Monday Thought

While the folks in my YA books were experience a blushing first romance, I was trying to reconcile pop culture with the teachings of my conservative Muslim upbringing.

For so long, I had grown up believing that social justice discourse, particularly through a gendered lens, was a completely separate sphere from Islamic discussions.

There are 18.6 million people in Malawi. Many of them are subject to some sort of initiation ceremony. These ceremonies are religiously followed and form the basis of a version of cultural survival.

Nakedness in dreams was a terrible thing. It called for extra caution in your day-to-day life. It could require several days of prayer and fasting, depending on the perceived severity.

Present day sex workers are devalued, abused and oppressed. But prostitution is one of the oldest professions, even featured in The New Testament as Jesus is condemned for mixing with female "sinners."

To leave behind the noisy, self-absorbed human world for a time and sit on the river’s bank is to open oneself to the presence of the divine.

Welp, we kind of took an inadvertent (?) Preachy break there, huh? I dunno about you — except I kinda do cause we just had a chat about it — but I think I kinda needed it.

I was battling a mental illness while I was weaning myself off doctrinaire Christianity. I was undiagnosed because I couldn’t afford access to a good, and LGBTQ2+-friendly psychologist, and the illness was debilitating.

Yuengling is an objectively terrible beverage. Even a quick pull from a longneck that originated at the longest-running brewery in the United States leaves you wondering just what you’re doing trying to put a thing that actually tastes like spoiled grain into your body.

What little I know of grief tells me that it does not follow logic, and that those in its throes will oftentimes grab on to anything to make sense of their feelings. In that, I could understand why he chose to rely on religion for sense.

Independence Day, you’ll remember, is a pre-9/11 film chock-full -of oblivious patriotic bravado that captures peak-1990’s chauvinistic sentiment. It is also, to me, a Jewish film.

As a child, I was passed between hands, hearths, hospitals, and houses of God for healing.

Gaming repackaged the terms of Stoicism for me so that randomness replaced the Stoic principle of accepting the inconsistencies of the world around us. I imagined a spirituality by which this randomness defines our own lives, a place where one can acknowledge chance in life.