Jennifer believed in what Mason called a “feast of ideas”—laying before them a rich table of living books, great art, history, poetry, and the natural world, trusting their minds and the Divine spark within, to make the connections. It was all really more formation than education now that I think about it. The question was never simply what our girls would know when they left our home, but what would they love. What would hold their attention? What would stir their imagination? What might they care enough about to give their very lives to? As James K. A. Smith reminds us, we really are what we love.

And maybe this is where education and vocation meet, where our girls’ past and future come together in this present moment. Not to choose the right career, but to become attentive enough to hear the quiet call of their innermost being. To notice what draws them, what moves them to tears, and what they cannot help but care about. Education has taught them to enter into relationship with the world; vocation asks them to discover the part they are to play within it. All those formative experiences with truth and beauty have brought them to this threshold, where they ask, “What is mine to do?”

Parker Palmer writes in Let Your Life Speak, that vocation is not something we manufacture so much as something we listen for. It is less about asking, “What job will I have when I grow up?” and more about paying attention to the life that is already within us—the gifts, the loves, the limitations, the longings that have been there since before we can remember. Vocation, in Palmer's telling, is an invitation to become more fully who we already are.

Vocation begins in the same place beauty does: in paying attention. We cannot hear the quiet callings of our hearts if we are constantly listening to a world telling us who we ought to be.

That is what I hope our girls are discovering as they read and sing, study and write, play and hopefully pray.

Sitting here in a house much quieter than it was a week ago, I’m reminded of the final verses of Mary Oliver’s poem “Upstream,” and the task we parents have of setting our children’s feet in the right direction. We walk with them for a while, pointing out the things we’ve learned to love along the way. But eventually the path becomes theirs. My hope is that they have learned to pay attention, to listen deeply, and to find their truest route in this world.

As Oliver pleads:

I want this for my girls, and for myself: a life awake to beauty, curious about the interconnectedness of it all, attentive to what stirs, and spacious enough to discover what is worthy of love, what the world needs, and what part we are here to play. This is our truest vocation, to pay attention long enough to discover what is ours to do, and then having the courage to go and do it.

So, for the world’s sake, slow down. Go to an opera. Visit an art museum. Read a novel that has survived a hundred years. Write poetry even if no one ever reads it. Walk through the woods and breathe the butterscotch coming from ponderosa pines. Sit on the porch and watch summer fade into fall. Put peppermint in your pocket. Pay attention to what moves you. Notice what you cannot stop caring about. Listen to your life. What is it all saying?

And walk slowly, noticing every little living thing along the way.

Gary Alan

P.S. Writing is one way I’m figuring out my truest vocation—following the questions that stir me, paying attention to what I can’t stop thinking about, and trying to give some of it back to the world. If you’ve found something worthwhile here, becoming a paid subscriber gives me the freedom to keep doing that. It’s only $5/month.

We are all connected in ways we rarely see. Sometimes a few words from one person give another person permission to listen a little more closely to their life. If these essays resonate with you, I’d be grateful for your support. Even the greatest artists needed benefactors. Vocation may be personal, but it is never solitary. I can’t do this alone. Your partnership helps me keep listening for the voice within me, following what stirs, and offering whatever I find back to the world. Plus, you gain access to all our premium posts and the complete archive. Thank you!

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I proclaim it every Sunday. Somewhere between the sermon and the prayers of the people, the congregation stands to recite the Nicene Creed.

I’m sure you know the rest of it.

If you attend a liturgical church, you’ve probably said these words a thousand times. I believe most of it, and even the parts that make me squirm aren’t troubling enough to make a fuss about. I’m not interested in deconstructing the Nicene Creed. I’m consumed with what it meant to call yourself a Christian before there were creeds, or clergy, or even a canon.

The further I flee religious fundamentalism, the more fascinated I am with the historical Jesus and the community of people who knew him personally, or were only one or two degrees removed from those who did. What did these first Christians think the Jesus movement was all about? What did faith mean in the first two centuries after his death? When did followers become believers, and when did disciples become people who think all the right doctrines about Jesus while living in opposition to everything Jesus ever taught? When did apprenticeship become assent?

I’ll tell you. October 27th, 312.

On that fateful day 1,714 years ago, Emperor Constantine had a vision. Fighting for control of the Roman Empire with his rival Maxentius, Constantine saw the sign of the cross in the sky. Interpreting this portent as divine favor, Constantine went on to win the battle and subsequently adopted Christianity as his personal religion. For the first time in history, a globally powerful politician converted to Christianity. And his “conversion” changed everything. Well, it didn’t change him of course, but Christianity has never been the same.

Suddenly, Christianity had something it had never had before: imperial power. With it came the temptation the Church would succumb to for the next two thousand years—to exchange the way of Jesus for the ways of empire. Almost overnight, Christians moved up from the catacombs and into the Senate, where the persecuted became the persecutors. Once a marginalized and brutalized community of political and cultural misfits, Christians were now the privileged and the powerful. Instead of resisting the ways and means of empire, they wanted to Make Rome Great Again. Christians suddenly found themselves bearing arms for the very empire that killed their king. Following the way of Jesus was reduced to innocuous beliefs about Jesus. The people once known for defending the rights of women, socialistic economic practices, universal nonviolence, and radical justice were converted to the cruelty and callousness that is imperial Christianity.

Constantine was one of the first, and hardly the last, to enlist Christianity in service of empire.

The most sinister aspect of imperial Christianity isn’t that the crucified became the crucifiers; it’s that proximity to power changed what it meant to call yourself a Christian. A movement born from modeling your life around a homeless Palestinian prophet who healed the sick, defended the weak, and spoke truth to power morphed into an institution increasingly preoccupied with defining Jesus rather than following him. And sadly, it only got worse.

In 325, Constantine called the Council of Nicaea to settle a theological dispute over who Jesus was in relation to God. Was Jesus fully divine and eternal, or was the Son created by the Father? For the first time, the question of what Christians should believe about Jesus was being settled by imperial, and politically motivated men.

By 380 and the Edit of Thessalonica, Emperor Theodosius made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, marking Christianity as an imperial institution. The domestication and subjugation of the Jesus movement was complete.

It’s one thing to describe this conversion. It’s another to see it staring right at you. Several years ago I visited York Minster in the north of England, near the site Constantine was crowned emperor in 306.

