 2023, roughly 20,000 children have been killed, not counting the generations who have lived and suffered under occupation.

If there were ever a moment for God to regret making humankind, it feels like that moment would be right now.

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Catholicism was never merely institutional for me; it lived in Abuela’s hands and echoed in the choir long before I had language to critique it. And yes, I have critiques. My “abuelita faith” journey—what we call deconstruction—has kept me from fully returning to that institutional space. But formation is not so easily discarded. The rituals, the rhythms, the memory of it all remain woven into my body, shaping me still.

One of the most vivid memories I have of practicing faith on my own—without the direct influence of family or school assignments—was observing Lent every single year. I took Lent seriously. I’m talking nine, twelve, fifteen years old and already choosing what I would give up for forty days, guarding that commitment like it was oxygen. Looking back, I recognize my personality in that child: when I do something, I do it. All the way. I fasted with the intensity of someone who believed it mattered. It did then—and in my full-circle journey of decolonizing from empire’s ways of thinking and being—I realize how much it does now, too.

Which is why this year I felt drawn to that ancient well within me and chose to observe Lent in a more traditional way. I’ve decided to fast—from food—as a physical, embodied experience (the specifics of this fast are mine to hold because not everything sacred is meant for public consumption.)

But I do want to name something clearly when I speak about fasting or refusing indulgence: I am not talking about contorting ourselves to fit a culture that polices bodies, measures worth in pounds or proportions, or spiritualizes hunger in ways that harm. Many of us—myself included—have learned to fear self-denial because it was tangled with shame, whether shaped by evangelical intensity, Catholic rigor, or simply the toxic world that we live in. Refusing these harmful messages and the practices that go along with them stems from an act of wisdom and self-protection. If this kind of practice is triggering for you, it is not something you should partake in.

What I am reclaiming now is different: fasting as a practice that loosens empire’s grip on desire and consumption, rather than shrinking ourselves to fit its mold, and I understand that this is tender. Empire wants either excess or shame. It knows how to weaponize both. It tempts us to indulge without question and then condemns us for the very appetites it has cultivated. It persuades us to overconsume and then whispers that our lack of control is a personal failure. In this way, it keeps us tethered—either bloated with more or burdened by guilt—never free.

This is particularly why, fasting that is untethered from shame, oriented toward love, and rooted in freedom— can be an anti-imperial practice. An empire-resisting one.

Here’s why and how:

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Worse, it is arranged and organized to harm her.

Since the latest batch of the Epstein files dropped like a bomb into our consciousness, I’ve been suspended between two instincts: stay informed or stay sane. I don’t want to look away, and I also know how fragile the psyche is in the face of this kind of evil.

So I read, but carefully. I refuse to click on the images. I skim, but I try not to descend because the few times I’ve gone too deep, my mind would not let me go. The emails and images replay themselves—so grotesque, you wonder if it could all be real. Grown men—powerful, connected, influential men—most of whose names have been redacted, of course, writing about bringing their “little girls” to meet Epstein. Joking about “the littlest one being naughty last night.” This line haunts me, and I hate even typing it. It feels like some sort of violation, and yet, something in me tells me they must be spoken because silence is how rot survives. Silence has always been the accomplice of abuse.

Some will refuse to engage because it’s too dark, too grotesque, too destabilizing. It makes the ground beneath our institutions feel less solid. But that is exactly what needs to happen because if we do not look, if we do not reckon, then what? Evil not only thrives most where it is politely ignored, but we also participate in the very conditions that allow exploitation to persist undisturbed. Reckoning is painful, but it is the only path toward repair.

What intensified my grief was watching people begin to trace connections between the names in the files and powerful corporate leaders. When conversations online linked individuals associated with Epstein’s network to executives tied to companies like Lifetouch—the nation’s largest school photography company—the proximity of it all felt suffocating. Kind of like when I began to reckon years ago with the way colonialism and the church are one and the same. It is paradigm-shifting.

These are not shadowy figures operating in some distant underworld; these are institutions embedded in our children’s everyday lives. The machinery is not abstract, for Christ’s sake, it smiles in school hallways.

Then reports surfaced linking Limited Too to Epstein’s orbit, and I’m suddenly thirteen again, walking into that glittering store at the mall, sequins and lip gloss and bright girlhood everywhere. How many of us moved through these spaces believing we were safe? How many of us were taught to trust the brand, the smile, the familiar logo? When you sit with this too long, your body starts to protest. A sense that the ground is not as solid as you thought.

This is the grief I’ve been holding. Not only did men do monstrous things. We have always known men do monstrous things. What devastates me is the architecture that protects them, the networks of wealth and influence that insulate them, the way power circulates among the same names while children pay the cost. And no, this isn’t new. I am not “surprised.” And yet—I am, because I refuse to let my spirit grow dull to the absurdity of injustice. Even if the information isn’t new, I don’t want to not feel this ache. This is the truest part of my humanity. It is what reminds me that I am alive. That I am awake.

Our daughters move through a world structured by men who trade in innocence while speaking the language of family values, and it is beyond grotesque. It is demonic.

I know there are people who bristle at the word demonic. They worry that naming something demonic shifts the blame away from flesh-and-blood actors, from policies and boardrooms and signatures on contracts, and relocates it to some vague, spiritual elsewhere. I understand that concern. The last thing I want is spiritual bypassing, the kind that shrugs and says, “Well, sinners gonna sin,” as if exploitation were inevitable weather.

That is not what I mean.

When I use the word demonic, I’m not excusing men or systems. I’m trying to name the depth of the rot. I’m reaching for language big enough to hold the reality that this is more than a few “bad apples”—it’s something embedded, normalized, woven into the architecture of what we call success and stability. It’s evil that has learned to wear a suit, to draft policy, to fund campaigns.

