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…
If you hadn’t heard, a big thing with Democratic rhetoric lately has been calling right-wing behaviors “ weird .“ I’ve heard some confusion and critique of this, so in this blog post I hope to unwrap why this technique is so effective for fighting fascistic rhetoric and actions. My Background and Standpoint As always, I’m coming at this as a former pastor’s kid who went on to become a communication scholar whose work focuses on stress, trauma, and conflict communication….
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…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the privileges of safety since this whole social media question started making the rounds on social media. You know, the one about whether you’d rather meet a man or a bear or whatever other variation in the woods (if you haven’t heard, many women when offered this question have been enthusiastically choosing the bear, and explaining their experiences and reasons for this). It makes sense that I’d been thinking about this, because the very…
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…
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…
As I write this, it is Holy Saturday, and as I reflect on this time that’s traditionally one of gestation and waiting moving toward resurrection, in the midst of spring, a season that celebrates new growth after the dormancy of winter, it’s profoundly helpful to look back on what has gone before. And to grieve the mini-deaths that have been necessary within me as I’ve been traveling away from unhealthy religio-political beliefs, and hopefully toward healthier ones. I can’t believe…
I don’t know about you, but there are times in weeks like this past one when it just feels so much like however much progress we make, like the systems in place are just too flawed, and allow the bad guys—you know, the bullies and abusers—to win much much too often. In today’s piece I want to unwrap some of the dynamics of these issues and how to understand and healthily respond when things seem like this. (This is going…
This week, in honor of opening a new year, I wanted to use this space to write an open letter to my former more conservative self that was trained on some level to believe that assertiveness was immoral. (If you’re just joining us, or forgot, I’m a former pastor’s kid from a right-leaning denomination who went on to get a PhD in Communication. There are lots of places on this blog you can learn about where I came from and…
I have to confess—I’ve been choking back an awful lot of “I told you so’s” this past week or so as people marveled at the fact that the former president of the US (you know, the one who still thinks he didn’t lose a legitimate election in 2020 and has been shown to have fomented an insurrection to maintain power) hosted alt-right extremist Nick Fuentes for dinner at his home, and so so few GOP leaders decried the choice. In…
I had the privilege recently of talking with the lovely folks over at the What in God’s Name podcast about the ideas and background behind this Assertive Spirituality project, and if you’re reading this before Wednesday, September 28, 2022 there still may be an opportunity for you to join in a Zoom talk back session with all of us at 7 p.m. Eastern. Here’s what you need to know: The podcast is in a 3-part series, with an intro, the…
Okay, so I’ll confess I had to go back and read up on Heather Cox Richardson’s latest update when I started seeing memes and posts about GOP immigration nonsense in my feed again. At any rate, it doesn’t actually feel all that new at all. That’s because this rhetoric is old as the fascistic hills. So today I wanted to unwrap a bit more of what happens in general with unhealthy rhetoric that frames “open borders” as a devil term—and…
Okay, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the Bible this week: and specifically the idea of how conservative Christians tend to idealize reading the Bible and assume it will somehow keep you conservative (spoiler alert: that did not happen for me). This comes in the wake of two disparate bits of news: (1) according to the 2022 State of the Bible report from the American Bible Society, Bible reading took a huge dive from early 2021-2022; and (2) that…