Testing profile pics: This is a short post to test what image shows up in my BlueSky post.

Testing pretty pictures: This is an image I like. I’m going to post it to my blog.

Ten Years Later: Ten years ago, on the Saturday before Christmas, 2014, I woke in a state of intense fear. This was both unexpected and the culmination of of years of anxiety and frustration. While it felt like the end of my world at the time, the changes I had to make in order to recover were the end of a lot of …

God Will Not Abandon: From Lectio365 this morning: Psalm 9:9-10 NLT The LORD is a shelter for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble. Those who know your name trust in you, for you, O LORD, do not abandon those who search for you. I’m searching in a big way, and I’m trying to trust that God will not abandon me.

Myth: Listening to the story of the Magi this morning, I was prompted ponder again, how do I believe. I struggle even to explain the question: It is practical. It is not hypothetical. I am trying to determine how to approach faith and scripture in ways that are both respectful and realistic. What …

Hi neighbors—I’m testing cross-posting from micro.blog to other services I use. Feel free to say “hi”. :-)

Advent & Incarnation: Anyone who grew up in an even remotely liturgical church community has heard of Advent. The rest of us have seen Advent calendars, with tiny doors concealing tinier candies. And anyone who has seen Christmas Vacation knows Advent is when Clark Griswold spreads mayhem and puts up far too many …

Prune My Priorities: This is a phrase has been part of the week’s prayer of approach from Lectio365: Lord, as I meditate on your word and learn from your Church, teach me what it means to “pray without ceasing” ( 1Thess 5:17 ). Holy Spirit, wake me up to your constant presence and prune my priorities so I can go further …

Caste: I’m reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson because she is coming to speak at the University this fall, and I just finished the chapter, The Container We Have Built for You. Lordy, but that was a tough slog. Not because the material was too academic or hard to understand—to the contrary, Wilkerson …

Digging In Again: Good lord, do I want to do this? I imported my State of Faith and Saving My Faith documents from Ulysses into Obsidian, along with most of my State of Faith notes, with the idea that I’d like to develop that more and possibly even finish it. It’ll be different than it would have been if …

The Prayer of St Francis: A random thought about the prayer of St. Francis occurred to me a few days ago that I wanted to share. He probably didn’t actually write the prayer, but lots of good stuff is pseudepigraphic, including large parts of scripture. This is what struck me: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where …

What Do I Want?: Seriously. What do I want from God? Let me take a step back. The question of what I want arises from losing any certainty about God and faith. I know what I was taught, but my assurance that what I was taught was true was vaporized in the implosion of American Evangelicalism and its nearly unanimous …

Advent: This post isn’t ready for prime time. It’s not even half baked. It’s still fluid. I want to write about Advent because it’s coming. I want to write about Advent because it implies the incarnation, which is my all-time favorite doctrine. Incarnation is important because it is God the creator entering …

Resurrection: Death and resurrection. It’s the impossibility around which every other impossibility of the Christian faith orbits. (Rachel Held Evans: Searching for Sunday (2015), p. 38) I find the cosmological argument for the existence of God convincing—I can’t conceive of a universe without a first …

Karens: A woman driving a minivan nearly hit my daughter on her bicycle today at an intersection where the entrance to a gated community crosses the Virginia Capital Trail. Then she had the gall to honk at her. I pulled in front of her car and let her know very firmly (without profanity) that cars are …

John 3:16: For God so loved the world. Not all the white American Christians. Not all the people who loved him. Not even all the people. The World. The Cosmos. All of it. God loves creation, because it is good. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that …

Unsaying "God": David James Duncan speaks of “unsaying God”, that is, apophasis—theology defined by what God is not. God has been badly defined by so many people and so many traditions that we need to strip the baggage away from the name and treat it as we would any other—someone we are getting to know. I had much …

Curious, not Confused: I’ve been thinking about my approach to faith and how I am unsure of anything anymore, and I’m wondering how to describe it. Am I confused? I don’t think so. Confusion implies some level of discomfort, and I’m remarkably mellow about this. Perhaps my attempts to learn …