This is where my mind goes when I think about Ephesians 6: the call to put on the “armor of God” has so often been reduced to private piety, but the passage speaks of resisting the “schemes of the devil,” which it immediately describes as rulers, authorities, powers governing this present darkness. The struggle, it says, is not merely against flesh and blood, but against forces in the unseen realms.

And these forces are not disembodied ghouls floating above us. They are systems, structures, ideologies, economic arrangements, theological narratives—real mechanisms that protect the powerful and grind the vulnerable into silence. The unseen realm is not somewhere far away; it’s the spiritual undercurrent animating what looks perfectly ordinary on the surface.

And yes, spiritual bypassing deserves to be called out. Sometimes the truth is so grotesque, so destabilizing, that we would rather theologize it than confront it. I have watched Christians deflect by saying that focusing on “darkness” will not help their “sanctification,” that only “following Christ” will. But since when does following Christ mean averting our eyes from suffering? Since when does discipleship require emotional detachment from the wounded? The Christ I read about moves toward lepers, toward hemorrhaging women, toward the demonized and dispossessed. He does not protect his inner peace by ignoring their pain. He looks darkness straight in the face and names it.

I remember the responses when widespread sexual abuse was exposed within the SBC. I hear echoes of it now: “Everyone needs redemption.” On the surface, that sounds orthodox, but it collapses under scrutiny. Because when powerful people harmed others—especially in systemic, institutional ways—Jesus did not wave it away with a reminder that we all fall short. He confronted and he rebuked and he overturned tables in the temple when exploitation was baptized as religion.

What unsettles me is how easily some Christians become passive when the men in question are powerful, charismatic, or useful. And then I remember David.

I remember how his story is told.

Yes, he committed adultery, we say, but he was also gentle—he took care of sheep! And he was brave—he slayed (slew?) giants! C’mon, he was “a man after God’s own heart!” We linger over his poetry and his repentance. We soften the edges of his violence. We call it a “moral failure,” as though it were an impulsive mistake rather than an abuse of royal power.

And of course, there’s Bathsheba. For centuries, she’s been cast as a temptress, as if a woman bathing—while purifying herself according to the law—were an invitation. The text tells us David saw her and sent for her and took her. This was not consensual adultery between equals; it was a king summoning a subject. It was coercion. It was rape.

When she became pregnant, David did not confess. He orchestrated the death of her husband through calculated political manipulation: he used his power to ensure that the man he’d wronged would die on the battlefield. That is not a lapse in judgment; it’s systemic violence enacted from the highest place of power. And the consequences did not end with a psalm of repentance. Violence multiplied within his own household. David’s daughter Tamar is sexually assaulted and receives no justice from her father. Her brother seeks vengeance by replicating violence. The cycle continues to spiral because this is what happens when abuse is minimized, and power goes unchecked: it becomes culture. It becomes normal. It becomes the way things are.

Yet David’s leadership is praised, his repentance celebrated, while the women in the story—image bearers of the divine—are reduced to narrative devices, collateral damage in a tale about a flawed but favored king.

This pattern is ancient, and it is painfully contemporary. The ones who suffer most are not abstractions; they are girls. Girls with names and laughter and futures. Girls with gifts and callings and untapped brilliance. They are not plot points in a redemption arc for powerful men. They are not vessels for male desire or theological lessons about forgiveness. They are image bearers. They are children, and it is better for a stone to be hung around your neck and be drowned in the bottom of the lake then to cause one of them to fall into sin, Jesus said.

When I call this demonic, I am naming the way violence against the vulnerable is normalized, sentimentalized, even spiritualized. I am naming the theology that protects kings and blames girls. I am naming the systems that absorb abuse and continue functioning as if nothing has happened.

To follow Christ is not to sanitize these stories. It is to tell the truth about them. It is to stand where he stands—against the misuse of power, against the exploitation of bodies, against the quiet arrangements that keep predators comfortable.

So yea, I’m grieving. Not just the world my precious, strong, brilliant daughter was born into, the one I feel almost helpless to protect her from, but I am grieving my own inner child. The way she wasn’t protected either. And I’ve learned something about grief: it can either hollow us out or clarify us. I do not want to become numb. I do not want to become conspiratorial. I do not want to drown in horror. I want to stay awake. I want enough of us awake that power begins to tremble. Because only when enough of us care—truly care—will something shift. I don’t know what that shift looks like yet.

But I know this: my daughter deserves a world that does not prey on her innocence and call it business. And if grief is the doorway into that fight, then I will walk through it with my eyes open and my heart heavy.

And I’ll admit—there’s a part of me that feels that familiar satisfaction when I see the comment-to-like ratio working in our favor. Folks saying something like, “The Bible is clear about welcoming the foreigner.” And I agree. Truly. One hundred percent. Let me say it clearly: I don’t think the mere fact that heaven has borders justifies enacting heinous immigration policies. Besides that logic simply not making sense, it echos the familiar example of the lazy, convenient cherry-picking some evangelicals use when they claim to be “taking the Bible literally.”

But here’s the thing we rarely want to say out loud: Heaven does have gates. And the Bible does use exclusionary language when it talks about who’s inside and who’s outside those gates.

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Many people have been quick to label the protestors’ action as “wrong.” I shared my thoughts about this on Threads—namely, that people seem more outraged by a protest during church than by the reality that ICE has been intimidating and arresting people in and around churches, schools, and hospitals. (Yes, parking lots too—still church property.) Over the past year, ICE has ignored due process, deported people to countries that are not theirs, denied access to hired attorneys, used inhumane detention facilities, and even detained U.S. citizens.

From the responses I’ve received, it seems that for some folks, none of that changes the conclusion: what the church protesters did was still “wrong,” and I should at least name it as such.

