Let’s look at photos of a poet — I’ve been thinking about Emily Dickinson, and I wondered what she looked like. What images are available of the poet who lived from 1830 to 1886? The visual record seems to begin around age nine when a painter named Otis Allen Bullard did a portrait of Emily with her siblings, Austin and Lavinia. She had auburn hair. She holds a book of her pressed flowers.

Let’s talk about “porneia” — When you sign up for Christianity, the faith is explained as a lot of rules about sex. God hates people having “bad” sex. That seems clear, for example, in 1 Corinthians 6:18: “Flee from sexual immorality.” The Greek word here is porneia. And its meaning, interestingly, is unclear. It’s not something the religion even talks about. All Christian sexual rules depend on πορνεία, or porneia, mostly as used a few times in the letters of Paul. The religion seems to be…

The country superstar was always exploring the shadow — In 1984, a 38-year-old Kentucky nurse and her daughter hit it big as a country music duo. The Judds were the feel-good “Cinderella story” of the year. It was an amazing act: a Baby Boomer mother and daughter who seemed to be the same age — as the mother was sexier. Naomi Judd shot herself to death on April 30, 2022. I’m trying to understand her difficult story.

A religion runs on fraud — When you grow up in church, you’re told to follow a lot of rules about sex — and Bible verses are cited to prove it. You wouldn’t be told that Christianity’s key verses to control human eroticism are badly misread and mistranslated, and often just made up. 1. A fake verse says women should be “dominated” Christians often try to center the religion on the Bible’s Creation story, which is framed as their ticket to divine patriarchy. Back in Genesis 3:16 we find God…

The story of my first viral post — I grew up hearing one thing in church, and Bible scholars told me something else. Most people had no idea the scholarship was there—and wouldn’t much care to read it. That was the situation I faced when deciding to be a ‘religion blogger’ back in 2019. I had a lot of issues on my agenda, like Leviticus 18:22. The verse had been so often explained as a ban on “homosexuality.”

The story of an infamous post — My most notable post to date went up on August 12, 2019, back when I was still thinking about how to be a ‘religion blogger’. It’s a profession I’d never heard of, or had any idea how to do, when I’d decided to do it. That I’d try to sort out the religion I grew up in, and make a deep dive into its hidden history—was yet unknown to me. How does one write about Evangelicalism?

The story of a popular post — When I posted it on March 17, 2021, I thought I was just cranking out another listicle about the Bible. It turned out to be my biggest one. Re-reading “8 Things Christians Say That Just Ain’t True,” which has 130k views at present, I experience again the heartbreak and rage I felt on learning that much of what I’d been taught in church was false. It was my slash-and-burn manifesto against Christian lies.

Trying to keep up with the congressman’s private life — Everyone’s favorite North Carolina congressman has been lighting up social media with sex details, so naturally I had to do a complete run-down. In what appears to be a campaign to destroy him politically after his disclosure of GOP “orgies,” anonymous social media postings documenting his past have been conspicuously dropped. Whoever has it out for him seems to want to use his queer edges to unseat him. …

To learn Evangelical racism, you’d go to Dallas Theological Seminary — If you grow up in America’s largest religion, you’d know about its most prestigious school. Dallas Theological Seminary is called the “Evangelical Vatican.” For a century, the school has guided the faith—training pastors, setting the tone on church concerns. A fact about ‘Dallas’ was known, but we didn’t much care to talk about it.