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# Bleak Theology

A post-punk counterweight to joy.

## Sitemaps

- [XML Sitemap](https://www.bleaktheology.com/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website.

## Posts

- [On the 70th Birthday of Ian Curtis and the Calendar of Saints](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2026/07/15/on-the-70th-birthday-of-ian-curtis-and-the-calendar-of-saints/) - Today, July 15th, is the seventieth birthday of Ian Curtis. And the outpouring of remembrance by the post-punk world has been great... Most likely, he would have hated all of this.
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2026/02/02/the-eternal-return-12/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [Imagining Epiphanies of Artistic Action](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2026/01/01/imagining-epiphanies-of-artistic-action/) - You are invited on January 7th to a creative discussion about epiphanies of artistic action and how we can transform our communities and ourselves.
- [An Update About My Joy Division Book](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2025/10/16/an-update-about-my-joy-division-book/) - This blog has been mostly on hiatus for the past four (?) years because I have been focusing on writing my book, Tears in Their Eyes: Joy Division as Theological Lamentation. I am finally nearing completion and it's about time to start creating some buzz about it. This book approaches pop music and theology from
- ["When There's No Future, How Can There Be Sin?": A Response to David Dault on Nihilisms](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2025/09/05/when-theres-no-future-how-can-there-be-sin-a-response-to-david-dault-on-nihilisms/) - [TW: I mention suicide in this piece.]The Two NihilismsOn his Substack, David Dault has written an important essay entitled The post-American Present, where he considers two nihilisms that are two sides of the same coin, omega nihilism and alpha nihilism. He asked his readers to help him think through these nihilisms, the former abandoning the
- [The Queer Day of Pentecost [CAKE!]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/05/19/the-queer-day-of-pentecost/) - Pentecost is the queerest day of the Christian year. It is strange. It is unexpected. It is unwieldy. It is overwhelming. And we have sought to encapsulate and confine and control it within time, within a calendar to bring it back when we want it to occur. When we can expect it. When we can
- [The Last Sunday of Epiphany](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2025/03/02/the-last-sunday-of-epiphany/) - The wind is cold and sharp in the bright afternoon sun. The second day of March is leonine. I take a bite of Carnival and my teeth and gums sing as they sink in.
- [A Bleak Theology Guide to Resistance](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2025/02/06/a-bleak-theology-guide-to-resistance/) - Everything is terrible everywhere all at once. What to do? How to respond? Here is a Guide of ten things to help weather this storm. I hope that you will find this Guide helpful. It is a longer read, but I believe it is worth it. Take your time. Ruminate on it. Share it. Peace
- ["Unwise and Untimely"](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/01/21/unwise-and-untimely/) - This Martin Luther King, Jr., Day should unsettle us more than usual. It's not because President Obama is celebrating his inauguration today. It's because, almost fifty years since the composition of King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, his greatest epistle to the Church, we risk more than ever before being the people he accuses of
- [Kindness is Resistance](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2024/11/07/kindness-is-resistance/) - Things are bleak. It's only going to get worse. We are starkly faced with the existential choice of how we are going to act for our neighbor, for our nation, for ourselves. Fascism is here. Cruelty is here. It is in the bones and muscles and veins and nerves of our nation. We are not
- [Bonhoeffer at Charlottesville](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/02/06/bonhoeffer-at-charlottesville/) - [This post was originally written immediately after 2017's Alt-Right march on Charlottesville and failed to get picked up for publication. It is posted here in observation of his birthday, February 4, 1906. The work is heavily reliant upon Charles Marsh's Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. ] It is at Charlottesville and for the
- [Crushing your Pipe Dream of Community [Bonhoeffer]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/04/04/crushing-your-wish-dream-of-community-bonhoeffer/) - Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream [Wunschtraum]. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But
- [Ian Curtis, "Discovered on the Sabbath"](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2023/05/18/ian-curtis-discovered-on-the-sabbath/) - Today is one of the saddest days in the history of rock music, the death of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. In the early Sunday morning hours of May 18th, 1980, he hanged himself in his kitchen, Iggy Pop's album The Idiot still spinning on his record player, a note left for his estranged wife. Factory
- [The Solitude of Writing.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2023/04/25/the-solitude-of-writing/) - Writing is a curse. A Sisyphusian torture that can only be aleviated by not writing, to suffer the pain of not writing, the agony of stasis. Yet, the Furies shall not allow it.
