The hosts of the Romans have surrounded Jerusalem
but they bide their time while in the holy city’s streets,
rival factions reach for each other’s throats. 
Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai watches,
powerless as Jeremiah,
as the bands of zealots bleed each other dry.
Once, by the waters of Babylon, an exiled people sang:
If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its skill. 
If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my tongue cling
to the roof of my mouth.
Now, sheltered within her gates,
they deface her.

The people are already hungry
when the factions set fire
to each other’s food stores.
Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai calls
his disciples together.
It is better to go to a house in mourning,
he tells his disciples, than to go to a house where they feast.
So they lay him in a coffin, lift it up on their shoulders,
carry it out past the rebels
who bar the way against escape.

And so it is
that Yohanan leaves the embrace of Zion’s hills
in a box as dark as the womb.
And as he leaves,
he prays for the holy city.

That it never again
see such strife.
That it never again
be used as a pawn
in some self-styled savior’s
game.
That its gaze be turned away forever
from the vanity
and iniquity
and ignorance
of men.

His cry ascends
from the pit of a feigned death
and the last rabbi ever to teach on the temple’s steps
is granted a single
miracle:
God bends the arc of time.
In the heat of the fire,
as the three walls of the temple burn,
the Lord forges a future where the fourth burns also.

Roman generals order the stones of each building
to be scattered, the earth sewn with salt.
No strangers settle there, no flocks lie down
to pasture: the ruins of Jerusalem are home only
to wild beasts: scavengers in a desert.
Pilgrims come only to tremble in fearful awe
at the valley of unmarked graves.
Muhammad’s night ride
is from a heap of ash.
Would-be Crusaders bash
each other’s heads in
at home, because
there is nothing
called Jerusalem
to conquer.

No Jerusalem to inspire.
No Jerusalem to divide.

In a quiet cemetery in Tiberias,
Yohanan ben Zakkai
rests
in peace.

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Originally published in Phoenix Song

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My ancestors prayed for 
our country’s leaders 
to the tune of the 94th 
Psalm: O Lord God, 
to whom vengeance belongeth, 
Oh God, to whom vengeance belongeth,
shew thyself. 

They’d been driven 
from home after home: 
made refugee again 
and again, marked 
with broken glass 
and hot tar. So they 
prayed, like anyone 
who searches the sky
after being shoved down  
they prayed: Lift up 
thyself, thou judge 
of the earth: render 
a reward to the 
proud. 

They’d seen militias 
join mobs. They’d read
the orders written in 
the governor’s hand, 
words of violence given
weight of law. And they 
prayed: Lord, how long 
shall the wicked, how long
shall the wicked triumph?

Out of the ashes, 
they’d built a city.
They called it “beautiful.” 
They built a temple
in that place—
and when they 
were driven 
out again, 
just after 
they’d walked 
around the last 
turn of the bend, 
the very people
who’d driven them
away asked if they
could use its empty 
halls to hold a party
to celebrate the Fourth
of July. And as my ancestors 
walked away across the wilderness
they prayed, oh how they must have
prayed: How long shall they utter 
and speak hard things? 
and all the workers of iniquity 
boast themselves? 

They break in pieces 
thy people, O Lord,
and afflict thine heritage. 

They slay the widow 
and the stranger
and murder
the fatherless. 

My ancestors 
may not have seen
justice. But they 
longed for it.
In a numb world, 
they hungered and
thirsted.  

And now, once again, 
I am teaching my children
to pray like our ancestors.  
O Lord God, to whom vengeance 
belongeth, Oh God, to whom 
vengeance belongeth,
shew thyself. 

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Originally published in Phoenix Song

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I had a great time at the Wayfare summer festival talking about using imagination as a tool in scripture study. I’m excited to build off the ideas from that session and my Maxwell Institute lecture in my workshop on spiritual imagination at Restore in a month. Hope to see some of you there! If you want to come, you can use JAMES as a discount code when you register.

REGISTER FOR RESTORE

You can see the full slate here:

Faith Matters

Announcing our speakers and topics for Restore:Connect!