In the cathedral grounds is a statue of Constantine seated in military dress, casually holding the pommel of a broken sword whose blade forms a cross. On the base of the statue are the words, “Constantine by this sign I conquer.” The symbolism is difficult to miss. What struck me as I gazed up at the statue was just how smug Constantine is depicted. He has the same pompous look every politician since him has had when they are cavalierly using Christianity to legitimize their power. He isn’t kneeling beneath the weight of the cross, he is basking in the glory of conquering with it. Our sign of self-emptying love was now a badge of power. Christianity didn’t convert the empire. The empire converted Christianity.

And with it, our faith was turned upside down.

The Way was now a creed. Faith was right belief. Resisting the status quo was now treason. Christianity was suddenly a chaplain to empire, blessing the very powers Jesus had warned his followers to resist. Gone was the nonviolent Jesus, and in his place was the warrior for Jesus. An entire spiritual movement was fundamentally reshaped. Perhaps there is no better way to see the magnitude of that transformation than to place two of the most revered texts in Christian history side by side: the Nicene Creed and the Sermon on the Mount. One emerged from a gathering of bishops convened under the authority of an emperor; the other came from the lips of Jesus. One asks us to affirm what we believe about Jesus; the other asks us to embody what Jesus taught.

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It’s as hot as ever, but the kids are back at school. Swimsuits and shorts are giving way to backpacks and books. Here in Colorado, the dry heat is now gently bookended by crisp evenings and cool mornings as the first Montana winds flow across the Front Range. All over the South, the diesel roar of school buses mingles with the chorus of cicadas and the hiss of sprinklers soaking dew-drenched lawns. August carries that perennial childhood ache of knowing something is ending before you are ready to let it go: the dream of an endless summer suddenly jolted awake by the school bell.

As I write, our girls are upstairs packing and preparing to leave—one returning to university, the other gathering up the remnants of her childhood to move into her first big-girl apartment, this time for good. Tonight will be the last night the five of us share the same permanent home. For 22 years, this has been our normal. Tomorrow, it won’t be. And I’m not ready.

We are in that strange terrain of transition, between arriving and departing, beginnings and endings, holding on and letting go. Life is in flux. Nothing feels settled; like living between notes.

Perhaps that’s why August feels so achingly familiar. So much of life is lived in this liminal space, a threshold between what was and what is yet to be. Whether we like it or not, life is always moving, always shifting, always passing through. What arises eventually falls. What feels solid is quietly slipping away.

And when the ground beneath us keeps shifting, we naturally look for somewhere solid to stand. So we cling ever more tightly to our kids, we brace against change, we stiffen, we harden, we refuse to let go of what is already passing through. We hold onto what is familiar—the full house, the ordinary routines, the carpool line, the math homework, the noise upstairs, the knowledge that everyone will be home tonight—even as it slips away. We get angry that a chapter is ending, and grieve that it all seems to have happened so fast. I almost feel betrayed by the ending of a chapter I never wanted to close.

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The Urakami district of Nagasaki was the historical heart of Japanese Christianity becaus…

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This essay is the third installment in an ongoing series titled Christianity Before Belief: Exploring The Way of Jesus. If you missed part one (When Did Jesus Become God?), you can read it here.

Has anyone ever thrown the O-word at you?

If you’ve spent any time in the faith deconstruction community, chances are you’ve heard it. Not so much as an invitation to explore the Christian tradition more deeply, but as a way of ending the conversation altogether.

I recently read a Substack article by an ACNA priest with a rather unconventional title. Before getting to his argument, he offered his readers a reassuring disclaimer: “While this may sound progressive, don’t worry, it’s completely orthodox.” I couldn’t help noticing how “orthodox” functioned like a shibboleth, or an ecclesiastical stamp of approval.

For many of us who came of age in conservative Christianity, orthodoxy functioned less as a guardian of truth, and more like a protector of the status quo. The assumption being that the Church settled the essential questions centuries ago, and our primary task was not to wrestle with the faith but to defend it. It is little wonder that so much energy in evangelicalism is devoted to apologetics rather than spiritual formation.

Today, when we reexamine inherited doctrines like patriarchy, purity culture, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, gender roles, biblical inerrancy, or the Church's relationship to power, those acts of spiritual maturity are often interpreted as theological rebellion. The implication is unmistakable: your questions are not ancient; they are modern. You are not being faithful; you are disobedient. Your curiosity isn’t a virtue, it is evidence that you have been deceived. Because the verdict has already been rendered. Orthodoxy has spoken and you are the problem.

But let me say this before we go any further, there is nothing inherently wrong with orthodoxy. Faith needs roots, it needs a container and a community. It needs a connection to the generations that came before us. But roots can either nourish a tree or become chains that prevent it from growing. Orthodoxy becomes dangerous when it is no longer an invitation into a living and evolving tradition but a boundary drawn to keep questions—and questioners—out.

History also reminds us that appeals to orthodoxy are never made in a vacuum. Sometimes, orthodoxy is nothing more than a baptized version of the prejudices of the age. Christians throughout the centuries appealed to orthodoxy in defense of slavery, war, the burning of “witches,” the Crusades, colonization, and the persecution of so-called heretics. Simply calling something orthodox, or biblical, has never guaranteed a reflection of Christ. Who gets to define "orthodoxy" has always been as much a question of power as it has been a question of theology.

In a lecture at Yale University, theologian Robin Myers describes how orthodoxy often functions as a silencer of spiritual inquiry:

“The operative premise here is that we know what true Christianity is. That we are defending something we truly understand. That a sort of unspoken consensus exists that the meaning of Christianity is fixed, true to its origin, and protected from error by God.”

But, is this true? Was the early Church ever as unified, settled, and theologically certain as we've been taught?

The deeper we look into the first generations of Christianity, the more diverse the landscape becomes. The Christian tradition has never been a story of pure theological harmony. Instead, we’ve inherited a vibrant, often contentious, and diverse story about who Jesus is, why he came into the world, and what it means to follow him. From the very beginning, followers of Jesus disagreed on fundamental issues. It’s why we have four canonical gospels; four different stories about the historical Jesus that often contradict one another on some serious issues!