- [Good Friday and Joy Division](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2023/04/07/good-friday-and-joy-division/) - I've been quiet for the past few months while I've been focused on writing my book, Don't Walk Away: Joy Division as Theological Lamentation. What I thought would be one obligatory chapter on religious history of became three very unexpected chapters. I've been making good headway, currently working on lyrics analysis. I would love for
- [S1 E2 Exvangelicals, Deconstruction, and World’s End](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/05/08/s1-e2-exvangelicals-deconstruction-and-worlds-end/) - Has the "biblical worldview" always existed? Can the exvangelical escape evangelicalism? Why does "deconstruction" sound so familiar? So many questions. My answers will probably trouble you. But it wouldn’t be bleak theology if Plato, Nietzsche, and Derrida didn’t show up, right? And there’s even some Marx, just for fun. I can’t say that it’s postmodern Marxism, but maybe? Judge for yourselves!
- [S1 E1 Everything is Terrible](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/04/15/s1-e1-everything-is-terrible/) - Welcome to the Bleak Theology Podcast. It is Good Friday and to coincide with this most dreadful day of the Christian year, I am sharing my first episode. I have been writing bleak theology for a long time, but with the world as it is these days, it seemed that such a podcast might be
- [Introducing The Bleak Theology Podcast](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/04/12/introducing-the-bleak-theology-podcast/) - If you're into Christianity, existential crises, and the seemingly insurmountable abyss between the human and the divine, then this is your podcast. First episode drops, unsurprisingly, on Good Friday.
- ["This is the End - For Me the Beginning of Life"](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/04/09/this-is-the-end-for-me-the-beginning-of-life/) - In the early hours of this morning at the Flossenbürg concentration camp, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was led to the gallows among Nazi guards and hanged until he was dead. It was not Palm Sunday seventy-two years ago. In fact, Easter fell on April Fool's Day in 1945. Today, Jesus is led into the streets among joyful
- [Watch This Void](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/03/02/watch-this-void/) - A new logo and some news of things to come.
- [Now Is The End of Our Certainty](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/03/01/now-is-the-end-of-our-certainty/) - Today is Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Carnival. The last festive day before the forty days of Lent. It's hard to imagine letting the good times roll in our own communities as Putin's tanks roll toward Kiev. They are already in Kharkiv. The Russians are committing war crimes, while Ukrainians fight for their country,
- [War as Ruined Time](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/02/27/war-as-ruined-time/) - These words by Phil Snider, a pastor at Brentwood Christian Church in Springfield, MO, really spoke to me. I hope they will speak to you, too. He's a favorite writer of mine and I hope you will read more of his stuff. As if our world could take one more thing. War is ruined time.
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/02/02/the-eternal-return-11/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [Plague-Waiting for an Eschaton - Plague Epistle XI](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/01/21/waiting-in-the-after-times-plague-epistle-xi/) - At some point, they stopped waiting... or at least stopped waiting so expectantly. For some, maybe the first or second generation of followers, they stopped after a few months. For others, it would be much longer. Others held true to the promise, to the hope. Jesus hadn't come back. But he said he would. And
- [The Whitening of Martin Luther King, Jr.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/01/17/the-whitening-of-martin-luther-king-jr/) - Focusing solely in MLK's Dream is to whiten him, to make him palpable to white audiences by focusing solely on something that can be easily and readily shared: a dream.
- [Epiphany and Our Crisis of Authority](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/01/06/epiphany-and-our-crisis-of-authority/) - Epiphany is a word we use akin to "revelation": a sudden realization, an unexpected vision of the true and possible, that eureka moment of creativity and insight. "And then, I had an epiphany." We "have" epiphanies. We possess them. We feel compelled to share them. Epiphanies abound. Western Christians observe (if they do) January 6
- [We're The Saints Who Don't Want to Be Found](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2022/01/01/were-the-saints-who-dont-want-to-be-found/) - The end's not nearIt's hereAlleluiaSpread the cheerAnd watch the millenariansThrow a party for a thousand yearsYou won't see the pious prayingThey'll be too busy flayingAll the martyrs with better waysTo stop the world decayingIf you call me I won't be homeI'm hiding from the kingdom comeThey can't see everything on earthWith the satellites and the
- [Ten Publishing Tips for Young Academics, Revised Edition.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/09/21/ten-publishing-tips-for-young-academics/) - I was in academic publishing for over ten years. I was an editor acquiring Religion and Philosophy monographs and edited collections at a major, international academic press. Because I kept answering the same questions over and over again and saw so many young scholars make grand faux pas as they entered the academic publishing world, I
- [Twenty Years After September 11th, This Day of Lamentation](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2021/09/11/twenty-years-after-september-11th-this-day-of-lamentation/) - For those of us who remember that day, we are forever in that day. The day does not stop. It is with us, that eternal, infernal day.