Friends, we are so pleased to share the speakers and sessions for Restore:Connect, happening September 24-26 in Orem, Utah…

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15 days ago · 7 likes

“He leadeth me beside the still waters…” -Psalm 23

As the bread and water come around, 
I look out over our flock and count 
the babies and toddlers in grown 
men’s arms. There are so many, 
anymore, and I thank the Lord 
of this supper that we live 
in days when fathers know
how it feels to suffer 
the children. 

The bread and water come— 
and I think of Jesus while 
a boy drives a toy truck 
across his father’s
shoulder, over the back 
of his neck, up to his ear. 
I think of Jesus while another
man rocks his infant daughter
to sleep, her drool soaking
into the fabric of his Sunday
shirt. I know, of course, that 
children are sinless, not 
perfect. I know they will 
wander: under benches, 
up and down the chapel aisles, 
through the rest of their 
lives. Through the rest 
of their wild lives all 
through this wide, 
bewildering world. 
I know. I could 
bear testimony
of just how
deeply I 
know. 
 
But I am watching
grown men, good and
and worn men with arms 
around their children.
And I think of Jesus
while I watch Brother
Shepherd, who works 
weeks at a time 
at a chemical plant half a world away 
and see the way his eight-year-old boy, 
adopted a year ago from 
an orphanage there
looks up at him like 
no one else on this earth
could make him feel safer
or more loved. 

We take the bread. 
We take the water. 
Fathers take the tiny 
cups and they run over 
onto their babies’ and
toddlers’ chins. Brother 
Shepherd holds out the tray 
for his son and all is still 
for just a moment. And I 
am remembering
Jesus. 

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Originally published in Phoenix Song

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In God’s great mercy, 
though my time as a
gospel doctrine teacher
had come to an end in
Exodus, I was given the
chance to substitute
on the week the class 
covered Psalms. 

The manual says to focus on
gratitude, read a few verses  
about Jesus: sticking to safe,
familiar phrases—like sheet 
music that floats an octave’s 
worth of melody over a few 
chords, even though a whole 
piano of possibilities is waiting. 

But I know my students. Know that
in the rough wash of years, gratitude 
alone is not enough. So we read indignation
alongside exultation, rejoicing but also
remorse. We read loneliness and longing. 
How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? forever? 
before I will sing praises unto my God
while I have any being.

Sometimes we treat the scriptures 
as only an instruction manual, I 
tell them—but they are so much 
more. If we get them into our 
hearts and minds and mouths, 
the scriptures are a language
and whether we want to sing or 
scream or cry, they can give us
a way to reach out 
to a living
God. 

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Originally published in Phoenix Song

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Take a look at the contest finalists here.

Creative Reading

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one (Deut 6:4)
-What are three different ways we could read this line?

Wheat and Tares: Meant to refer to people. Also maps onto ideas.

Good Samaritan: Traveler, Thieves, Priest and Levite, Samaritan, Innkeeper, Road
Didactic, allegorical, comparative readings

Pardes Method:
Surface, Suggestions, Comparative, Mystical
(Plant, Roots, Root Network, Fruit)

Creative reading exercise: 2 Ne 4: 20-21
20 My God hath been my support; he hath led me through mine afflictions in the wilderness; and he hath preserved me upon the waters of the great deep.
21 He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh.
-What are different ways we can read verse 21? What experiences can it map onto?

Creative Writing

Raat yun dil mein
by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, trans. Agha Shahid Ali

Last night, my lost memory of you returned

and I was like the empty field where springtime,
without being noticed, is bringing flowers;

I was like the desert over which
the breeze moves gently, with great care;

I was like the dying patient
who, for no reason, smiles.

In this poem, Faiz approaches the experience of returning memory three times. Take the starting line. Find three other routes of approach: what images or lines could map onto the experience of a returned sense of connection to God, love, or hope for you?

It’s true ties of tribe can bind tight
and a serf knows a certain stability.
Ink swirls and it spills. Here we’re all stained
in pursuit of a common civility.

But that guilt
is a price well worth paying
for our faith
that each person has rights. I will own
all the shadow and darkness revealed
when we hold ourselves up to the light.

And the inkwell is hardly exhausted.
Maybe stale, but it hasn’t run dry.
So scrawl out the promise, in toil
and soul—there are truths we refuse
to deny.

