Following Jesus in rejecting empire
“Oh what savory satisfaction. What splendid joy. In one instant, all my anger dissipated and all the rot in my soul has been removed!” That’s how I imagined it. What freedom would taste like once the earth was rid of Frederick Johnson, and I had exacted revenge. Once I had exchanged my passive fist with…
When I think of the word pacifist I can’t help picturing myself standing passively by inside the bathroom door, holding a weapon in my fist while I watch my wife get murdered. Passive-fist is all I can hear now when that word is spoken. And I regret, many times a day, my blasted pacifism in…
The summer before my life disintegrated was lovely. There are Knoxville summers where the heat oppresses a person like a tyrant, but not that summer. Not the summer of 1997. Highs barely reached to 80 and the humidity must’ve pushed its way around us and into Georgia. I remember being happy, but only as though…
Sometimes the truth needs to be told from an angle. The truth head on can blind a person or scare them, like a bolt of lightning. Better to tell it in a more circuitous way. Or so it seems Emily Dickenson believed if we grasp her poem. Jesus liked to tell it slant in his…