One More for the Day: This ridiculously cute little guy was at the Rochester Pride Parade in June. I sent this pic to his person because I’m a geek and I like to share. :-) Taken on my Canon RP with 24-105mm lens. Transferred wirelessly to Canon app on my phone and sent to doggo’s person’s phone via AirDrop. See, being a …

Happy Yellow Flower: I take lots of photos on my commute. Of course, my commute is along the Erie Canal. This shot was a little tricky because I was trying to get a sharp, well composed image while the wind was blowing this little flower all over the frame—this is a surprisingly common problem when shooting outside in …

More Photo Fun: I have tons of photos, and I don’t post enough of them. Here’s one more: I’m not sure if this is a dragonfly or a damselfly. At any rate, it landed on my ring while I was riding down Scottsville Road, and I tried to take a quick picture with my phone camera. I figured it would fly away if I tried to …

Experiential Problems with Faith: August 4, 2023 This one was tough. I originally wrote a pretty antiseptic description of the issue, then realized what a gut wrenching, soul sucking struggle this has been for me. My 20s were spent in a lonely search for a father figure—I learned to love my dad, but he could never be the nurturing …

Living as a Ken in a Barbie World: I am anticipating seeing the Barbie movie with a mixture of excitement and dread. It’s a Greta Gerwig film, which means it will be a sharp and funny satire of Barbie, Mattel, and our ridiculously consumerist culture. On the other hand, my name is Ken, and this is a movie about . . . Barbie. My …

Time for Reconstruction . . . Or Not: This is about my State of Faith project but not actually part of it—kind of a meta-post. I’m not entirely done with the deconstruction part, but I’ve documented the snot out of why I’m no longer even Evangelical adjacent and maybe not even Christian. I want to start writing about something …

This is a funky tree I saw growing along Irondequoit Creek on a bike ride through Ellison Park

Atonement: July 13, 2023 I’ve been working on this for ages, and I need to publish something, so here it is. I’ll likely come back to this post and refine it—it certainly isn’t in a final form, but it is a good start. Atonement I could be accused of burying the lede here, because changing my …

State of Faith (thus far): August 4, 2023 Experiential Problems with Faith This one was tough. I originally wrote a pretty antiseptic description of the issue, then realized what a gut wrenching, soul sucking struggle this has been for me. My 20s were spent in a lonely search for a father figure—I learned to love my dad, but …

Miracles: May 28, 2023 This is a tough one because we all want a God who can intervene on our behalf. I mean, what good is a God who is all powerful but can’t or won’t use that power to give us a hand? What are miracles? Are they God benevolently helping people out of a tough spot? Altering natural laws? What …

Materialism or Physicalism vs. Dualism: May 24, 2023 This gets a bit technical, so first, a few Greek words (from a non-theologian): ** Sṓma** (also sárx): the physical body, flesh. Sárx can be used of a corpse. ** Psyché**: soul, life. The life force which leaves the body at death and goes to the underworld. ** Pneúma**: spirit, …

The Problem of Evil: Updated June 3, 2023 Any discussion of the existence and nature of God must take seriously the problem of evil. If God is the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenvolent being of classical theology, then how does this perfectly good deity cause or, at minimum, tolerate the presence of evil in …

The Nature of God: May 23, 2023 Evangelicals (especially Calvinists) like to define the attributes of God, most of which can also be called perfections: Omnipotence—God is all powerful. God can do anything except that which is logically inconsistent (e.g., making a rock so heavy that they1 cannot lift it2) or …

Philosophical Problems: May 23, 2023 I’m taking a little different tack here and jumping around in my posts to topics or sections I’ve been able to get into a publishable form. Philosophy, in particular, has been difficult for me, because I have very little training in the subject. I’m trying to be as …

The Power of Metaphor: May 16, 2023 If myth is one end of the narrative spectrum, then metaphor is the other. Myths are grand, transcendent stories which help to explain why the world is as it is. Metaphors are nuggets of meaning, comparisons which carry associations and contextual significance rather than storylines. …