I won’t—and I’ll explain why in a moment.

First, a bit of context. I had promised a series on the burning bush narrative, and for a bit there it didn’t feel urgent to focus on that when empire-level commentary felt necessary elsewhere. But then I remembered something crucial: we don’t get to Exodus 3 without Exodus 1. And that’s where this conversation about protesting in church comes back into view—this insistence that we must first admit the protest was “wrong.”

Here’s what we need to understand when it comes to the Bible. If you’ve read my first book, Abuelita Faith, this (particularly the women) sits at the very center of it—but consider this a refresher: Scripture is full of stories of people doing what those in power considered “wrong” in order to confront injustice. Civil disobedience, cunning, deception—whatever it took to resist systems of harm. “Protest” can take many forms.

Since we’re talking about Exodus, Moses repeatedly defies Pharaoh’s authority, demanding freedom for enslaved people. From an imperial standpoint, he is a destabilizer and a threat to national security. Scripture frames his defiance as obedience to God.

In Joshua 2, Rahab lies to the king of Jericho in order to hide Israelite spies. Her deception is treasonous in the eyes of the state, yet she is praised for her faith and becomes part of Israel’s story—and Jesus’ lineage.

Daniel and his companions refuse the king’s food, refuse to bow to the statue, and continue to pray despite legal prohibition—these are acts of religious and political disobedience. The law says they are wrong, and God vindicates them.

Jesus heals on the Sabbath, disrupts the Temple economy, eats with the “wrong” people, and openly challenges religious and political authorities. From the standpoint of both Rome and the religious elite, his actions are illegal and destabilizing.

When ordered to stop preaching, Peter and the apostles respond: “We must obey God rather than human authority.” Their refusal leads to arrest and punishment—but the narrative frames this as faithful witness.

Morality is not always black and white in the Bible. (I have an entire chapter in Liturgies on how deeply dualistic thinking has shaped our imaginations—so much so that many of us can barely envision a world without it.) When we are facing systemic evil, the lines are rarely clean.

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I watched the videos. All of them. From every angle. I read the commentary and the reporting. I listened to the audio. I even sat through @iamkaizen’s take on it.

I sifted through the responses too—the ones that made me cringe, that broke my heart, that left me stunned by how far we’ve fallen morally. No, I wasn’t there and there are things I’m inevitably missing, but after everything here’s what I saw:

I saw Renee Good’s car stopped, positioned horizontally across the street. Her window is down and she appears to be speaking when an unmarked vehicle pulls up and two armed, masked men get out. The agent on her right immediately begins shouting: “Get the f**k out of the car.” He then begins to aggressively yank on her door handle in a way that is not calm nor is it a form of de-escalation (which is what they say training requires). It is a violent interaction, and it is at this exact moment that Renee begins to drive away.

As this is happening, there is a second agent in front of her bumper who then fires three shots. One goes through the windshield and kills her.

From the footage—the way her car is parked, and the way her window is down as she says things—it appears, though I’ll name this humbly, because we can’t hear her words, that she was using her body, her car, as a form of protest. A barrier—a way to intervene—before she is shot.

This is where people have rushed to say she was “obstructing” or “preventing ICE from doing their job” and I want to be clear about something: there is nothing—nothing—illegal about peaceful protest. It is a constitutionally protected right. Historically, justice movements have almost always required people to place their bodies in the way of violence: sit-ins, human chains, locked arms, standing in doorways, blocking roads. These have always been means of using presence as resistance. It is not criminal behavior, and it is not a means by which she deserved to die.

Now, one of the central questions people are asking is whether she intended to hit him? I don’t know. None of us do. But what I do know is this: if a masked, armed man—part of an organization with a documented history of dragging people out of cars, tackling them in the street, and disappearing them into detention—begins violently trying to force his way into my vehicle while screaming profanities, I will be terrified. And in terror, I will try to escape by any means possible. If I am in a car, I will most certainly press my foot on the gas and attempt to drive away. People can reframe that as aggression, but anyone with a clear head understands this as survival. Multiple witnesses confirmed that Renee was attempting to leave the area, not use her vehicle as a deadly weapon.1

Folks have also claimed the agent was “rammed” and “dragged.” Yet there is no visible evidence in the available footage of officers being injured. The agent who appears to have fired the fatal shots is later seen calmly returning to a silver SUV, which leaves the scene—driving through a red light.

Another central question folks are asking is whether the agent who fired the fatal shot believed he was acting in self-defense? Maybe he did. But it could also be true that so did Renee when she drove away and hit him with her car.

As a Christian I’m called to see the sanctity of all life, to remember that we are all human. As one commentator on IG said, “he is someone’s husband or father or brother, too,” and I don’t deny that. But even if we grant him the framing of self-defense, I don’t think it erases the deeper truth, one that is even described by bystanders:2

A woman witnessed her friends and neighbors being terrorized by agents of the state and she did what so many of us say we would do. She intervened. She tried to protect them. She tried to do something. And she was killed for it.

Killed by masked and armed agents from an institution that has spent months detaining people without warrants, without clear identification, without accountability. ICE insists its mission is public safety, yet this incident reflects excessive, disproportionate, and deadly force used against an unarmed civilian. It is difficult to reconcile that with any credible definition of “keeping people safe.” After the shooting, a doctor can be heard on video pleading with agents to allow them to give Renee care. The agents refuse. This is not the posture of people primarily concerned with preserving life.

And what followed matters as much as what happened. Kristi Noem labeled her a “domestic terrorist.” Donald Trump amplified the lie, blaming “the radical left.” Leaders of this country justified the killing of an innocent civilian—without empathy, without remorse—while reframing the exercise of a constitutional right to protest as terrorism. This is tyranny, plainly and unmistakably. And anyone who refuses to recognize the danger of this moment must reckon with the bloodshed enabled by such rhetoric and power.

