f2PointEight
Creative Studio
Tag: Religious Trauma
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Morality Without Cosmic Enforcement
When fear loosened its grip on how I made choices, I expected to feel lighter. For a long time, goodness had been tied to what would happen beyond this life. Actions mattered because something vast stood behind them. A cosmic seriousness made even the smallest choice feel charged with eternal significance. What I did in…
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Holding The Sky Open
There is a particular discomfort that surfaces whenever the conversation drifts toward origins. Not just about the universe, but about anything that resists clean explanation. Where did this begin? What caused it? What stands underneath it all? The moment the trail of causes grows thin, many of us feel a quiet urgency to finish the…
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More Than You Can Bear
Content Note: This essay discusses mental illness, suicidal ideation, and death. Please read with care. I’m Here… For Now “Do you have thoughts about harming yourself, or ending your life?” Her question cut directly to the reason I was there. Shifting in my chair, I searched for words precise enough to answer without exposing too…
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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 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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