Princeton historian Elaine Pagels has spent much of her career reminding us that early Christianity was far more diverse than many of us were taught to imagine. The first generations of Christians were not theologically unified, nor did they recite or preach from a settled script. They were engaged in a profound conversation about the meaning of Jesus, preserving different memories, different emphases, and different theological visions. In other words, the very first followers of Jesus were heterodox, and often quarreled with one another about the nature of faith.

According to Pagels, two ancient visions of Jesus diverged within the earliest Christian literature. The Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas tell remarkably different stories about the heart of faith, but they were each attempting to answer the same questions:

• Is Jesus primarily the unique object of our faith, whose divine identity must be confessed and worshiped?

• Or is Jesus the embodiment and exemplar of a way of life, inviting us not merely to believe in him, but to participate in the fully human and fully divine life he revealed?

Pagels opens her seminal work Beyond Belief with a striking observation.

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It’s been a minute since our last essay.

Did you think I’d wandered off into the theological wilderness never to return? Or quietly ascended into heaven? Or—given what we talk about here—been redirected somewhere considerably warmer? That sounds more likely! :)

Thankfully, none of that happened, I’ve just been in Eugene onboarding for my new ro…

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This is part two of the series, Christianity Before Belief.

Regardless of which Christian tradition you grew up in, I’m guessing you inherited two inseparable narratives: one about yourself and the other about Jesus.

The first told you from infancy that you were born bad, a sinner by nature, totally depraved, deserving of Hell, and that even on your best days your good works were but filthy rags.

How inspiring.

The second script strengthened the first, insisting Jesus was unlike you in every conceivable way. He was a sort of superman whose earthly life was animated from a place you can never inhabit. His compassion, wisdom, and power were proofs of his otherness, rather than signs of a human being at its best.

Working together, these two doctrines shaped two thousand years of Christian theology. The more deeply humanity is depravity, the more different Jesus becomes. This vision stripped us of our agency, leaving human beings dependent on supernatural intervention instead of participating in the same life Jesus came to reveal.

But this has never been the only way Christians understood humanity and the divine.

Running quietly alongside the dominant currents of Western Christianity has always been another imagination, one preserved by Christian mystics and carried forward by contemplatives and esoteric seekers who see the human condition not as one of inherent depravity, but of forgotten likeness. This perspective transforms not only the human person, but Jesus himself. He’s no longer the eternal exception to our brokenness. He is our fullest revelation—our exemplar, avatar, and the “first fruits of a new creation.” He was, and is, the ideal human.

Before I go any further, I know what you are thinking. “You’ve said this already!” I know, I know. I have. I wrote about it in our last essay, When Did Jesus Become God?

But here's where my argument takes a more interesting turn. The real test of this spiritual reimagination is how we interpret the extraordinary things Jesus did. We can believe his words, but can we carry on his work? Jesus healed the sick, fed the multitudes, gave sight to the blind, and set the captives free. Can we tap into the same transformative power Jesus unleashed into this world? Because if his “miracles” exist only to prove Jesus possessed powers forever beyond our reach, then he remains the exception and we remain spiritual spectators. However, if Jesus didn’t come to rescue humanity but to reveal it, we have to ask whether these signs and wonders point toward what becomes possible when a human being is completely aligned with the life and will of God.

So, if you are up for it, I’d like to reconsider his miracles in light of his humanity. To do so, we must begin where the Christian story begins, in the Gospel of Mark.

Decades before the high Christological debates between Luke and John, the earliest and least varnished Gospel introduces Jesus in startlingly human terms. Mark presents the least developed account of Jesus’ divinity and the most striking portrait of his humanity. It’s why Mark is my favorite Gospel. Here, Jesus gets hungry, exhausted, angry, and heartbroken. He needs his sleep. He has no money and he apparently has no job. His entire ministry is funded by a group of wealthy female patrons. And yet, this first century itinerant prophet taps into some of the deepest dimensions of human consciousness, which makes Mark’s Gospel so remarkable. Mark tells story after story of healings, exorcisms, and wonders without ever suggesting Jesus accomplishes them by becoming less human. For Mark, Jesus’ power isn’t a rejection of his humanity, but its fullest expression.

He repeatedly tells his readers Jesus was "moved with compassion” (splagchnizomai)—a Koine Greek word which literally translates as “having one’s guts torn apart.” Contemporary theologian Marcus Borg argues that Jesus did not possess compassion, compassion possessed him. If Borg is right, it was Jesus’ compassion, not his supernatural abilities, that allowed him to perform so many marvels. What if Jesus' miracles were not suspensions of the natural order, but revelations of the hidden possibilities within it and within us?

Nowhere is this clearer than in Mark's account of the feeding of the five thousand. Read carefully, Mark may be inviting us to see something far more transformative than a supernatural multiplication of bread.

Let’s pick up the story in chapter six.

“When Jesus came out and saw the crowds, He was moved with compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And He began to teach them many things.

When the day was now getting late, His disciples came to Him and said, ‘This is a remote place, and now the time is passing. Send them away into the surrounding country and villages to buy themselves bread, for they have nothing to eat.’

But He answered, ‘You give them something to eat.’

They said to Him, ‘Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii^[a] worth of bread and give it to them to eat?’

He said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’

When they found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’

Then He commanded them to make everyone sit down by companies on the green grass. So they sat down in ranks, by hundreds and by fifties. When He had taken the five loaves and the two fish, He looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to His disciples to set before them. And He divided the two fish among them all. They all ate and were filled. And they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments and of the fish. Those who ate of the loaves were about five thousand men.”

Here’s my question: Where, exactly, is the miracle? Where does Mark describe a supernatural event? Read it again. There isn’t one.

If you don’t believe me, then lets return to the story and watch the scene unfold.

Like a dramatic playwriter, Mark carefully sets his stage. The disciples have just returned from their first mission, exhausted from the demands of ministry. Jesus leads them by boat into the wilderness, hoping to find a moment of rest. Instead, the crowds follow them. Theologian Ched Myers notes that wilderness is a crucial coordinate in Mark’s narrative world. “In literal terms, wilderness connoted an uninhabited and desolate place.” It is a geography of scarcity. Resources are limited. People are vulnerable. This wasteland is beyond the jurisdiction of imperial economics. Mark describes the crowd as “sheep without a shepherd,” a community abandoned by the political, social, and religious systems meant to care for them.

When the disciples come on stage, they see exactly what scarcity teaches them to see: too many mouths and too little food. Their solution is predictable. “Send them away.”