Here we are, arguing over semantics instead of mourning a life and confronting the violence that took it. The fact that we are still slow-motion dissecting this video—still asking who was morally correct enough, who technically crossed the line first—reveals how profoundly disfigured our moral imagination has become.

You cannot unleash chaos on communities, terrorize people in broad daylight, and then claim innocence when the chaos you’ve created finally erupts; when the terror you have unleashed provokes fear and resistance. You do not get to be both the author of violence and its victim.

ICE has been abducting people from sidewalks and parking lots for months. That reality does not disappear because the narrative is politically inconvenient. And if we cannot name this plainly—if we cannot grieve honestly, speak truthfully, and refuse lies—then the danger is not only what has happened, but what we are allowing ourselves to become.

Rest in peace, Renee Good.

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It’s always a strange thing to say this to people when I don’t know how the year is actually beginning for them. “Happy” may not be the right word. It might be interesting, heavy, brave, disorienting, fulfilling, or tender. All the things that stretch beyond happiness. And still, I admit, I’m a sucker for a new year. I’ll take all the fresh starts, blank pages, clean slates, and the quiet permission to begin again.

I know the calendar year as we know it has roots in empire (truly, what doesn’t? If you’ve read Liturgies for Resisting Empire, you know this). In most Indigenous ways of being, the new year begins in spring, which makes far more sense. It’s the season of rebirth and regrowth. It feels logical to begin again when everything is blooming, not in the dead of winter, when so much is in a process of dying. And yet—maybe there’s a metaphor there, too. That we can still mark “hellos” and newness even in the cold, the dreary, the in-between.

2025 was, for me, all the things.

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Join me for Making Room Beyond Empire: A Year-End Workshop on December 30!

Joy is a strange word to offer in a world like this one.

On Friday night, we gathered with some folks in our community. We had food and Christmas movies. We pushed dining chairs aside and turned the music up—Lake Street Dive and Feliz Navidad filling the room. Our kids danced wildly, their joy unselfconscious and loud. We laughed. We felt grateful. It was the kind of night that settles into your bones and reminds you why friendship matters.

And then we learned that someone who lives not far from us—raised in this country, this state, this city, since he was two years old, never having known any life outside of it—was taken to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. His offense? Being pulled over while driving without a license. He has no criminal record. He’s worked, paid taxes, built a life like any of us. And now he’s being deported to a country he doesn’t remember, a place where he knows no one.

I drive without a license more often than I’d like to admit. Many of us do. The arbitrariness, the cruelty, the sheer inhumanity of it all settles heavy in my chest.

It’s not fair.

This week, a Catholic priest—or someone dressed like one, depending on who you ask—stood up in a House committee meeting and began shouting, “The power of Christ compels you!” at Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security. It immediately pulled me back to Ephesians 6 and that call to resist “the tricks of the devil,” the reminder that our struggle is not just against people but against the unseen forces—systems, structures, ideologies—designed to strip the image of God from any of us.

Watching someone go full-blown exorcist in the halls of Congress was unsettling, even surreal. And yet, in a strange way, “biblical”: a religious confrontation erupting in a place built to shield the powerful, directed at one of the very officials helping to uphold the system that terrorizes the vulnerable and innocent.

This morning at church, we saw images of nativity scenes altered to tell the truth we often refuse to see: baby Jesus wrapped in foil emergency blankets, wrists bound with zip ties. Another scene with the manger empty, a sign reading, ICE was here. The Holy Family rendered as detained, disappeared, displaced.

It reminded me of Bethlehem. If you were to visit today, the story we so often sentimentalize would become almost unbearable. The modern city is enclosed by an eight- to nine-meter-high separation wall, with only one entrance and exit. Bethlehem has been transformed into something like a prison. Across the West Bank, the wall snakes through land and livelihoods, separating Israeli settlers from Palestinian families, cutting through olive groves and memories alike.

Street artist Banksy once called Bethlehem “the least Christmassy place on earth.” In 2017—one hundred years after Britain seized control of Palestine—he opened the Walled Off Hotel near Manger Square (where Jesus is believed to have been born), pressed directly against the illegal separation wall. Part hotel, part museum, part protest, it was an act of subversive hospitality, channeling resources back into local Palestinian communities. That same year, Banksy worked with director Danny Boyle to stage an “alternativity”—a reimagining of the nativity meant to expose the sanitized illusions empire feeds us. Palestinian children wore Santa hats and angel wings, singing “Jingle Bells” under drifting fake snow. Joseph received his angelic message by text. Mary, radiant, rode a donkey across the stage. And towering behind it all was the gray concrete wall.

At the end of the video, a woman comments, “Jesus was born here in Bethlehem to bring peace to mankind. Well… let’s say he’s still working on that.” You can see some parents laughing as they brush the fake snow from their hair. Most are weeping.

Last night, we took our kids to a holiday light show with friends. We watched toddlers run beneath glowing arches. We laughed. We sat by a bonfire while our kids roasted marshmallows, sticky hands reaching for warmth and sugar. And as the fire crackled, we talked quietly about grief. About loss. About the people we’ve buried and the people we’re bracing ourselves to lose.

I hugged my children close when we got home and tucked them into bed. I dozed off feeling full and grateful and unbearably heavy all at once.

I woke this morning to news of another mass shooting—this time at Brown University. More lives lost. More bodies terrorized. More families shattered before breakfast. They say not to make it about the guns, but how can you not when there is a devotion to firearms in this country that feels almost sacred, a belief that warfare is the truest measure of strength and security? I keep thinking about Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning: that a nation pouring its wealth into military defense while neglecting the flourishing of its people is not just misguided but inching toward spiritual death. We are not inching. We are catapulting.