- [The Last Poem of Dietrich Bonhoeffer](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/04/09/the-last-poem-of-dietrich-bonhoeffer/) - Sixty-one years ago today, in Flossenbürg, Germany, Nazi guards hanged Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Two weeks later, the Soviets would liberate the prison. This is the last poem he wrote, found in his cell. "By the Powers of Good" With every power for good to stay and guide me, Comforted and inspired beyond all fear, I’ll live these
- [Re-Membering in the Time of Trial](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2021/04/01/re-membering-in-the-time-of-trial/) - What we have lost can only be remembered. And it is in the act and ritual of remembering, re-membering that together we create something new.
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2021/02/02/the-eternal-return-10/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [St Anthony! St Anthony! Please Come 'Round...](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/08/10/st-anthony-st-anthony-please-come-round/) - ...There's something that's lost that cannot be found. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cYNI8s_vo4 Today is the eleventh anniversary of the death of Anthony H. Wilson, saint of Manchester, England. Read his obituary in The Guardian if you have not heard of him (most saints are known only by those who pray to them). Perennial television host and co-founder of
- [This Evil Insurrection. This Infernal Godhead.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2021/01/10/this-evil-insurrection-this-infernal-godhead/) - This horrific insurrection before our eyes is of the dumbest, most ignorant parts of America. It refuses to accept juridicial verdicts about the veracity of their claims, even the review by SCOTUS with three Trump appointees. It refuses to accept the legislative authority of the Electoral College and the executive authority of the Vice President.
- [Our Democracy's Moment of Krisis](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2021/01/08/our-democracys-moment-of-krisis/) - And upon that cold, grey day of Epiphany, hung before the Capitol I saw among the seething mob of welcomed insurgents a giant flag proclaiming JESUS 2020. I saw erected before the Capitol dome a cross and a gallows. I saw people huddled fearful for their lives as fascists shattered windows and through marble halls
- ["The End's Not Near"](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2021/01/01/the-ends-not-near/) - The end's not nearIt's hereAlleluiaSpread the cheerAnd watch the millenariansThrow a party for a thousand years You won't see the pious prayingThey'll be too busy flayingAll the martyrs with better waysTo stop the world decaying If you call me I won't be homeI'm hiding from the kingdom comeThey can't see everything on earthWith the satellites
- [The Days of Our Dead - Plague Epistle XI](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/10/31/the-days-of-our-dead-plague-epistle-ix/) - We can remember that the dead are never dead, that the dead are never gone. That the dead haunt us and visit us and form us. They appear when we least expect it and they are gone when we need them most.
- [Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now: The Manchester Passion](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/04/23/heaven-knows-im-miserable-now-the-manchester-passion/) - The Manchester Passion was a public, outdoor event performed on Good Friday, 2006, put on by BBC3 in the English city of Manchester, home to some of the most iconic post-punk and alternative bands of late twentieth century English rock. The goal was simple: tell the story of Good Friday through the seminal and influential
- [We played a flute for you, you did not dance. We sang a dirge, you did not mourn.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/01/we-sang-a-song-you-did-not-dance-we-played-a-dirge-you-did-not-mourn/) - It can be easier to learn, to retain information in cadence. Rhythms offer repetition. A kind of re-membering, reattaching significance to each other and to ourselves. Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, Job, Aeneid, Metamorphoses. These are all poems, all ancient stories. These are also all religious poems. Gods are everywhere. And they interact with humans. There is
- ["This" and The Trauma of Easter - Plague Epistle X](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/04/12/this-and-the-trauma-of-easter-plague-epistle-x/) - When we incorporate this virus into our daily rhythms and our children and grandchildren learn this time of human history, how do we explain it?