Jesus sees something else.

Moved by compassion, he refuses to accept scarcity has the final word. “You give them something to eat,” he demands. According to Myers, this is the turning point of the story. It's also the hinge upon which this entire spiritual reimagining turns. Jesus refuses the supernatural, because it is not required.

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What you may not know is that Holy Heretics isn’t my full-time job. If it was, I couldn’t afford to eat. 🙂

I’ve rarely written a…

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This is part one of an ongoing series titled Christianity Before Belief.

I usually treat my summer reading list like I treat my vacations: entertaining, exciting, and requiring as little existential angst as possible. Two summers ago it was Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, followed last year by Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole Series.

This year, I failed spectacularly.

Somewhere between Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ, Alvin Boyd Kuhn’s A Rebirth of Christianity, and Robin Meyers’ Saving God From Religion, things got serious. So serious it’s been difficult to think or write about anything else.

I should have stuck with Scandinavian crime novels.

But, the more I think about it, my current restlessness doesn't feel like deconstruction, it feels more like a complete shift in consciousness, a kind of divine haunting. And since I’d rather not be haunted alone, I’m inviting you into the stirring these books have awakened in me. Harpur, Kuhn, and Meyers are widening my spiritual imagination, inviting me to see Jesus, Christianity, and reality itself through a universal, allegorical, and mythic lens rather than a historical and literal lens. Each book is circling questions I’ve never heard from even the most progressive pulpits:

• When, exactly, did Jesus become God — and why does that matter?

• What if Jesus didn’t come to earth to be believed in, but to show us what a fully human life looks like?

• What if the Incarnation wasn't primarily about rescuing humanity from God, but about revealing humanity's capacity for union with God?

• What if the central question of Christianity isn't, "How do I get into heaven?" but, "What does it mean to become like the Christ?"

• What if Jesus is not the exception to humanity, but the revelation of humanity's deepest calling?

These really aren’t theological questions. They are invitations into an inner alchemy. They not only reorient our beliefs about Jesus, they rehabilitate our core identity. For centuries, institutional Christianity has trained us to direct our attention outward toward an object of faith. These questions gently turn our gaze inward, toward the work of becoming, by daring to discover that the deepest mystery of Christianity is awakening the Christ within.

Think about it like this. In normative Christianity, Jesus is the glorious exception to sinful humanity. He is “The only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.” We are none of those things. He is holy; we are depraved. He is worthy; we are wretched. He bridges the infinite chasm between God's perfection and our original sin, accomplishing what we never could. Our role is simply to believe, receive, and beg for mercy.

Within this framework, Jesus is not so much an example to follow as an impossible standard to admire. His divinity separates him from us far more than his humanity connects him to us. The entire story depends on the assumption that Jesus is fundamentally unlike us in every meaningful way. Faith is therefore outsourced to an external perfection. Instead of awakening to the Christ within you, we spend our lives gazing at the Christ who is eternally unlike us.

But what if that isn’t the whole story? What if the earliest Christians were trying to say something far more radical—not only about who Jesus is, but about who we are? What if Jesus didn't pop out of Mary's womb as a Superman to be worshipped, but grew into perfect union with God through a life of self-emptying love and surrender, revealing the Way the rest of us are invited to walk?

With your permission, I’d like to explore these questions and see where they lead. My goal isn’t to dismantle whatever remains of your faith, but to invite you into a way of seeing that has made Christianity feel larger, deeper, and, paradoxically, more believable than ever.

A word of caution, though. If you’ve only recently begun disentangling yourself from evangelicalism, this may not be the best place to start. These aren’t the shallow waters of deconstruction; they’re the deep end of mystical reconstruction. The questions we’re about to explore don’t simply challenge toxic doctrines like patriarchy and purity culture—they reimagine the very framework through which we understand Jesus, salvation, and what it means to be human.

If your faith is still in triage, tend to it gently. There is no rush. You have an eternity to “work out your salvation.” But, if you've reached the point where you're no longer trying to escape Christianity but plumb its depths, then these conversations may feel less like a threat and more like walking an ancient path — one worn smooth by mystics, saints, and seekers, but overgrown after centuries of neglect.

Are you ready?

If so, let’s start at the beginning, or more particularly, at Jesus’ beginning.

Father Richard Rohr is fond of saying Christ isn’t Jesus’ last name, and for good reason. Jesus is the historical person; Christ is the universal presence. “Christ is not a person, but a principle,” writes Kuhn. Jesus is the individual who lived in first-century Palestine and who died at the hands of the Roman Empire. Christ is divine consciousness, the eternal Word, the union of God and creation that Jesus embodied and invites us to participate in. Christ existed before Jesus, within Jesus, and beyond Jesus. Christ also exists before you, in you, and beyond you.

If true, then all of this takes us back to our original inquiry: When, exactly, did Jesus become the Christ, or God? The answer depends on which New Testament author you read.

In Robin Meyers book Saving God From Religion, he reveals something I’ve never noticed. The New Testament does not present a single, static understanding of Jesus' divinity. Instead, it preserves a fascinating evolution if read chronologically starting with Paul and ending with John. The farther the story develops, the farther back Jesus' divinity reaches. Speaking at Yale’s Beecher Lectures, he shares this startling conclusion:

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At dawn on this longest day of the year, the first rays of the morning sun once again touched the Heel Stone (hele-stone), the solitary sighting stone standing outside the great circle of Stonehenge. Rising nearly sixteen feet above the ground, it may seem unremarkable compared to the towering trilithons at Stonehenge's center. Yet it is the stone upon which the entire monument depends.

On the morning of the Summer Solstice, as the sun rises on the northeastern horizon, its first rays appear directly above the Heel Stone and shine into the heart of Stonehenge. Thousands of years ago, the ancient builders of this holy site carefully positioned the monument so that the Heel Stone would mark one of the most significant moments in the solar year, the return of the light.

Built over thousands of years beginning around 3,100 BCE, Stonehenge was more than a monument, it was and still remains a reminder that the boundary between heaven and earth is porous, if it exists at all. The Ancient Britons gathered around the Heel Stone at Summer Solstice because they understood something we’ve long forgotten: Nature is our first and truest spiritual teacher. Every dawn is a kind of genesis, the world’s first morning is repeated with every new sunrise.