The Power of Myth: May 10, 2020 I’ve been reading Inspired by Rachel Held Evans, partly because it was available on my Bible study app and partly because I no longer know how to read scripture or what “inspired” even means. I enjoy her humor and frank honesty about her own struggles and misbehavior—it feels like she …

Scripture: April 11, 2023 In our next exciting installment, we’ll explore the authority of scripture and how has collapsed for me. Sort of. I still find scripture compelling, and I’m trying to understand how to read it appropriately. Scripture In Reformed Christianity, Scripture is the single most important …

Response to Facebook flame war: Memo to everyone who has been behaving badly on my feed: I recently was told that people were shouting at each other on my feed. I spend very little time on social media, particularly Facebook, because it has become a cesspool, and I was oblivious until someone apologized for blowing up my …

Beginning Reconstruction: ##March 31, 2023 Now that I’ve deconstructed or unravelled my faith, where do I go? I don’t want to float around in an unanchored agnosticism, but I also don’t want to latch onto the next shiny certainty I see. I’m jumping forward a bit here to start discussing reconstruction of a new way to …

Revelation: March 25, 2023 What can we know about God? As the first cause and creator of the material universe, God is, by definition, transcendent, and as such, not observable as an object in our experience. Transcendence means the idea of God is necessarily an abstract concept and hard to get our heads …

State of Faith (thus far): May 28, 2023 I’ve been all over the place, revising older posts and wrestling new ones into publishable form. Don’t ever let anyone tell you writing isn’t work. Introduction I’ve been in a near constant state of gradual spiritual evolution over the last 40 years (since college), a process which …

What's so Amazing About Grace?: Finished reading: What’s So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey 📚 I actually read this when it came out, in 1998. I remember standing in the bookstore, tears running down my face, unable to put the book down. So I didn’t. I don’t think this started my deconstruction, but it was a …

Deconstruction: March 16, 2023 “Deconstruction” has become overused and weighed down with cultural baggage, but I still find it a useful concept. I am disassembling bits and pieces of my spiritual heritage and the framework I’ve built to determine what can support belief and what needs to be discarded or renovated …

Lioness, Seneca Park Zoo: Lioness, Seneca Park Zoo This is a photo I took in 2021 of either Zuri or Asha, the two lionesses at the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester, NY. This was in the middle of winter, on a beautiful day with a clear blue sky. I’ve been volunteering as a photographer at the Zoo since 2019, when my wife started …

Introduction, the Conclusion: March 16, 2023 Sooooo . . . where am I going with this? First, I want to document and discuss my deconstruction from both intellectual and experiential perspectives. This has been a long process, really more of a spiritual journey than deconstruction, per se, with roots all the way back to my teens …

Introduction to My State of Faith, or what Ken has been thinking about lately: March 11, 2023 I’ve been in a near constant state of gradual spiritual evolution over the last 40 years (since college), development which reached a turning point around 2016. Even though I was more comfortable calling myself “Evangelical adjacent” than Evangelical, Evangelicals were still my …

Introduction, continued: March 12, 2023 So, why write about all this? Why not just chuck it and be done? There are several reasons: I haven’t said I don’t believe in Christianity but that I don’t know how to believe in it—I am agnostic, not antagonistic. Scripture may well be inspired and authoritative, if not inerrant—I …

Gotta post pics: March 11, 2023 This is my daughter’s incredibly undignified cat, Thor the Wonder Kitty. He is a roughly 16lb Maine Coon mix, and he loves this chair. He also loves to harass his older housemate, Chester. In spite of all his annoying faults, he’s a lovable lunk. Remember, I didn’t promise the Great …

Learning to Blog: March 11, 2023 This is my first attempt at a real, live blog—something of a leap for an introverted geek who has struggled for 40+ years with any kind of writing. Terrifying, actually. Well, I’m going to give it a try. My therapist will be so proud. Yes, my handle is ArtGeek. That’s a name I adopted …