- [Encountering Death on Good Friday - Plague Epistle IX](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/04/10/encountering-death-on-good-friday-plague-epistle-ix/) - And with that, Jesus dies. Death surrounds us like we have never experienced and Good Friday strikes right to the heart. The single event of the Crucifixion overturned everything in the disciples' lives. The communal event of this plague has overturned everything in our lives. Death does not become. It always is. Today of all
- [Enjoy the Silence - Plague Epistle VIII](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/04/09/enjoy-the-silence-plague-epistle-viii/) - Enjoy the Silence - Plague Epistle VIII I have never really focused on contemplative silence. I don't consider myself a contemplative, but the silence that accompanies grief and exhaustion is with me, now. I welcome it.
- [Betray All Palm Sunday - Plague Epistle VII](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/04/05/betray-all-palm-sunday-plague-epistle-vii/) - So begins Holy Week in April, the cruelest month, in the midst of our creeping, wheezing plague. And today, Palm Sunday, is when we begin our collective betrayal of the Son of Man. Who else shall be betrayed? Today, we read in Matthew's gospel the Liturgy of the Palms of how Jesus fulfills Jewish prophecy
- [Grand Theft Colt on Cloak Sunday](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/03/24/grand-theft-colt-on-cloak-sunday/) - Palm Sunday is weird. I mean, even for Christians, Palm Sunday should be weird. In Luke, Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem and we can almost hear the sigh of "let's do this" under his breath and the weirdness starts. We meet our hero in the midst of Chapter 19: 29 When he had come near
- [My Brooklyn Friday - Plague Epistle VI](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/04/04/my-brooklyn-friday-plague-epistle-vi/) - Yesterday was the first day this plague overran my mental defenses. I sat in my chair for long spells staring. Time languished and curdled with disuse. I felt like I was waiting for something that would not leave. I heard church bells as I looked for my car, only to find that it had been
- [Writing through Plague - Plague Epistle V](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/03/30/writing-through-plague-plague-epistle-v/) - If there is one thing to do to pass one's time isolated during plague, it's writing... What is it about plague that compels us to write about it? "Writing through Plague - Plague Epistle V"
- [Feeding the American Moloch - Plague Epistle IV](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/03/25/feeding-the-american-moloch-plague-epistle-iv/) - Beware Republicans and their devotion to that child-devouring idol, Moloch! I am reading First Things' R.R. Reno, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Glenn Beck, and other conservative luminaries recommend abandoning the elderly to the plague to preserve their American way of life. How much more blatantly can such soulless imperialism devour human flesh and frailty?
- [The Time is Out of Joint - Plague Epistle III](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/03/23/the-time-is-out-of-joint-plague-epistle-iii/) - "The time is out of joint," says Hamlet. So, too, is ours. - Plague Epistle III
- [Little Liturgies for Cramped Spaces - Plague Epistle II](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/03/21/little-liturgies-for-cramped-spaces-plague-epistle-ii/) - When ritual is performed and liturgy created, there is the construction of new, certain time within this age of uncertainty.
- [Alone Together - Plague Epistle I](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/03/20/alone-together-plague-epistle-i/) - I am in Brooklyn, New York and I am writing a bleak theology while cloistered with the rest of my city. I do not know what these epistles, these letters, these dispatches are to become. But I am writing them, because they give me relief and we are alone together in this time of real uncertainty.
