religion

December 20, 2021

Feeling Good

Birds flying high, you know how I feel
I have a very intense fear of heights. But the thing about having a fear of heights, is that having a fear of heights is not about the fear of being up high, it is about the fear of falling. It is the fear of having nothing to catch you. I have dreams of being in the body of a bird, of flying, and in those dreams I have no fear of falling because I will catch myself on my wings. It is the plummeting crash that I fear. The view from up high is amazing, the fear is the potential to fall.

June 21, 2020

Gold

Exclusive Content, Poetry, Unlocked Content

This poem is one that I wrote to play on the themes within Robert Frost’s famous Nothing Gold Can Stay. I wanted to explore the darker elements of the poem, and I think it is clear from the verse that while writing Gold the imagery of Eve, the apple, and the serpent were also vivid and top of […]

January 8, 2020

Book Review: Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive by Kristen J. Sollée

Book Review

I’ll admit it, I picked up this book because of the title. But beyond being provocative, the ways in which Sollée illuminates the connections between witchcraft, feminism, and sex within Witches, Sluts, Feminists are powerful and incredibly enlightening. I found this book to be an intriguing mix of things I knew, things I didn’t know, […]

December 11, 2019

UPG vs. Headcanon: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Fandom

There is no functional difference between UPG/ SPG and headcanon/ fanon; it is only because people perceive fandom and religion as distinct entities that they are not allowed to fully coexist. My perception is that this is because people may think that comparing religion to fandom delegitimizes religious practice, but that strikes me as nonsense and I don’t at all agree.

June 27, 2019

Some Thoughts About Tarot Cards, Hogwarts Houses, and the Four Elements

Fandom, Reflection

I’ve been getting into Tarot cards lately, and I’ve always been into Harry Potter, so it is only natural that eventually I was going to combine the two. The first thing you need to understand is that when I decide to pick up a new hobby, I commit. So when I decided to take up […]

April 12, 2019

Wrapping Up My Final Semester: Revising My Capstone Paper

Academic, Reflection, Writing

I’m in the thick of revising my capstone paper right now, but even once I turn in the draft that I currently have it remains far from over. As I’ve mentioned before, my capstone paper is about the religious figure Brigid, but since that was at the beginning of the semester and now I’m in […]

October 26, 2018

Book Review: The Kindness of Enemies by Leila Aboulela

Academic, Book Review

Even from just the first few pages of The Kindness of Enemies I knew that this was going to be a book that would stick with me for a long time. The novel is two stories in parallel, one taking place in the twenty-first century, and one in the 19th. The story starts with Natasha […]

October 23, 2018

On Belief and Reality

Academic, Reflection

Two quotes came to me, from wildly different sources, within a fortnight of one another. The first occurred a few weeks back, when I went to the Boston show of the An Absolutely Remarkable Thing tour. Much to my chagrin, I can’t remember which Vlogbrother said this, but I wrote down in my notebook that […]

October 19, 2018

Book Review: Stalking God by Anjali Kumar

Book Review

Stalking God: My Unorthodox Search for Something to Believe In chronicles the spiritual journey of Anjali Kumar, a mother in search of a spiritual awakening for herself and for her young daughter. Kumar started her search upon the birth of her daughter, Zia, in order that when Zia started to ask the big questions such […]