Posts by Believe Out Loud
Guns Will Not Save Us
I was 14 years old the first time I held a gun. My parents had recently divulged that they owned not one, but two, 9 mm semi-automatic handguns. The thought of guns in my house was scary, even if they were kept in small lock boxes, stashed far in the back of my parent’s closet.…
Read MoreIn Our Lifetime
She’s not a regular. I’d been meeting there weekly for almost two months, and I’d never seen her before. It must have been her first time. I was sure I knew all of the unsheltered people. She asked if I had $2. I didn’t. I still don’t. I choose not to carry cash. I walked…
Read MoreChristian Underhistory: Facing The Horrors of Christianity Past
Let me tell you about my new podcast Christian Underhistory. It’s a Christian True Crime podcast. Each week I have a different guest, usually a preacher or a theologian or a seminarian, and I tell them a true horror story from Christian history. We usually engage in gallows humor, joke so we can get through it,…
Read MorePainting Frida Kahlo
As we begin the month of October and ghosts decorate our homes, I am reminded of the holy days that await us. Poignant to my own background, Dia de los Muertos beckons us to remember who has gone before us. Dia de los Muertos is a Mexican holiday that is officially celebrated on October 31…
Read MoreHarmful Theology Will Not Define Us
Times are rough. Every five seconds, the news tells us something terrible that Trump and his administration has done. White Supremacists have a renewed, public boldness. Social media feeds are landmines of triggering comments about race, gender, sexuality, and many other issues that make up one’s humanity. On top of all of that, this thing…
Read MoreComing Out As A Pansexual Christian: Because They First Loved Me
Over the last few years, I’ve been deeply engaged in work and research that centers on cultivating space where people of all faiths, sexualities, and gender identities can seek to both know and be known. I’ve seen so many people experience spiritual, systemic, and interpersonal harm and sincerely believe that fostering inclusive, equitable communities can…
Read MoreWhy Coming Out Day Matters For The Church
In 1988, LGBT activists Robert Eichberg and Jean O’Leary established National Coming Out Day (NCOD), to be observed on October 11—the anniversary of the 1987 National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. According to his New York Times obituary in 1995, Eichberg explained the motivation behind NCOD as this: “Most people think they…
Read MoreWhen Coming Out Costs You Everything
Ten years ago if someone asked me to predict my future, I would have said that I expected to married with kids, and involved in some sort of Christian ministry. Ironically, that isn’t far from the truth, except that the specific confines of that prediction had a drastically different outcome than I (or any of…
Read MoreLesbian Priest Persists Under Mississippi’s New Anti-LGBTQIA Law
BREAKING: Plaintiffs appeal HB 1523 to U.S. Supreme Court The world seems surreal when your own government makes laws against you. You feel like you’ve been sent back in time and space to Nazi Germany. Or like you’re stuck in a Twilight Zone episode or a Daphne du Maurier short story. This can’t be real.…
Read MoreDo Unto Others: A Blueprint For Religious Leaders On Global LGBTI Rights
On Friday, September 29th, the United States cast a vote against a UN Human Rights Council resolution to ban the death penalty against LGBTI people, effectively jeopardizing LGBTI people’s lives around the world to preserve the death penalty at all costs. Though the US joined Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates…
Read More