While looking at the recent Association for Mormon Letters videos, I also noticed that my 2021 Presidential Address, given from my basement, is the most popular video on the channel. That time, I was in charge of the camera and there was no one to talk to but I managed to do a pretty good reading of my own speech anyway:

Finally, for those of you who missed them, here are the links to the panel on my work and to the interview with Mel that started this thing. If that last one looks too long for you, don’t worry. Cece will pull out some highlights.

Nobody sent me a leg lamp or anything, but this month I have found myself as the recipient of three writing related awards. Carry On was recognized by the Mormon History Association as last year’s Best Book, my early work on the God of the Arc manuscript won a Development Grant from the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, and the Association for Mormon Letters recognized my work with the Smith-Pettit Award, which recognizes a significant author in the middle of their career.

That last one did come with two YouTube videos, released this morning:

A Panel of Scholars: To mark the occasion, Katherine Cowley led a panel of scholars with Edward Whitely, Rafael Vázquez, and Christopher Jones in reflecting on my work. They are smart and interesting people and I really appreciate what they have to say.

An Interview with Melissa Leilani Larson: Mel is a playwright and screenwriter whose works are funny and heartbreaking and thought-provoking. She and I have have been friends for the past twenty years and we’ve had plenty of talks about the ups and downs of the writing life together. Now that I have joined her in the Smith-Pettit Award club, we got together over Zoom for some reflections. We start out with some ideas about Mormon literature in general before moving on to a discussion of my background and writing career. Come for the hot takes; stay for the deep cuts.

If you would like even more literature in your life, keep an eye on the rest of today’s release on the Association for Mormon Letters YouTube channel. There’s an interview with Angela Hallstrom coming up in the afternoon, and a panel on the 50-year history of the Association for Mormon Letters that I participated on.

Context: Brazil’s Best-Known Temple Caravan

The city of Manaus is located deep in Brazil’s interior at the convergence of the Negro and Solimões rivers, which join to become the Amazon. The waters of the Negro are darker, slower, and warmer than those of the sandy Solimões: for six kilometers after they converge, their waters flow alongside each other without visibly mixing, creating a striking iconic image for Brazil’s most remote state capital.

Though the first Latter-day Saint branch in Brazil was organized in 1930, the Church’s roots in the country, and the country’s first temple, were in the south. Since Brazil is larger than the lower 48 United States, Saints far to the northwest in Manaus in the early 1990s still felt like pioneers keeping the faith in relative isolation.

To strengthen themselves, the city’s Saints resolved in 1992 to make their first journey to the temple together. The trip was 3,000 kilometers: first three days’ travel by boat upriver, then three days’ bus journey over rural roads so rough that at one point their bus’s windshield rattled clear off.

The story of the Manaus Saints’ temple caravan remains well- known in Brazil and increasingly well-known throughout the Church. Over time, closer temples reduced the burden of travel. A temple was dedicated in Manaus in 2012.

TRIOLET FOR THE CARAVAN FROM MANAUS

The path to God has at least one beginning

where dark and sandy waters meet.

Where light meets dark and grace meets sinning,

the path to God has at least one beginning.

Sail up to the heavens, where stars are spinning:

take a taste of eternity. Savor the sweet.

The path to God has at least one beginning

where dark and sandy waters meet.

Bookshop.org

Amazon

We’re excited about the works on this year’s long list and excited to share the finalists with you.

See the long list

It is not easy to keep a publication going for fifteen years. Some of the flash fiction venues that inspired us back in 2012 are closed now. Thanks to everyone whose interest, support, and volunteer efforts have helped carry us this far. We look forward to the next 15 years.

Eating the fruit
from Lehi’s dream
the very marrow in my bones
fills up with light.

You can’t imagine
all the maladies
a little love in the bones
can shield you from.

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Originally published in Phoenix Song

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We’ve come a long way in Latter-day Saint visual culture in the few years since then. Deseret Book’s Expressions of Jesus is a good showcase of how diverse depictions of Jesus Christ can complement some of the paintings that dominated Latter-day Saint imagination in the late 20th century and traditional masterworks from the European tradition. I’ve also appreciated the way groups like Meetinghouse Mosaic have taken concrete steps to encourage and share this kind of artistic work. We still have plenty of room to grow, but I wanted to share this essay again with a reminder that times do change and small steps can make a big cumulative difference.