- [Remember The White Rose. Fight Fascism.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/02/22/remember-the-white-rose-fight-fascism/) - Today in 1943 at 5:00 pm, Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst were beheaded by the Nazis for their activities with The White Rose non-violent resistance movement. It would be over two more years before the Nazis were defeated. Yet again, fascism is on the rise. In our frustrating and frustrated
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2020/02/02/the-eternal-return-2020/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [David Bowie, our Lazarus and Apollo](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/01/12/david-bowie-our-lazarus/) - After receiving his prognosis, I can only wonder if Bowie sat alone in a quiet, dark room and listened for a long, dark time to Joy Division, that bitter salve for mortal dread and imminent collapse, that band that he himself inspired. "Lazarus" opens as if he had. Stark and high bass notes clip from "She's
- [A Theological Take on Good Omens: A Prologue](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2019/06/06/a-theological-take-on-good-omens/) - In the beginning… God reveals to us, in the voice of Frances McDormand, that we are wrong. Specifically, we are wrong about beginnings and we are wrong about time. And if there are fundamental things that we as a species are obsessed about they are when and how things start and how and why things
- [Prepare for Despair!](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2019/03/05/prepare-for-despair/) - New York City is fat with the pastries that are the harbingers of Lent. Greenpoint, Brooklyn's Polish jelly-filled pączki, Danish cream-filled fastelavnsbolle at Ole & Steen at Union Square, zeppole in my Italian Carroll Gardens, Shrove Tuesday pancakes dripping with syrup in so many Protestant churches. I will eat them all. I will eat the
- [Reading Kierkegaard after Christchurch](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2019/03/17/reading-kierkegaard-after-christchurch/) - Collectively, globally, humanly, we are experiencing a heightened awareness of our despair. I, along with millions of others, was rendered speechless with horror and lamentation. Fifty (so far) Muslim worshippers murdered and countless others injured by a white supremacist, a white man who has exchanged his humanity for the desolation of the inhumane. On the
- [Self Establishment.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2019/03/12/self-establishment/) - It's a bit breathtaking that our reflection on the self was all about a single, introductory paragraph. And yet already we already have a better understanding of what Kierkegaard understands the self to be, or at least be about. Most often, we think about ourselves relating to other people, the external world of ourselves. Society,
- [Don't Hold Your Breath.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2019/03/07/dont-hold-your-breath/) - Yesterday was a big day. Let's do a breathing exercise to help us calm down. It will help us with what's next. Let's take a deep breath. Lent is about slowing down, being more reflective, becoming more self-reflective. Let's take another breath. Good. Breathing is essential. The Latin word for breath is spiritus, but spiritus
- [The Truly Horrifying Thing](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2019/03/06/the-truly-horrifying-thing/) - Again, it is Ash Wednesday, the first day of the slow season of Lent. The beginning of our meandering trek toward Passion Week, that Christological culmination, full of dashed hopes and bewildering absurdity. Today, we allow ourselves to be told and dare to tell ourselves that we are mortal and are going to die. And
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2019/02/02/the-eternal-return-9/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- ["Everything is Bonzer!" (Parts 1 and 2) - The Good Place Review](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/10/04/everything-is-bonzer-parts-1-and-2-the-good-place-review/) - [WARNING: These reviews contain spoilers and nerdy philosophical/theological references.] The first season of The Good Place begins with death. Or more specifically, it begins with the beginning of the Afterlife in what seems to be Paradise for the ethically elite. The second season begins with Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, a reboot into one’s own personal hell
- [On September 11th, Ritual, and Radiohead.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/09/11/on-september-11th-ritual-and-radiohead/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M_Gg1xAHE4 Today is the seventeenth anniversary of when aircraft knives cut through the cool, blue sky into the fabric of our lives. It always happened this morning. It always is like it was yesterday. Such is life after trauma. Such is life after trauma. I keep saying that. I keep hearing myself say that, as
- [A Bleak Iconography](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/08/08/a-bleak-iconography/) - It was time to sharpen the contrast, really. I have redesigned the blog to signify a kind of territory. This territory is wilderness, the landscape stark and difficult, full of memories and promises we create as we go along, each becoming ourselves. As we create, we create markers and monuments for pilgrimage. Monuments for ourselves
