Posts

Continuing on the Road to Capernaum: Extremely Belated Super Bowl Thoughts and GOAT Conversations

Note:  This post follows up on thoughts I've had about the Bible passage in Mark 9:33-37 that were outlined in an earlier blog post explaining the name of my blog! Every year when the Super Bowl rolls around, I'm reminded of this conversation about greatness that often involves certain players and exists across most sports. The "GOAT" conversation (GOAT = Greatest of All Time) is always hanging in the air, prepared to descend and cause division between fans. So last fall when the Lakers won the NBA championship, the comparisons were stirred up again between LeBron James and Michael Jordan. With the Bucs vanquishing the Chiefs this year in the Super Bowl, more articles have been written about why Tom Brady is the greatest of all time, a story that has followed him for the last 10 years in some way, shape, or form. Those articles more often than not involve some comparison between Brady and other players. With soccer, the modern comparison exists between Messi and Crist...

The Beginning of Holy Week, a Modern Retelling

A hypothetical dialogue between Jesus and his disciples on Palm Sunday: Disciples: Hey Jesus, how's your week looking? Jesus: 👀

An article I'm wrestling with today about privilege and the politics of "being in the room"

Link to Article by  Olúfémi O. Táíwò Hello, here's an article I'm wrestling with today. I had a really good conversation with some people about it this morning and just wanted to share it here. It gave me thoughts about how the idea of deference , or deferring to others, can be done at an intellectual level that still doesn't affect the real lives of real people. Nowadays, many of us may have heard or done this a lot when it comes to the idea of centering certain groups or voices in our lives. Why are we centering them or deferring to them? Is it because we assume they have a certain experience that, when voiced, can lead to better outcomes? Or is it based in the actual experiences of the people we're deferring to? And as a person who has grown up in intellectual spaces, the article is making me think about whether such spaces or "rooms" are actually needed for material change to happen if all that comes from such spaces is the equipping of individuals with mo...

What is the Road to Capernaum?

Here's a brief explanation of the title of this blog. The words that I've been carrying with me a lot this year have been the words "in process". I'd like to think that if we're all being honest, we're all in-process in some way. Yet we exist in a world that is often focused on destinations. I recently graduated from college last year and that's one destination some of us may be working towards. I know I've told myself before that "if I just get ______ or just had ______", I'd be set and life would be much more straightforward. And there might be some who have been satisfied to the utmost upon reaching their goals. I think what I can say is that all the destinations I've reached in my short life so far looked so much better before I got there, came with their own cadre of complications and nuances, and were only valued appropriately and seen truly once I was five miles down the road. And when I say they looked much better before I...

Pandemic friendships and how some part of me fears a return to whatever "normal" means

I think one of the privileges that I've had during this season of quarantine has been the amount of time that I've just had to myself. Expectations for social interaction might be at an all time low and for introverts like me, that's created much-needed space for me to just be with myself. I think this need for time to connect with myself and process has been a part of me for a while but I didn't exactly meet that need in healthy ways in college. I've also been a person who I think shows signs of OCD when it comes to communicating with people through technology, usually through Facebook Messenger or text messaging. I value keeping up conversations with people but can all too often fall into viewing my message threads with friends as tasks that just need to be checked off. It makes sense then that treating messaging like a task to be checked off ends up throwing me for a small loop when I receive a reply and the box I checked the previous day is unchecked the next mo...