Across millennia the Britons, Beaker People, Iron Age Celts, Angles, and Saxons gathered here to hold space with the Sacred. Different names, different cultures, but a shared instinct: to watch the world closely enough to recognize divinity in all things. They learned this by paying attention, by walking humbly, and bowing often. They watched the rivers rise and recede, how life gives way to death and resurrection, how seeds disappear into the earth and return transformed, and how winter never has the last word. For them, the natural world was not a stage set for human existence, but the primary place of revelation. The wind, the sun, the stones, the rivers, the sky—these were not symbols pointing elsewhere, but expressions of the sacred itself. Creation was not merely evidence of God’s existence; it was the very place where Her presence was most encountered.

To live attentively in such a world was to know that there is no separation between the spiritual and the material—only different ways of naming the same reality, for Creation itself is God’s first word, the original revelation from which all later revelations of the sacred arises.

Think about it like this: regardless of whether you believe the universe is 6,000 or 14 billion years old, the Bible is a rather recent invention. Anthropologists tell us the earliest Homo sapien fossils date back approximately 300,000 years. Meaning? The human race has lived without the Bible for 99.4% of our existence. Thankfully, “Sacred writings are bound in two volumes—that of creation and that of Holy Scripture,” wrote 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas.

Before the Bible was written, there was already the first “Word of God”: Creation itself. Maybe this is what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote, “Ever since God created the world, God’s everlasting power and deity — however invisible — have been there for the mind to see in the things God has made.”

Our tragic disconnection with Creation has been one of the chief means by which we have not only domesticated spirituality, but sent ourselves into a self-imposed exile from the Divine. In our attempts to dominate and exploit creation instead of cultivate it, we’ve de-sacralized the dwelling place of God. The Church has mistakenly compounded our spiritual domestication by splitting the world into sacred and secular, spiritual and physical. In so doing, Christianity has sanctioned the sacred, controlling when, where, and how to experience God, conditioning us to look only in certain institutional places for the holy.

But, there is another way.

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For generations, this region was both hospitable and harmful, genteel and barbarous. The soil seemed to remember who had worked it and who had owned it, who belonged and who did not. There were thin places back in the bottom lands where the blood cried out from the silt and sand, where old Black men still lived in shacks surrounded by soybeans. I still remember the chain gangs with their shovels flashing in the sun as they dug ditches and built roads across a South where slavery and segregation mutated into the modern plantation —the State Penitentiary.

Poor white folks were better off, but not by much. My grandfather on my daddy’s side was the son of a sharecropper. He dropped out of school in the 8th grade to pick cotton. My grandmother grew up in tin huts on dirt floors all over West Tennessee, moving from shanty to lean-to, depending on the season. They both lived through the Great Depression and World War II to find themselves in old age the proprietors of a few acres they finally called home.

Nana’s house sat at the end of a dog-wood lined lane, where there was always room at the table for one more. But as I grew older, I noticed something disorienting beneath that hospitableness — not necessarily in her, but in the sweltering air we breathed. This was a world ordered by racial and gender hierarchy. Everyone had their place, and their role. It was all less a conscious ideology than an atmosphere, something understood, performed, and lived into long before it was examined.

My upbringing was both charming and supremacist, generous and exclusionary, dignified yet deeply insecure. How can an entire region of the country be so damn proud, yet rife with white grievance? Maybe it’s because Southerners have a peculiar gift for disguising one thing as another. The same hands that offered biscuits and gravy could just as easily fasten chains around your wrists. Respectable church ladies called you a damned fool without you even knowing it. They’d smile, squeeze your shoulder, and say, "Bless your heart,” as a way of masking their critique in kindness. This is the South in miniature: polite cruelty in the same breath, all while pretending not to notice the contradiction.

The Delta raised me in this double vision: superior yet insecure, poor but well-healed, rooted in a place that felt like home while slowly realizing that my belonging was inseparable from someone else’s unbelonging. Naming those tensions isn’t a betrayal of my heritage, it’s just the most honest thing I can say about it.

I left the South 25 years ago. Time and distance have a way of clarifying what proximity once blurred. I’m still close enough to know its cadences, humor, and accents, but far enough away to finally see it completely. From here, I recognize the culture I participated in and benefited from came at the cost of so many marginalized people. I now exist in what Father Richard Rohr calls “the edge of the inside,” a strange, holy place of disruption where you still belong to the people who formed you, yet you’re no longer captive to the way of life they gave you. In choosing exile, I’m neither an outsider throwing stones nor an insider defending the status quo. I’m something in between — a witness shaped by the South but no longer bound by its rules.

Leaving my physical home prepared me to recognize when it was time to leave my spiritual one. The same awakening that changed my understanding of the South eventually transformed my understanding of faith. Like the Delta, evangelical Christianity was a place I once called home. It gave me identity, superiority, stories, songs, language, purpose, and community. It taught me how to pray, how to read the Bible, and how to seek God. I was at home in evangelicalism because it was a religious house built with people like me in mind. As a white, male, cisgender, heterosexual Christian, I rarely had reason to question its architecture. Only later did I begin to see how that same structure often restricted, marginalized, and excluded women, People of Color, and LGBTQIA individuals. Beneath its welcome and warmth was a similar contradiction.

The church of my childhood was often kind, generous, and deeply sincere. But it was also shaped by the same rigid hierarchies of my home town. Certainty masqueraded as faith. Racial, sexual, and gender boundaries determined who belonged and who most certainly did not. White, heterosexual males were in charge of everything, while the women actually did everything. Much like the South, evangelicalism carried a double inheritance.

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Our cat is in …

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With tickets priced around $100,000 and tables starting near $350,000, the event featured 400 of the world’s most rapacious egos across entertainment, fashion, and business. All the celebs famous for being famous were there, but it was Beyonce’s opaque narcissism that stood out among the horde of image addicts parading before the cameras. As children in Gaza are reduced to skin and bones and eight million Sudanese citizens suffer displacement and death, Beyoncé wore a sculptural Olivier Rousteing gown featuring a nude, crystal-embellished bodice and a wearable diamond skeleton mapping her entire body in jewels.

The symbolism was unmistakable. Her jeweled skeleton was not decoration, it was revelation. She wasn’t wearing a dress, but an ideology — the conviction that unimaginable wealth, excess, and self-glorification are virtues, even while the rest of the world starves, bleeds, and burns.