Last week, my uncle died—just days before my mom’s birthday. I called her to say happy birthday, but of course it wasn’t “happy.” A few nights later, unable to sleep, I turned on the TV. Univision was showing footage of thousands making their annual pilgrimage to honor La Virgen de Guadalupe. Elderly bodies shuffling forward, some nearly crawling toward the altar in Mexico City. People had traveled for weeks from El Salvador, Guatemala. A journey not marked by comfort or leisure but by survival—and by hope.

And I thought about how, just weeks ago, I traveled across the country to speak about empire and Jesus. Between sermons and workshops, my days were filled with good coffee, good food, warm welcomes. Everyone should have that kind of privilege, I thought.

It’s not fair.

Or maybe I’m the one who’s lacking. Maybe my comforts—the $8 specialty coffees, the ease of it all—do nothing for my soul. Maybe those pilgrimages are the real fullness of life. Maybe that’s what’s true. And all the fluff that cushions my days is what’s quietly wearing me down.

A few days ago, my four-year-old filled a bag with toys she wanted Santa to take to children who “don’t have a family.” She added pajamas too—her favorites—for kids who might be cold at night. She knows something we spend our lives forgetting: that joy always bends toward the other.

We, too, filled bag after bag with things we’ve accumulated over the years—clothes, trinkets, unnecessary stuff. And when I looked at those bags, I felt both lighter and heavier. There was an emptiness in me that felt sacred somehow—looking at the materiality of my life as if it were calling me to repentance.

I wonder if those on pilgrimage ever feel this. We tend to look at people who have less with pity, but I think it’s the engorged who are often lacking.

I remember watching those pilgrimage segments growing up with Abuela often—stories of devotion to la virgen. I know how deeply they resonated with her. She understood that kind of longing, that kind of hope, that kind of endurance. Now she is nearing the end of her life, barely eating, rarely opening her eyes. Her body slowly loosening its grip on this world.

The last time I visited her in her little duplex on the edge of Little Havana, I was flooded with memories of slow afternoons in her backyard, finding lizard eggs in a space that felt enormous to me then and impossibly small now. We didn’t have a house full of things. We had hearts full of grief and joy and each other. And it was always more than enough.

Today is Joy Sunday, and more than ever I’m convinced: there is no true joy without deep grief. I don’t think we can feel one without the other. And the gift of Advent is that it never asks us to choose between them. It insists we hold both.

The incarnation—God breaking into humanity in vulnerability, choosing flesh, choosing dependence, choosing proximity—is a thing worth feeling joyful over. It is God’s refusal of empire’s way of power. God’s declaration that freedom does not come from domination but from presence.

And yet, the incarnation story is not free of Herod. It is not free of state violence. It is not free of infants murdered in the name of security. The all-powerful king feared the newborn “king of the Jews,” and so a mass slaughter of children followed. We rarely talk about that part at Christmas, but it is just as much a part of the story.

Joy arrives in a world that is still dangerous and this Advent, I am not trying to resolve this tension. I am sitting with it. Holding it altogether in the palm of my hand like something small and trembling. I am letting them, joy and grief, speak to one another. Trusting that God is not offended by our inability to feel only one thing at a time.

Joy does not deny the wound. It names it—and it dares to hope anyway.

In the spirit of joy and grief and longing and, well, all the things, I thought I’d do a thing I’ve been wanting to do for a bit now.

On Tuesday, December 30th at 6pm CT, I’m hosting a year-end time of reflection inspired by my newest book, Liturgies for Resisting Empire, and I’d love for you to join me. Together, we’ll gently name some of empire’s most persistent ideologies and explore how we might loosen their grip on our lives.

This will be a space to breathe, to reflect, to grow—a space to make room for freedom within. So bring your tea, light a candle, settle in. Come ready to connect with others, to engage in an embodied practice, and to close out the year with a bit more clarity, insight, and language for resisting empire.

Space is limited to 10 attendees. Here is the link: Making Room Beyond Empire

I hope to see you there!

I remember that moment when I whispered it out loud: I’m scared. My insides were quivering like a fault line. It was time. I had spent ten months preparing for this, reading about how, just before birth, when the cervix reaches full dilation and the body begins to shift into transition, people often panic. It’s supposed to be normal—a sign that new life is close. But nothing about surrendering control of your own body feels normal.

“I can’t do this,” I told my doula, my voice trembling. She met my fear with a simple invitation: “Your body is doing what it’s meant to do. Trust her.”

Moments later I was in the tub, my child’s head crowning—visible outside my own body. With each contraction came a sound I had never heard before, a roar torn from somewhere ancient inside me. Giving birth felt like being dropped into another world: disorienting, raw, and holy. I had never been more out-of-body and embodied at the same time. Birth is its own liturgy—wholly material and wholly spiritual, a reminder that flesh and spirit were never meant to be separate.

A few months later, when Christmas arrived, I found myself revisiting the story of Jesus’s birth with the memory of my own still living in my bones. I wasn’t thinking about the neat, polished images we’ve inherited; I was thinking about blood and fear and trembling and courage.

If the Incarnation is one of the holiest events of our faith, then it means God enters the world through the very site empire tries hardest to control: the vulnerable, laboring body of a young woman. And if that is true, then holiness has never been untouched or distant. It is as close as breath, as loud as a primal groan, as real as a body fighting to bring life into the world.

