f2PointEight
Creative Studio
Category: Religion and Faith
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A Pleasing Aroma: God, Blood and The Fragrance of Sacrifice
Tracing ritual sacrifice, blood and smoke from Canaanite altars to the cross. This essay argues that temple ritual, human sacrifice and communion all arise from the same shared ancient grammar of sacred, violent devotion.
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P.S. A Response To My Christian Friends
I know how this essay will be read by many Christians, because I once read others the same way. With concern. With defensiveness. With a quiet sense that something precious is being threatened. The instinct is not malicious. It is protective. Faith, for many, is not merely a set of propositions, but a moral compass,…
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Unequally Yoked
A Family That Prays Together… When people learn that I have left Christianity, and the reasons why I reject the God of classical theism, they rarely seek to engage the substance of the arguments I offer. The conversation seldom turns on whether my conclusions are consistent with the scholarly consensus on religious history, whether they…
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Christianity’s Unpardonable Sin
The Faith That Formed Me I grew up in Jamaica, in a society that has never been famed for its tolerance of non-heterosexual identities, inside a conservative, fundamentalist denomination that codified my religious imagination long before I ever chose what to believe. I learned early on that “gay” was an insult, a punchline, a pejorative…
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The Gospel of Pain
Growing Up in a Theology of Hurt I grew up in a faith that treated suffering not merely as an inevitable part of life, but as something close to sacred. Pain was not only expected. It was encouraged. It was framed as evidence of devotion, proof that one was truly walking the narrow way. In…
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The Making, and Unmaking of God…
A Belief Without Burden My earlier essays explored why I no longer see Christianity as morally coherent and why, despite its claims to be a spiritual family, it repeatedly fails to generate the community it promises. But these questions, important as they are, rest upon a deeper one. Before we can ask whether Christianity is…
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Blood and Smoke
Before we learned to pray, we learned to kill in reverence. The sky was awash with deep violet hues as the sun, with practiced bravado, threatened its ascent from beneath the horizon. The boy lay awake under the widening heavens on the roof terrace of his family’s house, a single-room dwelling of mud and straw.…
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The Church Is Dead (It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet)
A Requiem of Faith I recently wrote about my loss of faith and why that loss should matter to Christians. Not because I imagine my story to be unique, but precisely because it is not. It belongs to a growing chorus of quiet departures, people slipping out of pews and into a wider, lonelier, but…
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And Thus, Man Created God In His Own Image
I have spent my whole life in church – a born-again, Bible-studying, multi-generational Christian. I heard the stories about how ‘so-and-so’ stopped going to church, or ‘such-and-such’ was no longer a Christian. Never in a million years did I think those are the stories others might hear about me. I have always had questions about…
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I’m A Racist, and You Are Too
When I was 13, a classmate revealed to me that his parents were German and that he had spent several years growing up in Germany. In my surprise at discovering his heritage, I jokingly exclaimed, “oh, so you’re a Nazi!” I had only been living in the UK for a few months at that point…
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