Here’s the piece:

—

Why I Hate White Jesus

I tried to pay attention during General Conference in October. I’d just switched jobs and I was thinking about my life’s path, wondering where I might fit into this great song of a world—and I could’ve used one of those experiences people talk about where a word or phrase jumps out to you and for an instant you feel as if a speaker were inspired specifically for your sake. I couldn’t do it, though. Barely heard half the words at all because of the way my body tensed and my concentration scattered almost every time they put a painting of Jesus up on the screen. I swear they’re doing that more and more lately. Swear they’re trying harder to hold our attention with image after image, all too often of a softly lit Jesus with white skin and light brown shampoo commercial hair and impossibly clean clothes.

I hate him. I hate white Jesus.

I didn’t always. I used to be able to look at those paintings more or less unmoved and shrug white Jesus away. But I couldn’t this October. Couldn’t separate medium from message, couldn’t intellectualize, couldn’t forgive people for depicting the divine without examining their assumptions. And so I sat in my hate, stewed in my hate, stayed stuck in my hate long after the weekend was done.

I have wallowed in my hate now, turning it over in my gut and in the back of my mind, and I am beginning to suspect that the only way out (if there is such a thing) is going to be through. I will not be offended if you turn back now. But if you’d like to wade with me, I plan to count and catalogue and measure my hate on the off chance there is something worth finding on the other side.

#

I have skin in this game.

I am an heir of my grandfathers’ Semitic and Sikh features: deep-set eyes, a signature nose, a cast of melanin in the cells that makes my complexion olive and my hair black. My grandmothers’ ancestry stretches back through ships like the Mayflower to the northwestern European peoples who called themselves white after reaching America, but four centuries later I still get compliments on how well I speak English.

I have skin in this game. And in America, the rules of the game are still so tied up with one’s skin. Not officially. Officially we are all to be treated equally. Officially this is a land of opportunity, where your contributions to the future matter more than whatever connotations of the past may be carved into your phenotype. But however strongly most Americans embrace that ideal, the reality remains that our perceptions frame our actions and those perceptions are deeply inflected by race.

Sorry. I’m slipping into theory. I’m using long Latin-based words to push my thoughts safely up out of my chest and into my brain. I’m just trying to explain what my life feels like.

Let me try again. Think of a movie. In a movie, you’re not watching every event that happens in the story. Like: if someone’s making breakfast, you don’t have to watch them cook in real time. Instead, at any given time, you’re only watching one shot. Maybe a tired face. Then hands breaking an egg into a pan. Then a person sitting down at the table with an omelet. Your mind fills in the rest.

In the process, your mind also adds meaning to each moment. Imagine a shot that is just an actor’s face, looking blank and expressionless. How is that possibly interesting? Film works, as some brilliant Soviet directors in the 1920s realized, because we see everything through the lens of our memories. Insert the shot of the actor’s blank face into a comedy and it can become a hilarious deadpan reaction. But put it in a drama, put a piece of tragic news right before that very same shot and the blank, expressionless face will feel stunned and overwhelmed. When you’re watching the movie, though—and this is the vital point—it doesn’t feel like you’re cobbling the pieces together detective-style to make meaning. It feels like the face itself is deadpan. Or like the face itself is stunned. Our minds at once do us the favor and play the trick of merging associations and experience together instantly.

We all live, every day, in the middle of other people’s movies. Living in America as a person not perceived as white is difficult because every shot of you is framed by the most emotionally powerful associations people have with bodies like yours. Strangers. Foreigners. Criminals. Rapists. Terrorists. They don’t typically think about that. You probably don’t think about it in the moment either. But it’s there, always, just like the great Soviet directors of the 1920s said it would be.

#

I don’t know how much people’s responses to me are based the color of my skin versus the content of my character. The content of my character is, admittedly, potentially a pain all by itself. I can be open, direct, and passionate in ways that may be discomfiting. I am strong-willed well past the point where that virtue veers off into fault. If I find, as I regularly do, that people perceive me as a threat it is entirely explicable if my brashness is to blame.

But I can’t close race out of the picture, because I’ve been treated as a threat in circumstances where my personality wasn’t involved at all. People didn’t call the police on me the time I was picking up discarded roof shingles from a family friend’s yard because I was brash. They did it because I’m brown. They did it because in their movie, men with my face are bad, scary guys. With that context, any unexplained scene with me is also potentially scary. That’s been true, in my not-so-limited experience with police, whether I was shooting hoops on my own at a park in the summer or walking down the street or, heaven forbid, dropping off a car at the elementary school where my mom worked and walking away.