Why do we worship these people? There is nothing admirable about a class so obscenely wealthy, so insulated from consequence, and so intoxicated by their own importance that they can hoard, consume, and indulge without limit while the rest of us scrape to find the faith to ask for daily bread. Beyoncé and Jeff Bezos, Katy Perry and Kim Kardashian—they are not cultural royalty. They are participants in, and beneficiaries of, a system that drains labor, devours resources, and turns a blind eye to human suffering.

It’s why calling them “the elite” or “A-listers” is problematic.

In reality, they are the Vampire Class — people whose wealth depends on siphoning life from others while remaining permanently insulated from the consequences. They feast on labor they never performed, amass fortunes no human being could spend in twenty lifetimes, and hover safely above the poverty, instability, and suffering their industries and brands create. Like vampires, they survive through extraction: draining workers, communities, ecosystems, attention, news cycles, and entire nations to sustain their endless appetite for more.

But this is not a new phenomenon, and it is not even uniquely modern. It is part of an older human memory, a recurring archetype that shows up whenever power becomes predatory and life is reorganized around consumption. Every age has had its name for it: in myth, in religion, in folklore, and in the warnings of poets who recognized what happens when the human world forgets its limits.

Enter Irish philosopher John Moriarty, stage left.

Born in 1938, Moriarty spent his life asking a question most modern cultures cannot tolerate: “Ask of your society, does it nourish me or vampire me?” His answer was increasingly clear. A civilization that reduces the living world to resources, and the human person to a product, does not sustain life, it feeds on it.

Long before the rise of today’s billionaire class, John Moriarty saw the outlines of a civilization that survives by sucking life upward — feeding on the bodies, labor, and inner vitality of ordinary people to preserve the glittering immunity of those at the top. What we are now witnessing at the highest levels of wealth is not an anomaly, but the logical endpoint of a system that has forgotten how to be human.

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Christianity Today recently published “We Need the Doctrine of Hell,” suggesting that it is the harshness of hell that exposes the full extent of human depravity and the magnitude of Christ’s redemptive work on the cross. It was typical evangelical theology, turning spirituality into a coercive tool of control rather than a transformational Way to walk.

Growing up evangelical meant living beneath a giant spiritual scoreboard run by an abusive father. My faith was fear itself. Every action measured and every misstep recorded. The whole world was a battlefield, with eternity at stake. Sexual purity, quiet time, and church attendance were religious litmus tests. The more tightly I suppressed my true self, concealed my vulnerability, or projected them onto others, the closer I was to God. Behavior modification was the way, and forced conformity was the evidence I was going in the right direction. I now recognize this as moralistic compliance, or sin management. In evangelicalism, I was never a hereditary child of God, but rather a problem to the fixed before it was too damn late.

It’s a familiar logic within external Christianity, where spiritual life is framed less as inner awakening and more as threats and rewards. Sociologist Christian Smith describes this dynamic as a form of “moralistic therapeutic deism,” where faith becomes less about encounter with the divine and more about being a good, well-behaved person. Every spiritual tradition eventually faces a choice: whether it is managing people or forming souls, whether faith is an external system of beliefs or an inner path of transformation. When the balance tips toward the former, the central question quietly shifts from Who am I becoming? to What am I doing, and who is watching?

The result is a subtle but powerful inversion of what Jesus originally taught. Instead of behavior growing naturally out of an inner life, behavior becomes the main focus.

But, there is another way. In the words of Deng Ming-Dao:

“There is no curse on humanity. There is no original sin. There is no bad karma from previous transgressions. There is no spiritual wisdom forbidden to people. The true spiritual downfall of humanity occurs only when people ignorantly and willfully close themselves to spiritual wisdom.”

And what is this ancient, spiritual wisdom? Our path is inward, not outward. Or as Aldous Huxley wrote, “Morality is not enough.”

The heart of spirituality, shared across traditions, is the move inward. Instead of purifying our outward activity, we gradually awaken inner consciousness. Instead of placating an angry, external deity, we directly experience God in our innermost being. Instead of this fixation on future rewards and punishments, we are transformed in the present moment.

All great spiritual traditions recognize salvation as an inner unfolding rather than an outward expression. “For our spirituality to be authentic, we must experience things from the inside out instead of just the outside in, writes Father Richard Rohr. Or, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “The only journey is the one within.”

Last night, I began a work by Richard Smoley that pushes back against the punitive theology embedded in the wider evangelical imagination.

In his book Inner Christianity, Smoley notes that this outer, exoteric form of religion is only one layer of our tradition, and a pretty anemic one at that. The exoteric is public, behavioral, and institutional. It organizes belief, enforces doctrine, and draws boundaries of exclusion, orienting the self toward future outcomes rather than present transformation. But beneath this outer, imperial shell of Christianity is a more ancient and authentic version of our religious inheritance.

From its earliest centuries, Christianity has held more than one depth of expression or spiritual path. Alongside its public worship, creeds, and moral teachings, there existed an inward, contemplative stream focused on inner awakening and individual transformation. Early communities such as the Alexandrian theologians, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Syriac poets and mystics, and later monastic and apophatic traditions understood faith as a gradual healing and illumination of the soul. These traditions assumed that Christian truth unfolds in stages—offered publicly in symbol and sacrament, and more deeply through prayer, contemplation, and lived reality. Far from being marginal, this inward path was woven into the heart of the Christian tradition, shaping its understanding of salvation as a change in being, not a change in eternal destination.

In this inner tradition, the symbols of Christianity are not merely historical claims to believe in, but living realities to embody. The Fall is not just something that happened long ago, but a description of the human condition here and now. Redemption is not rescue from future punishment, but the gradual reintegration of the self. Smoley even argues that where exoteric Christianity sees time as a linear drama—from sin to judgment—the esoteric collapses that timeline into the present moment, where transformation is always available now.

I’m sure my evangelical friends will think this emphasis on inward awakening is New Age mumbo jumbo, but in truth, it stands at the center of Jesus’ teachings. Again and again, Jesus locates the kingdom not in external conformity or future reward, but in interior renewal. “The kingdom of God is within you,” he says in Luke, redirecting spiritual attention from outward observance to inner realization.

