Faith and Doubt Archives - Page 13 of 17

Blow It Out Your Sinatra: Poems from Paul Fericano’s “The Hollywood Catechism”

January 6, 2016

The cover of Paul Fericano’s poetry collection The Hollywood Catechism (Silver Birch Press, 2015) shows a smoldering black-and-white movie still of Burt Lancaster as con-artist preacher Elmer Gantry, with his bedroom eyes and well-thumped Bible. This characteristically American blend of flim-flam, movie idols, and popular Christianity sets the tone of this entertaining and original book.

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January Links Roundup: Disobedient Woman Facts

January 5, 2016

This blog usually tackles (or is tackled by) serious subjects, so let’s start the year with a little humor. Over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Sandra Newman’s list of “Woman Facts” satirizes gender roles and those clickbait lists of dubious scientific trivia. For instance: A woman is born with all the exclamation points she will use

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Poetry by Perry Brass: “The Child”

December 23, 2015

Perry Brass is the author of several novels and nonfiction books on gay spirituality and sacred eros. As a Christmas gift to his newsletter list, he shared some of his recent poems, one of which he has kindly permitted me to reprint below. The boy in this poem could be the Christ Child or my

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A Christmas Message from Becoming Church

December 19, 2015

Becoming Church, an offshoot of the Church of the Saviour in Washington D.C., is an intentional Christian community devoted to racial and economic justice. Their major project at the moment is Reunion, a ministry that re-integrates formerly incarcerated people into civilian life, as well as doing activism for prison reform. I blogged about my inspiring

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Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2015

December 9, 2015

What a year! 2015 was a time of transition, living out the implications of changes that began last year and gathering the courage to go public with them. Writing career milestones this year: My second full-length poetry collection, Bullies in Love, came out in March from Little Red Tree Publishing. Forbes Library in Northampton hosted

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Beyond God the Mother

December 4, 2015

I’ve been fortunate to have practiced Christianity in communities where sexism did not impact me–an unusual experience, I realize. Women priests, religion professors, and Bible study leaders were well-represented even when I was on the conservative side of the spectrum. Growing up in an all-female home, I felt completed and refreshed by the masculine Father-Son-Holy

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November Links Roundup: It’s Supposed to Hurt

November 18, 2015

I just finished a philosophy book that I loved in 1999, and found it equally rewarding to re-read from a new perspective. Marxist-feminist philosopher Robin May Schott’s Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (Beacon Press, 1988) challenges the body-mind split that has constituted “objectivity” for the Western religious and intellectual tradition. I

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Religion as Medicine, or Diversity Without Relativism

November 18, 2015

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s widely-shared TED Talk “The danger of a single story” (transcript here) links narrative hegemony and prejudice. When you only see a limited range of images of a community or social group, both your self-understanding and your empathy become stunted: “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over

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October Links Roundup: Spiritual Bypass Edition

October 11, 2015

For a one-sentence statement of my personal philosophy, the Serenity Prayer can’t be beat: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” (Closely followed by Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” chorus: “You got to know when to

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Misinterpreting Narcissus

October 5, 2015

During our family vacation on Cape Cod this summer, I visited Sunday services at an interdenominational liberal-mainline church. The sermon was about feasting on the body and blood of Jesus, a more orthodox and specifically Christian topic than I expected from a church with Unitarian roots. I was happy that a synthesis of inclusiveness and

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