Childbirth is not just physical; it is deeply political. The way a society imagines women and families—whose bodies matter, whose pain is believed, who bears the risks, who receives care and who doesn’t—reveals its deepest commitments. I write about this in Liturgies for Resisting Empire: the family has been politicized for decades, especially by conservative movements that weaponize “family values” while ignoring the material conditions that endanger families in the first place. Bodies, particularly the bodies of women of color, have always been sites where empire exerts its authority. Take Black mothers, who die at the highest rates in childbirth because their concerns are more likely to be dismissed. This is the weight of a medical system that, like so many others, was built on structures of racism and sexism.

Once I became a mother, I began to see Mary differently—not as the sanitized figure of Christmas cards, but as someone whose story unfolds at the intersection of birth, body, power, and empire. If we tell her story honestly, we discover she is not merely the gentle figure draped in blue. She is a young colonized girl—a child—whose life, body, and choices are profoundly political.

Mary’s story, after all, begins under occupation. She grew up in the long shadow of Roman military rule, where every aspect of life was shaped by the presence of empire. Rome controlled land and labor, taxation and religion, meaning and mobility. Her people lived with the constant pressure of heavy taxes designed to fund imperial expansion and with the daily visibility of Roman soldiers policing their streets. Public crucifixions served as a brutal reminder of what happened to those who stepped out of line. A client king, Herod—whose power depended on Rome’s favor—ruled through fear and violence. Mary’s “yes” to God, then, is not whispered in a neutral spiritual vacuum. It is spoken in the shadow of Caesar, in a world where pledging allegiance to anyone but Rome was already an act of resistance.

She also belonged to a community at the bottom of empire’s hierarchy. Mary was a young, poor, brown, Jewish girl from Nazareth—an insignificant village on the margins of an occupied land. Nazareth was the kind of place people mocked: “Can anything good come from there?” Her people were seen as extractable, their land and labor taken to sustain Rome’s wealth. Her body, like the bodies of many young women today, was shaped by political realities she did not choose. The threat of being stoned for pregnancy outside of marriage was not merely a religious concern; it was a symptom of a social order in which women bore the weight of honor and shame, often at the cost of their lives. Mary’s vulnerability was not incidental; it was political.

Even the announcement of Jesus’s birth is a confrontation with empire. When the angel tells Mary that her child will be called “Son of the Most High,” it sounds poetic to our ears. But in her world, it directly challenged the titles Caesar Augustus claimed for himself—“son of god,” “lord,” “savior,” the one who brings peace. To proclaim Mary’s child as Son of the Most High was to declare a rival authority. It is not a sentimental moment. It is the collision of kingdoms. A young peasant girl becomes the bearer of a life who will unmask empire’s lies and inaugurate a different kind of peace.

Mary’s response to this announcement—her Magnificat—is even more overtly revolutionary. Her song in Luke’s Gospel is not a lullaby; it is a manifesto. She declares that the mighty will be cast down from their thrones, the lowly lifted, the hungry filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty. This is the language of redistribution, the language of a world reordered by justice rather than domination. It is no surprise that tyrants have feared this text; throughout modern history, the Magnificat has been prohibited and/or discouraged in public worship in places like Guatemala, Argentina, and India because oppressed communities used it as a rallying cry for liberation. Mary’s theology is insurgent.

And Mary does not merely speak revolution—she lives it, raising Jesus in this climate of terror and surveillance. The story of Herod’s massacre of infants, far from a mythic exaggeration, echoes real imperial tactics of population control and intimidation. The Holy Family becomes refugees fleeing political violence; Mary becomes a migrant mother seeking asylum, carrying her child through foreign lands to escape the wrath of empire. There is nothing apolitical about this story.

Through it all, Mary resists empire’s scripts for womanhood. In her world, women were imagined as property, their voices deemed untrustworthy, their bodies valued primarily for producing heirs. They were expected to remain silent, invisible, obedient. Mary refuses these expectations at every turn. She speaks. She questions. She prophesies. She carries the divine in her own body. She becomes the first theologian of the Gospel. She stands at the foot of the cross when male disciples scatter. Her entire life is a refusal to let empire define what women are for.

So is Mary political? The incarnation? Absolutely. But not because we have imposed politics onto the story—rather, because this is what happens when divine imagination collides with imperial power. Mary is not the sentimental figure of pageants or porcelain statues. She is a poor colonized girl who becomes the prophet of God’s revolution. Her “yes” is a declaration that empire cannot own her body or her future.

The question is not whether Mary or the incarnation are political—which I believe they are. In fact, I’d argue that the Incarnation is one of the most politically charged moments in the story of God. The question though, for me, is whether we have the courage to hear the radical, disruptive, deeply embodied truth of Mary’s story—and to let it shape how we imagine birth, family, faith, resistance, and the holy in our own lives today.

Some house keeping!

This weekend I’ll be in Seattle for my PNW friends!

Saturday night Brandi Miller and I will be having a conversation about empire at Quest Church. Doors open at 4pm, event starts at 5pm. Come hang with us!

Sunday morning I’ll be preaching at Quest Church at 10am!

And Sunday afternoon and I will be leading a 2-hour workshop on empire and anxiety. This is a ticketed event. You can purchase tickets here (they come with signed copies of both of our books!)

If you’re in the area, I hope to see you! And for my DC area friends, I’ll be there in January- more info on that coming soon :)

Throughout history, empire’s drive to conquer has been explicit in the literal seizing of land and bodies, especially women’s bodies (I explore this more in the book). But the mindset persists. Next week is Thanksgiving, and American culture still glorifies conquest while minimizing the violence of the European invasion of North America. Think of the classroom pageants where kids wear feathered headdresses and paper Pilgrim hats, reenacting a peaceful feast that never existed. This sanitized story is not only inaccurate—it’s harmful. It erases five centuries of brutality against Native peoples.