This same trajectory appears more plainly in Jesus’ earliest recorded sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas. Here, Jesus insists that what saves is the unveiling of the inner life, not outward religious performance. He tells his disciples:

“The kingdom is within you and it is outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are that poverty."

Later on in Thomas 89 he proclaims, “Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Do you not understand the inside?” Want more from the very mouth of Jesus? What follows is another summons to the inner labor that spiritual awakening requires. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

The spiritual danger Jesus names here is not moral failure or doctrinal error, but inner repression—refusing the work of self‑knowledge, healing, and awakening.

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Hyper-connectivity doesn’t help. Our phones deliver the most horrific human suffering at scale every single morning. We are not equipped, or evolved enough to consume this much evil. My social media feed is rife with Israeli genocide, Epstein injustice, Christian Nationalism, MAGA madness, and the war in Iran. As an empath, the boundary between my life and the lives of all who are suffering is illusory. I don’t simply understand their pain, I feel it. Each news cycle is a bullet to the chest.

Enlightenment is a double-edged sword. Yes, you feel more, know more, and care more, but at the risk of collapse.

Empathy, in its rawest form, is to feel what others feel—to mirror their pain inside yourself. It is immediate, visceral, and sometimes uncontrollable. When I watch human suffering, even from afar, my heart bursts. But, when we witness more than we can absorb, the body often turns that unresolved energy into rage. The body cannot accept what the mind cannot condone.

Saturday morning, my wife and I drove up to Denver to watch our son race in his track meet. Somewhere north of Castle Pines, she innocently asked me about Israel’s latest attack on Lebanon. Without warning, I lost it. Grief, anger, and hopelessness exploded from my soul, and neither one of us was ready for it.

Jennifer rightfully doesn’t enjoy these expletive-laden outbursts. She can’t comprehend my rage at the people and systems that cause so much harm. It’s even hard for me to explain. However, I’m coming to understand that anger in the face of so much evil isn’t a sin, it’s a moral alarm. But there is a threshold, and crossing it carries a cost.

When rage is sustained without hopeful interruption, it distorts the very empathy that birthed it. In feeling more than you can handle, vision narrows, compassion shrinks, and the people causing harm become caricatures instead of human beings. When this happens, my world suddenly looks just like their world—neatly divided between ultimate evil over there and ultimate good right here. My reductionism comes at a price. What began as moral injury is now a hatred of the haters.

At the risk of offending some of you, I need to be honest about something. I absolutely, to the core of my being, despise Donald Trump and his evangelical supporters. I really, really do. No matter what he does, how many kids he raped, how many lies he tells, or how many times he blasphemes the Holy Spirit, they keep lapping up his vomit.

The animosity I feel toward Trump and his followers is my greatest fear and deepest confession.

My sustained rage at this malignant man is malforming me into his image. I am becoming what I abhor. “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster...for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you, warns Frederick Nietzsche.

I’ve felt this daily temptation since Donald Trump took office in 2016. Ten years of acrimony at every new low, every new lie, every bloody grift, and every stupidity rationalized. Since Trump became President, rage has been my constant companion. But, I can’t do this anymore.

Sitting with so much suffering without the tools to transform it will break you. The ancient Taoists understood this truth completely. The following story comes down to us from their venerable past.

A long time ago, a Taoist sage was revered among his people for his sense of righteousness. He advised the emperor not to wage a war of aggression against their neighboring state, but the emperor listened to his bloodthirsty warriors instead. In retribution for the righteous sage’s unpopular position, the emperor banished him into exile. The sage watched the kingdom fall into ruins at the hands of this craven ruler. Even from afar, he appealed for peace, but the emperor rejected his petitions again and again. After some time, he could stand it no longer. He wrote a long and passionate poem. Then he drowned himself in a river.

The moral of the story? If all you do is take in the world’s pain without the tools to transform it, evil will eat you alive.

So, what is the antidote? In this time of monsters, how do you resist evil without allowing evil to colonize your soul? In the words of Pema Chodron, “The problem isn’t what others do, it’s how we react internally.”

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On Tuesday, Donald Trump posted this genocidal statement on Truth Social:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again. I don’t want that ‌to ⁠happen, but it probably will.”

His demented announcement wasn’t a warning or lament, it was framed as a routine inevitability. Mass human slaughter pronounced with a shrug, without a hint of accountability. 90 million image bearers threatened with extinction, and the world barely blinked. It was just another Tuesday in Donald Trump’s America.

Two days later, Melania Trump stood before the nation and denied well-documented facts about her known association, friendship, and sexual relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Unlike her narcissistic husband, her performance was calm, assured, and familiar to anyone who has experienced emotional manipulation. She didn’t scream or threaten. Instead, she took to the podium in broken English and delivered an undisturbed, unwavering negation of reality, speaking with the confidence of someone who knows the Machiavellian power of a lie told boldly, dispassionately, and often enough. What made her statement horrifying wasn’t the content of her lies, but the manner of her delivery: the composed posture, the placid tone, the confident repudiation of known facts without a hint of shame.

Melania’s press conference was a disciplined performance in deception. Placid, authoritative falsehoods force the listener into an impossible position: either trust your gut or submit to a confidently asserted counter‑reality. Over time, that tension does not break the speaker; it erodes the listener. The effect? Induced disorientation and learned helplessness.

Taken together, these two moments are symptomatic of our national insanity, forming a closed psychological circuit of abuse. When an abusive narcissistic figure is paired with a denying, image-preserving partner, the dynamic does not remain private, especially when they are the President and First Lady. When projected onto the national stage, it produces a culture of gaslighting, loyalty tests, spectacle, and the punishment of truth-tellers.

Donald screams, lashes out, and openly invokes chaos—threatening violence, retribution, or destruction. Melania stands calmly beside that volatility, denying reality with a serene, straight face. Unlike Trump’s erratic identity, Melania’s public persona is more of a “mute queen.” Her lack of public advocacy about anything other than “Be Best” in the face of her husbands brutality represents a willed and complicit passivity. Between the two, rage and composure alternate, replying to each other in a psychological roller coaster designed with intended effect on the American people. Our nervous systems jerked between fear and doubt, fight‑or‑flight, and forced calm. One voice heightens the terror; the other insists everything is just fine.

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And they brought him to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull). And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. And they crucified him and divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take. And it was the third hour when they crucified him. And the inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.” And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” So also the chief priests with the scribes mocked him to one another, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also reviled him.