I don’t mean any specific disrespect for the police who have stopped and questioned and waited around to watch me. As often as not, police have acted because someone called them. And I can guess why people have called them because I know what people have called me. It’s not just the middle school bully who passed out racial slurs like candy. Sometimes it’s the middle school friend’s sister, who told their mom I was a scary drug dealer and got me banned from a house I had never set foot in. Sometimes it’s the well-meaning members of wards where I’m new who ask me for what they assume will be a dramatic and exotic conversion story. One pulse-quickening time it was the missionaries walking back from the Provo temple toward the MTC who saw me passing by and shouted “Hey Osama!” from across the street while I hurried away.

It’s not just police. The same associations that have led to people calling me Osama are the associations that shape their attitudes about when the force of the state should be used. The same perceptions that motivated calls to the police have shaped parents’ attitude toward whether I should be allowed to come over and hang out with their son or how they felt about me hanging around their daughter.

We all live in other people’s movies. Images matter. Associations matter. People are wired by the raw montage of a culture to code assumed meaning onto bodies at a glance. To code certain human bodies as familiar, safe, trustworthy and other human bodies as foreign, dangerous, suspect. You don’t mean to do this, you may not want to do this, but it’s almost impossible not to. You can’t eat a diet of junk food and expect to stay thin. You can’t consume a culture full of racially charged images and expect not to become at least a little bit racist. You can’t expect to fill a nation with 24/7 fear of radical Islamic terrorists and not expect some people to murder American Sikhs.
I understand that. I understand why a person might drive by on September 15, 2001 and a shoot a turbaned gas station owner named Balbir Singh Sodhi. I understand why the soldiers in Salt Lake airport that Thanksgiving, presumably as pre-Olympic security, seemed to watch every step I took until I left the building. I know people make choices. People make choices and will be accountable for their sins. But people are also trapped in frames of reference and associations they do not control.

I understand that even as I resent it. I can observe it and intellectualize it even as I know that I will have to exist in a culture where black-haired, darker-skinned people are plotting against you and attacking your country and taking your jobs and ruining the intangible comfort of homogeneity in your neighborhoods. A world in which I never know whether a person feels like I want to take their job at work because people are naturally territorial or because that instinct is amplified when the perceived intruder codes as aggressively foreign.

When I was in high school, a team of researchers worked with a bunch of 1st century Galilean skulls in an attempt to reconstruct what the average man in Galilee from the time of Jesus looked like. They hired a forensic artistic to create a digital image of a living face, filling in details on things like hair length and skin tone from other evidence from the era and region. The Columbus Dispatch, which we faithfully skimmed in my household, shared the project with some kind of proto-clickbait title about revealing what Jesus actually looked like. My dad loved the picture. He said it looked like me.

An editorial later that week criticized the image. The writer correctly pointed out that a composite of Galilean skulls mixed with an artist’s informed speculation doesn’t give us hard evidence of what Jesus as a historical individual looked like. The writer then asked what possible, probably anti-religious motives there might be in portraying such a revered figure as Jesus as such a brutish Neanderthal.

#

I can still remember the first time I wanted to punch Jesus.

It was in the spring of 2006. I had just moved to Utah. The previous fall, while I was visiting my sister in Provo, a woman in her 70s had approached me in the canned goods aisle of Day’s Market and effused about my striking profile. I was used to my appearance catching American eyes, of course, but not quite in that way. Carma De Jong Anderson was different. She refused to let me buy the black beans in my hand until I had agreed to let her drag me to the LDS Motion Picture Studio. Once I moved to Utah, Carma also shared my contact information with every painter she knew who had done Biblical work.

I felt like I had a certain moral obligation to do modeling work for painters who called me. I hoped that by getting my Semitic-Sikh face into religious art, I might subtly move the needle of white Latter-day Saints’ subconscious associations. Practically, my meager efforts to find my way from appointment to appointment sometimes felt like spitting in the wind but maybe, just maybe, if a missionary saw my face in a temple painting, “Osama” wouldn’t be the first word that sprang to his mind when he walked out and saw me on the street. Failing that, they at least got me a beard card while I waded through the six months of education I would be getting at BYU to finish my undergrad.

