northernslug - Tumblr blog

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pete seeger's banjo 🪕

"this machine surrounds hate

and forces it to surrender"

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been a while since I posted one of my more complex pieces!

This lil guy is a Hildegard von Bingen quote, I was to include a variety of quite a few flowers!

For anyone curious, something of this detail level would go for around $120-150 CAD

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Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls. Separation wall in Bethlehem, Occupied West Bank, Palestine

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“Cure dismisses resilience, survival, the spider web of fractures, cracks and seams. Its promises hold power precisely because none of us want to be broken. But I'm curious: what might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness?”

Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

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Sunrise and sunset from the same window.

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some moments of spirit in my lil home

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Sirach 34:25-27 (NRSVue)

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So i already posted about this chapter from Dr. Amy-Jill Levine but it’s just so dang good, and offers a wonderful counter-interpretation to the typical “See? the Temple, aka the center of Jewish religion at the time, was corrupt and backwards and evil!” – so i wanted to post a more condensed summary too. If you’re interested in reading larger excerpts from her chapter (or the entire chapter as a PDF), visit this post.

Dr. Levine is a Jewish woman as well as a professor of New Testament Studies. Through her reading of this story shared in all 4 Gospels (Matthew 21:12-17, Mark 11:11-17, Luke 19:45-46, and John 2:13-17 – click here to read them), Levine helps us ponder:

How do we keep our churches from feeling like perfectly comfortable places for people who need to be confronted about the ways they are harming others?

And of course, that in turn brings up the question of how we make sure people who are vulnerable, oppressed, etc. feel truly welcome and safe in our worship communities – if we let in their oppressors unchallenged, can we really claim to be a welcoming space for the oppressed?

Image description under the readmore:

Keep reading

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What's God's role in human suffering ?

in it, with us. co-emergent in the affective, illegible spaces of pain. asking us where it hurts and hoping that we, in turn, will ask him the same

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We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.

-- Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way --

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We gotta go back to the days of early Christianity, where believers refused to serve in the military. There's entirely too many boot-licking evangelicals. Like, that's fundamentally what Jesus was against.

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Commission of Jesus holding the client’s cat

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Instant gratification gets put off for long walks and talks with God. He doesn’t pretend to know why there’s so much suffering – he just serves the food and goes home and sobs.

Jon Watts, The Burden of Vision

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me: I’m not a christian

also me: spends free time reading the Bible, infodumping about Jesus to people who don’t care, and has read many a book by Bart Ehrman.

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I pick up my custom wheelchair a week from tomorrow!!

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every special ed program i was in had some kind of system where your behavior was graded on a little sheet with different scores in different categories. its one of those things that i was shocked to eventually discover was actually specifically a special ed thing. getting a good grade in behavior.