For the last few weeks, this one scene from the Lord of the Rings movies keeps playing through my head. Gandalf has gone down with the Balrog. The remainder of the Fellowship of the Ring has run like crazy and escaped the orcs and other beasties swarming them out into the grass on the mountainside. When they get there, the hobbits collapse. Some of the party go around to try to get them up, when one of the party resists…
It’s been quite the wild ride lately in political rhetoric. With the politics of hope and joy birthing anew with the Democratic ticket, Biden having stepped aside, it might be easy to think that surely most if not all the right-leaning folks might just see reason and join the other side. Lest we grow complacent, though, I wanted to use this blog post to unwrap some theological maneuvers that help us all understand how the unhealthy folks manage to maintain…
It wasn’t that long ago that someone accused Assertive Spirituality, once again, of having “TDS”—you know, “Tr*mp Derangement Syndrome.” And every time we post in support of trans folks, some right-wing troll seems to pop up to argue that trans people and those who support them are “sick in the head.” (For the record, both things are ridiculous in the ways I’m about to outline.) In this week’s blog post I plan to unwrap a few of the layers of…
So if you’re a reasonable person, you’re likely feeling a little—or a lot—down just now. I’m here to unwrap for you enough of the context behind why that’s happening, specifically how a particular–ahem–right-wing fascistic strongman has been working to try to make their opponents seem immoral and weak—to hopefully give you some oomph to get back up off that mat and keep working toward a healthier world for us all. And let’s be clear—I first wanted to write this post…
Shortly before Pride Month started, I was driving across the wide open in the Midwest, watching the stormy skies in one quadrant of the view carefully, only to find what I was hoping for—a complete double rainbow. As I came to a stop to soak it in and take pictures, I had to laugh a bit when I noticed the bow stretched over—you guessed it—one of those “seeker-friendly” white Evangelical churches. This got me thinking a lot, naturally, about the…
One of the key reasons I founded this Assertive Spirituality project was the disturbing turn of the Republicans, in the 2016 election and beyond, toward embracing the ideals of fascistic Christian nationalism as their party platform. I believe the evidence of this ought to seem disturbing—it very much is a threat to healthy democracy in the US. It can also easily be confusing, though, so in this article I plan to unwrap how some of this rhetoric works, and why…
This week on the AS FB page I’ve been accused of attacking a wide variety of groups as per usual, simply by posting memes that critique unhealthy systems and behaviors. This happens fairly regularly here at the Assertive Spirituality page, mind you—but this week was special as I can’t remember the last time I remember having been accused of attacking so many groups in a few days. At any rate, I’ve been wanting to do a general post for awhile…
I started this project to make space for people of all stripes that are AGAINST unhealthy stuff in the religio-political sphere and FOR a healthier world for us all. The thing is, we don’t all (naturally) agree on all topics. As a result, the AS FB page can become contentious at times, even among long-established followers. This never seems to happen quite as strongly as when the topic of forgiveness comes up. It happened again this week when I posted…
So this week a TikTok got posted in one of the groups I’m in on Facebook about the oddness of the term “people pleaser.” That TikTok (here it is if you want to see it!) called out how the term gets applied in often strange ways—pointing out that people pleasing implies that someone’s being pleased, for instance, which often isn’t the case. That led my brain down the rabbit hole of all the concepts I teach in my university classes…
So this week I had several interactions with members of the AS audience that reminded me just how many stress responses get caught up in discussing religious differences. And since I literally teach theories in my university communication classes that explain why this is, I thought it may be helpful to delve deeper into this in today’s blog posts. At a time when polarization is high and there’s a lot of trauma around religious differences, I hope this can help…
A while back, I blogged here about the film Women Talking and how its dialogues tended to break down dichotomies and help its viewers’ minds break through to narratives of possibility about grieving out abuses and moving forward. In this week’s blog post I plan to look at two recently released books–one by Nick Offerman and the other by Robert Hudson–and discuss the ways they present differing but similar visions of what Assertive Spirituality could look like. Both of these…
In a previous blog post I talked about some of the strange things that happen when facts and ethics get seen as partisan. This week I plan to continue that theme, but with a different example—specifically, looking at the various uses and interpretations of the phrase “do your own research.” It struck me recently in an in-class discussion that I’ve heard this term used on all sides of the partisan divide in political conversations in the US in recent years….
Okay, so it’s been quite awhile now since fascistic Christian nationalism has been working hard to get an increasingly loud voice in US politics, and I’ve been noticing some increasingly complex dynamics at play because of this. Since a huge part of why I founded this project is to convince people to raise their voices against the unhealthy dynamics in this specific abuse of the fusion of religion and politics (alongside other unhealthy dynamics), I wanted to take some time…
So apparently there’s yet another conservative Christian article out about the theology of sex from a patriarchal perspective. (Apparently that narrative is super important to defend—all the eyeroll emojis.) Anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to look that particular article up after the trainwreck that was the last one I wrote about, but hearing about it got me thinking this week about a sermon I heard a few years back from a nuanced but right-leaning pastor in which the idea of…
This week I finally saw the Oscar-winning film Women Talking, which masterfully depicts women problem-solving how to respond a gigantic situation of systemic sexual abuse and assault by men in an isolated religious community. Today I want to take some of the tools of my trade—communication theory and narrative theory—to explain why I saw the film as an excellent expression of #AssertiveSpirituality on so many levels. Thanks for giving me a few minutes to see how I saw so much…