This celebration of conquest has deep roots. In ancient Rome, emperors staged extravagant triumphal processions—public spectacles that humiliated the conquered and glorified Rome’s military reach. The famous slogan veni, vidi, vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) still echoes today, woven into our language, our imagination, even our worship. Christians still celebrate a triumphant Savior who overpowers enemies by force. Some of our favorite worship songs have us singing about battles and victory, glorifying triumph and conquest.

This logic shows up everywhere. We treat grief like a finish line, assuming healing arrives once we “conquer” the final stage. We live in a culture fixated on destinations, so focused on where we think we should end up that we miss the slow, sacred work unfolding in the journey. And Christians, perhaps most of all, have inherited this obsession with arrival. We’ve been so focused on getting to heaven that we forget we are called to bring heaven here.

Which is why our imaginations about hell matter so much. Empire has always needed a theology of conquest—of winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, the saved and the damned. Our visions of hell have often mirrored the empire that shaped them: punitive, violent, obsessed with domination. And rooted in fear.

This is where ’s Hell Bent becomes such an important conversation partner. It invites us to interrogate the stories we’ve inherited about punishment, power, and what God actually desires—and to ask whether our theology reflects the kin-dom of God or the conquest of empire.

And I’m thrilled to be able to share an excerpt!

Hell Bent by Brian Recker

IT’S ALL GONNA BURN

This afterlife- focused spirituality continues to shape the way many Christians, particularly evangelicals, view the world and their place in it. I saw this firsthand in my own experiences as an evangelical pastor.

One of my pastoral mentors in evangelicalism was a grizzled man named Tim. He had a habit of constantly muttering vaguely Christian phrases under his breath to himself like mantras, and one of his favorites was “It’s all gonna burn.” I heard him say it whenever he felt a pang of envy over material possessions. For example, he desperately wanted a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, but it was financially out of reach. When he crossed paths with one in real life, he would shake his head and remind himself, “It’s all gonna burn.”

This mindset is common in evangelicalism. This world is going to burn. It’s the next world that’s important.

Now, I don’t want to be too hard on Tim! I think it’s a good thing to remind ourselves of the temporary nature of wealth and possessions. Jesus himself says, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy . . . but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:19– 20, ESV). But for Jesus, heaven is not a place you go to after you die. Rather, heaven is God’s space. It is a spiritual reality, and it is with us and all around us. To lay up treasures in heaven is not about collecting rewards in the afterlife. It is about living for the things of heaven right now. To live for the things that matter most in this world, the things that connect us to love and bring about God’s peace.

In a very literal sense, the world is already burning. Global temperatures are rising, increasing the number of wildfires and other weather- related disasters, and potentially posing a threat to human existence as we know it. Yet I was raised being told that climate change was not important, because even if we do experience ecological disaster, Jesus is coming back soon anyway. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann writes that because Christians have reduced salvation to the afterlife and not this life, we have “unconsciously abandoned nature to its disastrous exploitation by human beings.” If this world is going to burn, it’s because we’re letting it burn. We have abandoned the precious earth God created. We have allowed the exploitation of the garden we’ve been given to tend.

The evangelical response to Trump’s return to power in 2024 reveals how dangerous this disengagement from earthly concerns can be. While some evangelical leaders explicitly endorsed Trump, others engaged in spiritual bypassing, using biblical language to avoid confronting real- world consequences. For example, at a popular evangelical church just two days before this pivotal election, I heard the pastor remind his congregation, “Remember where your citizenship fully and finally lies. . . . We are foreigners and strangers on this earth. . . . Every other allegiance will expire.” While this may sound spiritual and politically neutral, such vague platitudes actually enable oppression by failing to confront it directly and minimizing the importance of our earthly involvement. When over 80 percent of white evangelicals support a race- baiting, fascist- leaning demagogue, speaking in generalities about “heavenly citizenship” without naming and opposing the hatred in the white reactionary Christian movement essentially endorses it.

Being a “citizen of heaven” is indeed a beautiful metaphor, but it doesn’t mean we focus solely on saving souls for the afterlife. It means we are called to represent the values of heaven here on earth. And what that truly means is liberation for the oppressed.

We have a serious problem, and it isn’t in heaven— it’s on earth. It’s in the hospital parking lot where a woman died after being denied miscarriage care due to abortion bans. It’s in our schools, where children drill for the mass shootings we’ve decided are an inevitable part of American life. It’s in the children’s eyes as they are torn from their families at the border. If our heavenly citizenship doesn’t rattle the chains of domination that hang heavy on our brothers and sisters, then it means nothing at all.

Salvation. When you hear this word, what comes to mind? For most of us, it’s the afterlife. It is salvation for the next world, not for this world.

But, at the risk of sounding obvious, once you reject the concept of hell, salvation cannot primarily mean going to heaven. Salvation cannot merely be about “who’s in” and “who’s out” in the next world.

Ultimately, one way or another, everybody’s in. God will be all in all. So salvation is about “this world,” or it doesn’t matter at all. For some people, this makes the idea of salvation seem trivial or unnecessary. They might say, “If everybody goes to heaven, salvation is pointless.” But that is only true if this world and this life are pointless.

If hell is real, then it’s true that this world doesn’t matter very much. The suffering of the world is but the blink of an eye compared to everlasting torment. Our lives in this world are a blip compared to eternity. If there is an eternal hell for the unsaved, then the only valuable purpose of this life is to be “saved” to avoid such a fate. This is slaveholder logic, and it has justified every possible evil under the sun.

But this life is not about escaping hell. There is no hell to escape except the hells we create for ourselves and for others. This life matters. This world, and the suffering in this world, matter. Whatever is on the other side of this (and I believe the eternal arms of love are on the other side of this), we only get one shot at this life. The purpose of this life is not to check the right boxes to get in on the good part of the next life. This life is its own purpose.