One day, I got a call from a painter named Jon McNaughton. At the time, he had a small shop in the mall where he mostly sold landscapes but he liked to do scenes from scripture as well. He wanted me to model as Simon of Cyrene on what happened to be the first day of spring term classes. He would be painting out in one of those bedroom communities on the far side of Utah Lake.

I didn’t have a car at the time, and buses didn’t go to the places where people fled when they thought Provo had a problem with population density. Jon offered me a ride. I worried just a little about being trapped, but he promised he would get me back in time for my religion class. On the drive, he told me he had always wanted to learn to paint like Rembrandt and admitted that he disliked universities like BYU for valuing abstract concept over craft, abstraction over reality. He told me about the great Jesus model he had and how excited he was for this painting.

A little after we got back to Jon’s house, his Jesus model arrived. He had a Norwegian shipbuilder sort of look. The strong build Mormons borrowed sometime after the late 19th century rise of what historians call “muscular Christianity.” He almost did a double take when he saw me. For some reason, he found me instantly amusing. “Hey Jon,” he said, throwing an arm over my shoulder. “You should just do a portrait of us and call it ‘Jesus and Osama.’”

I know he didn’t know what he was saying. I know he wasn’t haunted, like I am, by the image of red blood against the blue of Balbir Singh Sodhi’s turban. I didn’t hit him. I didn’t lash out verbally because I know I need to be so careful about how I speak and how I present myself because I will be perceived so quickly as not simply annoyed, but aggressive. Threatening at a visceral, reactive level. I weighed the risks of speaking at all: would I be able to help him see something or risk running into more thoughtlessly offensive comments until I got myself into trouble?

I bit my tongue. When Jon McNaughton took us to the room where he’d set up the scene, I knelt to take up the cross. Carrying white Jesus’ burden.

#

How do you forgive people for existing within history?

It is all happening like the prophets said. People look on the outward appearance. Their mouths speak great swelling words, having men’s persons in admiration because of advantage. They despise the stranger and they grind the faces of the poor.

They trust in their flesh. They make themselves images.

How can you let all that go and treat someone as if they are clean from the sins of the generation?

#

Let me pause. Let me be clear. I don’t hate the actual, historical Jesus who walked and talked and dreamed and sweated his way around Galilee and wrestled somehow with the cosmos just before being executed in Jerusalem. I don’t hate the Jesus of the gospels, that figure translated from a mosaic of memories into the powerful stories disciples told and wrote and passed down. I need Jesus. I look to Jesus. I cling to Jesus when I feel as if I will sink and drown in the currents of a broken and racist history or the culture left in its wake.

I’m not even a full-fledged iconoclast who believes that all images of the divine fall so short as to be incompatible with worship.

I don’t mind different depictions of Jesus. The early art that showed Christ in the image of a fish or an anchor. The later art that depicted him through human metaphors: a youthful shepherd tending his flock, a prophet buried in the belly of a whale. I don’t even mind the first paintings that portrayed Christ with long hair and beard that might have been borrowed from depictions of Zeus, or the 10th century paintings of a Chinese Jesus in temples along the Silk Road, or the emaciated Florentine and Flemish and Bavarian figures in those cultures’ paintings during times when European models were all most painters had and Europeans features the only ones they knew.

I wouldn’t mind an occasional white Jesus today if he appeared in my faith alongside images of a black Jesus, a Latin-looking Jesus, perhaps even an occasional Jesus who actually looks like he comes from first-century Galilee despite an discomfort people might feel with a man who looks like Osama bin Laden.

No, I don’t expect or need the Jesus of art to always be based on the patterns of contemporary Galilean skulls or modeled on the famous Fayum portraits. I can accept depictions of Jesus taking many forms. I respect the longing to make the divine familiar. But we cross a line when we imply that the familiar is the only form of the divine.

#

When did Florentine and Flemish and Bavarian become white? The answer, ironically, has something to do with Jesus.

In the early history of the Americas, landholders justified the practice of slavery by appeal to the heathen status of kidnapped Africans. They accepted, back then, that Christians could do better than holding each other in open bondage—but made an exception for infidels.

