Posts from Preachy
On Muslim YA Novels
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.
Female Scholarship In Islam Is Challenging Patriarchal Leadership
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.
On Initiation Rites and Child Marriage
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.
Naked and Not Ashamed
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.
The Role of Sex Workers in Religion
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."
The Mystery of the Trinity (River)
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.
A Welcome Back Yak
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.
How Nurturing My Relationship with My Ancestors Helps Me Manage My Mental Illness
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.
On Beer and Home
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.
Opaque Strategy Number 13
we present our re-casting of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards. We call our version Opaque Strategies. Here is Opaque Strategy number 13:
How People Grieve Through Religion
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.
David, Goliath stereotype
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.
A Trinity of Trauma-Healing: Science, Spirituality, and the Self
As a child, I was passed between hands, hearths, hospitals, and houses of God for healing.