And I believe we can find that purpose in Jesus. Jesus showed it to us. He called it the kingdom of God.

So many fun things to share today. First of all, Liturgies for Resisting Empire has been out for two weeks! And in that time, I got to celebrate it with such incredible friends (old and new!) in Los Angeles and San Francisco. If you were there, THANK YOU for joining and supporting this work!

Next up is Nashville THIS WEEKEND where I’ll be preaching and having a book conversation with Josh Scott at Gracepointe Church!

And then Seattle! Dec 6 and 7 where I’ll be in conversation with Brandi Miller on Saturday, preaching at Quest Church on Sunday morning, and and I will be leading a small retreat-style gathering on Sunday evening (more details on these events to come!)

I’m also excited to share the latest episode of Liturgies for Resisting Empire: The Podcast! It’s perfect timing because in it, you’ll hear from . Consider it a primer for this Sunday (be sure to make it if you’re in town! We’ll be having pupusas from a local Latinx owned restaurant afterwards to celebrate the launch!)

In this new podcast episode, Josh talks about religion and politics—really, about empire as lived theology. I’ll be honest: that phrase makes me uneasy, because the last thing I ever want is to link those two ideas. But Josh is right. Empire is a kind of lived theology—and, thankfully, it’s not the only one.

If you’ve been following this work, you’ve probably heard (or read!) me say that empire’s ideologies have seeped into everything we are, from our personal identities to our collective systems. Yes, empire operates through ideology, but ideologies begin as narratives. They start as stories that harden into beliefs, and those beliefs eventually calcify into the systems we now call “normal.” In that sense, empire is absolutely a lived theology, because it’s not only political—it is profoundly spiritual. How we view and relate to other human beings is a spiritual matter. Who we assign value to, whose wisdom we trust, and what it means to be faithful in a world where faith itself can threaten power- all expose the deeper narratives shaping our imaginations.

I hope you enjoy this episode! Let me know what you think in the comments—and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts!

Edward Said once wrote, “Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world.” It’s a haunting reminder that the visible battles of empire—those fought over borders, bodies, and soil—begin with battles over narrative. Nations themselves are stories written into law, recited until they are believed. And people have died trying to cross those stories.

To be colonized is not only to lose political or territorial sovereignty—it is to have one’s story rewritten, one’s imagination subdued. Empire decides who gets to speak, whose testimony counts as credible, whose way of knowing is dismissed as superstition or emotion. Over time, those stories sink deep into us—through our textbooks, our politics, our theologies, even the ways we narrate our families and ourselves.

But stories have never belonged only to empire. They have always been the ground of resistance.

Decolonizing, then, is about remembering. It is the sacred work of returning to the stories empire tried to erase and reclaiming the truth that there have always been other ways to know, to learn, to be. Ways not defined by conquest or hierarchy, but by connection and reciprocity.

My friend and fellow author Kaitlin Curtice writes beautifully about this in her new book, Everything Is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives. She reminds us that stories are not static—they are alive, breathing among us, shaping and reshaping the world. “Stories,” she writes, “are more than the tales we tell—they are living, moving, and prophesying among us.”

That line—stories are prophesying among us—is what inspired the name of this episode. Because when we speak of prophecy, we’re really talking about storytelling. The Greek word propheteia means “to speak before,” or “to speak for.” A prophet, then, is a storyteller—one who speaks before power, who tells the truth empire refuses to name.

If colonization is the erasure of one’s story, then reclaiming that story—naming it, telling it, remembering it—is an act of resistance. It is, in itself, an act of prophecy.

The prophets of Scripture knew this well. They weren’t fortune-tellers predicting the future; they were truth-tellers naming the present. Jeremiah stood in the shadow of Babylon and declared that the temple was no refuge for injustice. Amos cried out that God desired justice to roll down like waters, not empty rituals that upheld the powerful. They were storytellers who refused empire’s version of reality.

And maybe that’s the call for us, too—to become prophets of our own stories. To tell the truth about what empire has done to us and to our world, but also what it has failed to destroy. To tell the stories that still pulse with life—the ones that carry us home.

May we become keepers of the stories empire tried to silence.
May we listen for the truths still humming beneath the noise of conquest—the songs, the prayers, the quiet remembering that refuse to die.
And as we speak our stories aloud, may we find ourselves prophesying too: telling the truth about the present, dreaming a future that empire cannot imagine, and living into a world where every story, every body, and every breath is sacred.

I wanted to send this episode to your inbox, but episode three is out too! Listen to that one first, if you’re listening in order.

Liturgies for Resisting Empire is still 40% off + free shipping!

In this episode, I talk about how empire erodes wisdom: how it severs us from the sources of knowing that live in our bodies, our ancestors, and the earth itself. I also wrestle with how Western Christianity, for all its claims to purity and truth, is entangled in the very paradoxes it seeks to escape—dualisms that divide spirit from flesh, sacred from ordinary, heaven from earth.

This one’s an invitation to reflect, to ask what empire has taught us to forget, and to imagine what wholeness might look like on the other side of that forgetting.

Hope you enjoy!

Because empire isn’t just “out there.” It’s something we’ve internalized—something that lives in us. When we talk about resisting empire, we’re not only resisting a government or political power; we’re resisting the ideologies that come with it. As I explore more deeply in the book, these ideologies show up in many forms: hierarchy and dualism, homogeneity and violence. It’s the impulse to dominate. The desire to flatten difference. It’s the systems that taught us some lives matter more than others, that some stories deserve to be told, that some bodies are more worthy of being saved.

So as you listen, I invite you to notice where empire might have taken root in you—in your thoughts, your faith, your relationships—and to imagine what resistance could look like in your own life.