- [Charlottesville, Racism, and Sins of Omission](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/08/13/sins_of_omission/) - If I am having so hard a time formulating even a first sentence about Charlottesville, I can only guess the feat at hand for the sermon writer scrambling to pen something necessary and coherent and urgent and and and. And I hope it is every sermon writer - especially every white sermon writer. I hope
- [Yet There's Still This Appeal](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/02/14/yet-theres-still-this-appeal/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuuObGsB0No
- [In Another School, Sudden Death and its Untimeliness](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/02/15/death-and-its-untimeliness/) - Last night, I saw this photo. My heart broke again. The day was already strange enough, love and death juxtaposed and mixed. And then the shooting started. Our acknowledgement of the inevitable future of our collective and individual demise was met by the catastrophic present of another school transformed into an abattoir. We did not
- [Watch Out! The World's Behind You!](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/06/02/watch-out-the-worlds-behind-you/) - Yesterday, I had the pleasure to walk through Manhattan's Lower East Side, from Essex Street up through Alphabet City to Tompkins Square Park to Second Avenue and then down to Houston Street. For better or worse, it has cleaned up immensely over the decades, but the LES was once where New Yorkers, dragged by the
- [When Numbers are Not](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/03/12/when_numbers_are_not/) - https://vimeo.com/259476611 Johánn Jóhannson A Song for Europa Orphée The Conet Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUQUD3IMbb4 I do not consider myself a mystic. Yet, the whole phenomenon of number stations possesses for me an ethereal, preternatural sort of communication, expression, and aesthetic. They are simultaneously calming and unsettling. They are impossible to decipher. The messages are entirely
- [Peter Rollins, the Pentecaustic](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/06/08/peter-rollins-the-pentecaustic/) - Today is Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. This can often mean cake, but it always means fire. Luke's Acts of the Apostles describes the events of Pentecost with the rushing wind, the fiery heads, and glossolalia of the Apostles, holed up in the upper room. They went out into the streets to preach the
- [It's Just a Donut.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/02/13/its-just-a-donut/) - It's just a donut. There's a shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, just off the G train at Nassau called Peter Pan Donuts. They do good donuts. In fact, Tina Fey has confessed she'd like to have sex with their white-cream-filled powdered ones. Personally, I prefer sex with their red velvet donut ice cream sandwiches, but I
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2018/02/02/the-eternal-return-8/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [ADVENT IS NOW. ADVENT IS NOW. ADVENT IS NOW.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/12/03/advent-is-now-advent-is-now-advent-is-now/) - As I watch the ongoing mutation and collapse of my nation and society, Advent seems grittier and more necessary than in years past. You can feel our empire shudder and fret. The Rulers and the Rich and the Reverends, they twist into something astonishing and fearsome. They feed the people with lies. Words and actions
- [Jumped in the River, What Did I See?](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/09/11/jumped-in-the-water-what-did-i-see/) - I am in Red Hook, Brooklyn, just across the harbor from Downtown Manhattan. I have dropped off my son on his first full day of school. The day seamlessly conflates with that morning of a day sixteen years before. The Twin Towers are burning. The sky, that sharp and flawless painful blue, is the same
- [Everything is Terrible. ](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/06/23/everything-is-terrible/) - Let's break it.
- [And David Bowie as Pontius Pilate](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/04/14/and-david-bowie-as-pontius-pilate/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVq-JWdyvGI Aloof, merciless, terrifying, David Bowie is my favorite Pontius Pilate. In his bored, British accent he is empire. He is Senatus Populusque Romanus. He is Britannia. He is Pax Americana. He is lethal. This Ziggy Stardust, this Aladdin Sane, this Thin White Duke, this chameleon that has captured our hearts, now he is he
- ["It Was Like a Sacrament."](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/03/20/it-was-like-a-sacrament/)
- [Waiting for the Dust.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/03/01/waiting-for-the-dust/) - You and I are waiting. It is hard to wait. But such is Lent. Such is life. On Ash Wednesday, we remember from dust we are created and to dust we shall return, because we have to tell ourselves this from time to time. Most days, we are not waiting to become dust again. This is not
- [Steve offers great thoughts on our current situation as we approach Lent.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/02/20/steve-offers-great-thoughts-on-our-current-situation-as-we-approach-lent/) - http://steveawiggins.com/2017/02/20/ash-monday/
- [Watching the Paraclete. ](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/02/14/watching-the-paraclete/) - ​​ This stark element is not of us. She moves all matter, yet has no matter. "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes."