By the time missionaries began teaching enslaved African men and women, it was far too late economically for the practice of slavery to change. The notion of whiteness began appearing in law codes instead, a new and necessary distinction between enslaved converts and the men of various European backgrounds who called themselves both Christians and masters.

The Jesus I hate is a Jesus made white and kept white long after white stopped being a skin tone and started serving as a legal status.

#

Hate is a strong word. But think of Esau. First born, preferred by the patriarch, strong and athletic. And the Bible says God hated him.

Hate is a strong word. And I need strength. Please.

I need some strength against the whiteness of the world I was born into.

#

I told you I didn’t used to hate white Jesus. I learned to hate him when I realized how much we worship him. How much we honor the impossibly clean clothes, the shampoo commercial hair, the white skin.

I hate him when I watch people bend over backwards to accommodate respectable white men while they criticize every word, action, and decision a brown person makes in this country before he or she is crucified.

Forgive them, Father, Lauryn Hill sings from my phone on repeat, for they know not what they do.

Let’s say it took sixty years 
for the first generations
to lay a foundation 
for this faith we share. 

Another sixty 
for those who came after
to raise up the walls of practice
that protect us. 

That puts us around 1950 when the builders
climbed up on the first planks of the roof, 
got a chance to look out 
and take in the view 
of a wide open world. 

Which makes it 2010, 
another sixty years later,
when the roof is in good, solid shape.
And my friends start jumping off. 

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Originally published in Let Me Drown with Moses

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Last year, I was on a panel with Esther Candari and Maddie Blonquist about religious art and AI. At one point, I wondered aloud whether human attention per square foot matters, then asked people if they’d rather go on a walk around Florence or Herriman.

For some reason, Zach Davis still decided to invite me back this time around.

The event is July 11th in Heber. During the breakout sessions, I’ll be doing an hour-long workshop entitled, “Creative Reading; Creative Writing.” There are 10 breakout sessions and the presenters list is amazing, so it’ll probably be a small group with me if you do decide to come.

Hope to see some of you there. It’s a lovely summer tradition.

RSVP here

And Moses was on the mount. With God, who dwells in eternal
burnings. And they looked down and saw the people had turned
from divine light to worship the glint of gold.

As men are wont to do.

And Moses’ wrath flared within him. So God reasoned with
Moses after the manner of a man’s mind, saying: I have seen this
people. See this stiff-necked people! So set on a course toward their
own destruction: let it only be quick and not slow. Leave me alone,
let my wrath wax hot, let it consume them as fire through a field of
tares.

For none are worthy, God reasoned in the language of a man’s
mind, except you alone. None see clearly—except you alone. None
is pure except you, none is wise except you. Let us erase everything,
all my work and my glory, and make a new nation in your likeness
and image alone.

Not so! cried Moses, his heart melting soft beneath God’s
burning gaze. Remember how they cried out to you in Egypt, bitter
in their anguish. Remember your power, unleashed by the song of
lament. Why should it be said you brought us out of that land only
to extinguish us from the earth?

Please, said Moses. For Abraham. For Isaac. For Israel. For the
memory of each step we’ve taken across the wilderness.

And Moses cried out:
Oh Lord God, hear my lament!
Grant us a season to repent.

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Originally published in A Book of Lamentations

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I am not really surprised that we’ve arrived here. Back in 2020, I did a rhetorical analysis of Donald Trump’s “Save America” speech from his January 6 rally. Part of what I find dangerous about that speech is that way it treats “saving” as part of the role of the president.

Now, I really like democracy. I’m glad we get the chance to talk about our government together, whether the subject is taxes and spending or who can end up in jail. But I think that we need to set some more realistic expectations about what politics can do.

People have a tendency to look for a savior. That just seems pretty baked into the human psyche and spirit. But no political party, philosophy, or individual leader can really satisfy that longing. New laws and programs might make life better or worse, but they’re not going to give it meaning. And they’re never going to smooth all the rough edges away.

I spent two years as a missionary living in the formerly Communist parts of Germany. In East Germany, the government spent forty-four years promising that within a generation, life would be transformed and perfected. People looked forward to the age when true communism would be achieved and talked about it very much like Christians talk about the millennium, when Christ comes again and brings world peace and the lion and the lamb are friends.

