reclaiming-god

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Apparently our bishop was classmates with Pope Leo in the 80s?!?;

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I feel like the thing thats really different about the polish trans experience is that because the language is heavily gendered and asking about a persons gender is very much not normalized, now that my body looks mostly androgynous people started referring to me with grammatical forms that have never been uttered by human tongue before. Last week a woman couldn’t decide what gender I was so after trying several she settled on speaking to me in plural and infinitive

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our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. if there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. and therefore no need for faith. let us pray that god will grant us a pope who doubts. and let him grant us a pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.

conclave (2024) dir. edward berger

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if you're in the throes of cosmic despair i cannot recommend museums enough. art or science or history it doesn't matter. oh we're all connected, all of us and everything, throughout all time and space, and no one, no one, no one is alone? awesome. that's what i thought i just wanted to make sure.

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i <3 our WOKE MARXIST POPE (link)

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"[If the history of humanity was a book,] on the last page you find that humans are more prosperous than ever, but there is a worrying and perplexing set of problems and paradoxes emerging. For while the final few pages have brought us tremendous technological advances and higher standards of living, they haven't brought us more happiness. In fact, even though we are more connected than ever, we feel less connected. We have more power to do and be anything we desire, yet we feel more disempowered. Our lives are saturated with the artifacts of an absolute explosion of human creativity, and yet we struggle to find meaning. The last page also describes a world of unparalleled global inequality and a precarious environmental situation. Our population is more than 20 times what it was at the start of the chapter, but the richest 225 humans on earth have more wealth than the poorest 2.5 billion people combined. Nearly one billion people make less than $1/day. Humans produce more than enough food to feed everyone in the world, yet hundreds of millions are starving, even as we collectively spend over $1 trillion per year preparing to fight one another."

— Michael Wesch, "The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology"

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Your Daily Reminder to Click for Palestine!

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omg guys here's me cleaning a statue of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal

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What The Hell

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Reminder to Request Queer Books from your Local Library

If you're panicking about the state of the world, one of the easiest ways to make a difference right now is engaging with your library.

There is a reason that libraries are targetted by fascists. They are sites of immesurable power. Both just on their own, and also because of their patrons. So first step is, if you haven't, sign up for a library card ASAP.

Next, find out how your library takes requests (almost all libraries do), and start filling out the forms. Make it a ritual, go through queer books that interest you (here is an affiliate link for 165 queer books to get you started), and request as many as you can. It also helps if you take queer books out. Both digitally and physically.

Many libraries have a system in place where they have to rebuy the rights to a digital copy of a book after a certain amount of borrows. This is not contingent on you reading every single book you check out. No one will know if you read it or not. Though, I will admit that reading the books is also a good strategy to keep you invested in this very important discussion.

Regardless of your personal reading habits, you have space to make real change in your community with just a small amount of effort. Borrowing and requesting queer books backs up the irrefutable fact that queer stories are worth telling, and it pays queer authors for their work. I will say it until my face is blue, request queer books, read queer books, and engage with your local library.

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About Queer Happened Here

This sprawling, unique visual history of New York City’s queer spaces documents the evolution of LGBTQ+ culture, community, and activism within Manhattan’s dynamic landscape over the course of a century, spanning from 1920 to 2020. New York’s LGBTQ+ history is everywhere, but rarely is it visibly documented. Aside from current venues and a handful of landmark plaques, important queer spaces from the city’s past have otherwise been forgotten about, or remain entirely hidden. This multifaceted book joyfully and poignantly explores a century of LGBTQ+ gathering spaces across Manhattan through hundreds of historic photographs, flyers, posters, club membership cards, magazine spreads, and more. Author Marc Zinaman’s carefully researched, engaging text includes first-person accounts and little-known facts that range from the humorous to the heartbreaking. From 1920s bathhouses, drag balls, and the ascent of homophobia during World War II, to the protests and parades of the 1960s and 1970s, to the horrors of AIDS; from the vibrant nightlife scene of the 1990s to 2018’s Rainbow Wave, which saw a record number of queer elected officials in the US, to the rise of geosocial dating apps, every major milestone of LGBTQ+ social history is thoughtfully documented. The result is a powerful and compelling testament to the endurance of queer culture, and an important contribution to its preservation and celebration.

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"There is no such thing as a story or a teaching that doesn't have a cultural setting. That is not to say that a story or teaching is not relevant for another setting, but to remember that it comes to us from a particular place and in a particular language. God sent his Son Jesus Christ in the flesh, in a specific home, nation, town, and era. Likewise, God didn't send the Bible as a transcultural feeling or impression, but gave it to us through the experiences that real people had in real historical situations. [...] Readers from different cultures bring a range of experiences and insights to their Bible reading. The place where we come together, however, is when we read God's Word in the concrete framework in which he gave it. It is especially when we hear the message in its authentic, original cultural setting that we can reapply it afresh for our own different settings most fully, because we understand what issues were really being addressed."

— Author Introduction to the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible

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Maybe we’ll get to see the first American pope in history be the first pope to excommunicate the US vice president

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our father, who art in chicago,

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St. Kinga's chapel - Wieliczka, Poland

Located 101 meters (approx. 331 feet) underground in the Wieliczka Salt Mine, the massive underground chapel chamber itself was carved out of a giant green salt deposit in 1896. It took around 70 years for the chapel to be fully furnished with all its religious icons (also made entirely out of salt), with the most recent addition being a statue of St. Pope John Paul II.