Monday Thought

On Muslim YA Novels

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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.

From Preachy
On May 3, 2022
Categories

Female Scholarship In Islam Is Challenging Patriarchal Leadership

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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.

From Preachy
On March 21, 2022
Categories

On Initiation Rites and Child Marriage

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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.

From Preachy
On February 22, 2022
Categories

Naked and Not Ashamed

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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.

From Preachy
On February 14, 2022
Categories

The Role of Sex Workers in Religion

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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."

From Preachy
On February 7, 2022
Categories

The Mystery of the Trinity (River)

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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.

From Preachy
On January 24, 2022
Categories

A Welcome Back Yak

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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.

From Preachy
On January 17, 2022
Categories

How Nurturing My Relationship with My Ancestors Helps Me Manage My Mental Illness

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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.

From Preachy
On December 2, 2021
Categories

On Beer and Home

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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.

From Preachy
On November 22, 2021
Categories

How People Grieve Through Religion

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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.

From Preachy
On November 8, 2021
Categories

David, Goliath stereotype

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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.

From Preachy
On November 2, 2021
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A Trinity of Trauma-Healing: Science, Spirituality, and the Self

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

From Preachy
On October 25, 2021
Categories

The Stoic’s Embrace of RNG

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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.

From Preachy
On October 18, 2021
Categories