And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.” And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

Even though the Romans did not invent crucifixion, they certainly perfected it. Reserved for a special class of traitorous criminals, the cross was even more gruesome than being fed to the lions. This form of capital punishment was so heinous, it was frowned upon to even mention it in public. But public it was, and for very good reason. Crucifixion was imperial propaganda, designed to deter future rebels from resisting the way of the empire.

Victims were typically stripped of their clothing, paraded through the streets, and led to a high place outside the city gates where their naked bodies hung for all the world to see. Worse, most victims were crucified low enough to the ground that upon death, wild dogs and carrion birds would devour their bodies, leaving no remains for burial. In all of human history, only one crucified body has ever been found, pointing to Rome’s intended effect: “Here is a nobody, who has come to nothing, and is now nowhere.”

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In today’s Holy Heretics podcast episode, I’m joined by the renown Dr. Matthew Fox, one of the most provocative and influential theologians of the last half‑century. A former Dominican priest and the author of Original Blessing, Fox is best known as the founder of Creation Spirituality, a spiritual and theological framework that challenges Western Christianity’s deep fixation on sin, guilt, and separation. Instead of starting the human story with the Fall, Fox roots the world in wonder, creativity, goodness, justice, and our sacred connection to the cosmos.

Fox first gained international attention in the 1980s through Original Blessing, a book that directly confronts the doctrine of original sin, arguing that it distorted both Christianity and Western culture. Fox’s work brought him international acclaim—and serious institutional resistance. In the 1980s, his theology came under formal investigation by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and later Pope Benedict XVI. Fox was eventually censured and silenced by the Catholic Church, barred from teaching for a year, and later expelled from the Dominican Order after refusing to abandon his core theological convictions. One could argue that Fox’s willingness to challenge orthodoxy should make him the patron saint of the deconstruction community.

Drawing from medieval Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen, as well as Judaism, Buddhism, Indigenous wisdom traditions, and modern science, Fox proposes a radically different starting point for spirituality, and the whole of creation: that the universe is fundamentally good, and that human beings are born in blessing, not in brokenness.

In this conversation, we explore the core ideas of Creation Spirituality, including:

• Original Blessing vs. Original Sin — how a theology of blessing reshapes our understanding of God, humanity, and the natural world

• The Four Paths of Creation Spirituality — awe, compassion, creativity, and justice as spiritual practice

• The recovery of the Divine Feminine — and why the suppression of feminine images of God has had catastrophic consequences for both religion and society

From there, the conversation turns to the present moment.

Drawing on Creation Spirituality and the Christian mystical tradition, Fox brings his theological scalpel to contemporary culture and politics, offering a sharp critique of the MAGA movement as Antichrist. His most recent book, Trump & the MAGA Movement as Anti‑Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election, engages the biblical and mystical archetype of the Antichrist—not as a literal end‑times figure, but as a spiritual symbol for whatever stands in opposition to the teachings and spirit of Jesus. Fox argues that authoritarianism, the rejection of truth, contempt for compassion, and the sacralization of power reveal Antichrist dynamics at work in our contemporary moment.

This episode is bold, intelligent, and paradigm changing. At its heart is a question that feels especially urgent right now: What kind of spirituality do we need to survive—and transform—the crises of our time?

If you’re ready to rethink sin, reclaim sacred connectivity, and hear theology speak unapologetically into our current cultural moment, this conversation is for you.

Listen now by becoming a paid subscriber.

Gary Alan

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The same dogma drives Zionist Israel.

MAGA America and Netanyahu’s Israel are mirrors unto themselves, each outdoing the other in a game of domination and death. Both are driven by a worldview that divides humanity into pure and impure, chosen and intruder. The message is clear: our lives matter, their lives are expendable.

If words really do create worlds as Abraham Joshua Heschel once remarked, America and Israel are creating hell on earth for everyone else. War in Iran, genocide in Gaza, concentration camps in Florida, kids in cages, schoolgirls bombed, Muslims banned, and “shithole” countries to be annihilated. Trump and Netanyahu did not invent human division, but they have perfected it into governing principles, a moral compass, and political identities.

When Donald Trump describes immigrants as “rapists,” “animals,” or carriers of “bad genes,” he’s not merely insulting a community. He is reinforcing the story that humanity comes in categories — the safe and the dangerous, the pure and the contaminated, real Americans and infiltrators. When Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant says, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he’s not being hyperbolic, he’s being consistent. This is the language of separation. It is the vocabulary of life-deniers who believe humanity’s original identity lies in difference. In both MAGA American and Zionist Israel, the stranger is a predator to be annihilated.

In this world, the greatest sin isn’t injustice, inequality, or deviance, it is the existence of people who are not like them. Do you want to know why white evangelicals are silent about Trump’s pedophilia? Because protecting white power is more important than protecting innocent children.

Just days ago, J.D. Vance stood on stage and proudly claimed that America’s allies were “suffering more than we are,” as if human agony were a scoreboard and we were, of course, winning. In that simple statement, Vance clarified the entire MAGA worldview: human beings are not connected, the world is not reciprocal, our pain matters and theirs does not. It was indifference distilled to its essence. But, like all things MAGA, it is a lie. And, it’s not even original. This ideology is as old as Cain, who looked at his brother’s blood in the soil and asked the most dishonest question in Scripture: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

That question is the genesis of every ideology of separation. It is the refusal to see the other as kin and the denial that my life is bound up in yours. It is the myth that I can secure my flourishing apart from your flourishing.

In a perfect twist of fate — or perhaps it was the universe calling bullshit on Eyeliner Earl— minutes after Vance’s comment, I sat down with theologian Matthew Fox to talk about the deeper truth of existence. On a podcast episode I will release later this month, Fox shared what has become his foundational theology: all beings are interconnected, reciprocity is the fabric of reality, and nothing in this world exists alone. Amen to that.

Matthew Fox comes from an entirely different worldview than these dominators and death-dealers, one that begins not in fear or scarcity, but in the deep memory of our shared lineage. For decades, Fox has insisted that the universe is woven together, not torn apart. In his book Original Blessing, he argues that our first truth is not separation or sin but connection. Every creature emerged from the same sacred source and every life is threaded into every other. In short, every sentient being is both Sacred and inseparable.

This is the Creation-centered spirituality.

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