Personally, I do believe Jesus is going to come someday and the rules of the world are going to change. But I don’t think anything like that kind of change can happen because some political group--communist or fascist, progressive or nationalist--wins an election or stages a revolution. That’s just not inside the scope of what a human government can accomplish.

And guys...bad things happen when a group promises salvation-level changes and then (inevitably) fails. Communist regimes failed to solve all of society’s problems, and so they kept having to find people to blame. They were constantly looking for hidden counter-revolutionaries. By the end of the East German communist regime, the secret police had files on one out of every four East Germans.

That’s not just a communist problem. The Nazis also promised heaven on earth. They explained away the failures of Germany’s superior people by designating more and more groups as fake Germans. The violence against minorities wasn’t a random side effect. It was the excuse that kept the system going.

I don’t mean to be alarmist. I don’t want to leap straight from a bad AI meme to Hitler or Lenin. But I have talked with a lot of people who lived under Nazis and Communists. And we don’t want to go through that. In any form.

My religious response is this: If someone promises to save America, you should watch out for that person.

If you believe in Jesus, leave the saving to Jesus. He doesn’t need to scapegoat anyone to explain why life is still hard. He already took the blame. He already accepted the violence. He died hard so that we have no excuse for lashing out.

And what did he ask of us? He told us to wait.

And he said that while we’re waiting, we can find the people society looks down on and be kind to them. He said that when we serve a foreigner, a prisoner, a person who is sick or starving, we’re really serving him. The lion and the lamb might not be ready to lie down together in peace. But when we see adversaries and choose love, we can remember that hope.

I don’t need my country to be saved. I just need it to be a place where I can serve others. That’s enough. That’s always been enough.

If these walls of water fall, O Lord,
let me drown with Moses.

And let me praise you with my final breath
for lending me his mad, prophetic dream
for letting me wander out past the edge of this world
beside a man who could see all the glory of Egypt
and still say it wasn't enough.

If these walls of water fall, O Lord,
let me drown with Moses.
Yes, let me die with the same fire in my eyes
Moses saw in a desert bush.

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Originally published in Let Me Drown with Moses

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I’ve been telling my friends lately that I feel bad for ICE agents. They’ve got some difficult bosses. They’re expected to meet arbitrary quotas. Strangers look at them suspiciously when they walk down the street and tell them they’re ruining the country.

I can actually kind of relate to that last one. It’s how I felt after 9/11.

The country is definitely divided now, but I’m not sure it’s really over immigration. My sense is that we have our first social-media era Influencer President and that immigration makes convenient enforcement theater. It’s one of many ways the current administration is trying to flex and show off how tough we are.

But it’s tough to watch those efforts hit basically random people. Immigration officials are arresting people who go in to work on their required paperwork. They’re getting grandmas who raised their kids here. They’re getting kids whose parents are here legally and just haven’t worked through the process for the kids yet.

I was telling my sister I wish that I could just sign up to get arrested by ICE once a month so that they could get some numbers to report in to their superiors. I wish they could stick my picture on some report, so they could look busy without needing to pick up people who are going about their lives, taking care of their families, and often doing hard jobs that keep this country going.

I don’t think they’re taking volunteers. But my sister went with me to the proposed new ICE facility in Salt Lake City to make a short video explaining my point of view. We took some footage I'll post in a little while.

I thought this was going to be a moment for me to make something I could share. Just a little reminder for the people I know that we as a community could dream bigger and do better.

I had not expected the experience to impact me. But actually being at the place where our government is planning to keep people hit me pretty hard. It’s a big shipping facility. Right now, there are all these doors designed for semi trucks. There are black vans in the parking lot already, guarding the place. We talked to the guy in one of them. He seemed nice. He’s just a guy doing his job.

I wish he had a better job, though. There are some many good things we could have a guy do. I worry that if we as a state go through with this plan, people in power are going to feel like they have to prove that big facility is worth having. There’s going to be pressure to fill it. And there aren’t enough dangerous deportable people for that. ICE employees are going to end up arresting ordinary people, even people who are working through the immigration process. A building—a big stage—is going to make the cycle of enforcement theater worse.

That's not what I want for anybody. Not for my brothers and sisters who happen to have been born somewhere else. And not for my brothers and sisters who needed a job and found one with ICE.