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/02/02/the-eternal-return-7/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [Fight Fascism! #RESIST](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/01/29/fight-fascism-resist/)
- [Next Year in Jerusalem [Book Review]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/02/19/next-year-in-jerusalem-book-review/) - If a new subgenre could be coined for John Kolchak's book, Next Year in Jerusalem, "grim gospel" would be more than satisfactory. Set somewhere in the arid wastelands between Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ and Gore Vidal's Julian, Kolchak weaves a Hobbesian Palestine where the life of a man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short, especially
- [Nothing Changes on New Year's Day](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2017/01/01/nothing-changes-on-new-years-day/) - And so we're told this is the golden age And gold is the reason for the wars we wage Though I want to be with you, be with you night and day Nothing changes on New Year's Day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdLuk2Agamk
- [You Either Win It Or You Don't](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/11/30/you-either-win-it-or-you-dont/) - https://youtu.be/wF7sAjVcFJM
- [Our Weimar Moment](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/11/09/our-weimar-moment/) - I wrote this after I could no longer watch the returns of Election Night, so it's a bit of a panicking paroxysm, but given the state of affairs, I think I'm allowed it. Two nights ago, I started a post about the fact that with a Trump victory, the United States would be entering a
- [Tomorrow, this is what we are stopping. Tomorrow.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/11/07/tomorrow-this-is-what-we-are-stopping-tomorrow/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co
- [September 11, Our Eternal Recurrence](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/09/11/september-11-our-eternal-recurrence/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M_Gg1xAHE4 It is fifteen years and it feels like this morning. Our national holiday of remembrance of shock and horror and helplessness. We continue to create monuments for the dead and for ourselves. We keep asking God and about God, but we understand there are no answers, because we keep creating objects. We keep creating
- [His name is Omran Daqneesh.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/08/18/his-name-is-omran-daqneesh/) - https://youtu.be/7cfBmRW3isc His name is Omran Daqneesh. He is five years old. He is in Aleppo, Syria. I cannot bear to look at him. I cannot bear to look away. As a parent, as a person, I am gripped by sorrow. The sky shall not split asunder with mending angels descending. Bombs and death is the
- [The Futility of our Prayers in the Midst of our Violence](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/07/08/the-futility-of-our-prayers-in-the-midst-of-our-violence/) - Listen to the dead. Violence, real, physical violence, is often the the first eruption when relational communication tangibly breaks down. Violence, gun violence, is the deafening, lethal megaphone that strikes fear and sorrow in our hearts. Violence is the material manifestation of the brutality of the heart and mind and soul and spirit. Institutional violence against
- [People Like You Find It Easy](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/05/18/people-like-you-find-it-easy/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EdUjlawLJM Ian Kevin Curtis 15 July 1956 – 18 May 1980
- [Safety is Sat By the Fire [Passover]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/04/22/safety-is-set-by-the-fire-passover/) - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4GxUJxA9y_o It's the rare year when Easter and Passover miss each other by weeks. And the death of Prince is going to eclipse everything in a Bacchic frenzy. But that's not how things work in this place. This night is still different from all other nights.
- [Did he who made the Lamb make thee?](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/03/29/did-he-who-made-the-lamb-make-thee/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSLjYScyaBo
- [Mary Oliver Reminds Us of When We Had Something](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/03/26/mary-oliver-reminds-us-of-when-we-had-something/) - "Gethsemane" Mary Oliver The grass never sleeps. Or the roses. Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning. Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept. The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet, and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body, and heaven knows if it
- [Good Friday's Failure to Shock Us](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/03/25/good-fridays-failure-to-shock-us/) - A naive luxury of Christianity is that Good Friday has been repeated for centuries. The paradox of repetition is that either it creates a complete desensitization or it creates an obsession. The familiarity of Good Friday is such that it surpasses meaninglessness, becoming a blindspot, as seen among many American Protestants, who focus only on Easter.
- [What You Are About To Do, Do Quickly. ](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/03/24/what-you-are-about-to-do-do-quickly/)
- [Buzz, Alive and Relentless](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/03/22/buzz-alive-and-relentless/) - The day is my enemy. The day is empty. And it must be filled with words. The night is empty. And it must be filled with words. My head is filled with words. My heart is filled with words. My soul is words and silence. My ears buzz, alive and relentless. The emptiness, the hole
- [Betrayal, Confession, and our Uncertainty [Lenten Sermon]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/03/15/betrayal-confession-and-our-uncertainty-lenten-sermon/) - On Sunday night, I preached at St. Lydia's on John's version of Judas at the Last Supper. You can listen to it or read it below. https://soundcloud.com/bleak-theology/confessing-uncertainty Jesus Foretells His Betrayal 21 After saying this Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, ‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.’ 22The disciples looked
- ["Bombs of Beirut" by Mary Kouyoumdjian](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/03/16/bombs-of-beirut-by-mary-kouyoumdjian/) - I discovered Mary Kouyoumdjian and her work while listening to Q2, the contemporary classical music station counterpart of WQXR here in NYC. This is the Kronos Quartet performing it live. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pNegch1_dyU This is the kind of music that must continue to be created, regardless of its "accessibility," because this music creates the kind of access required. This
- [Oh, they will give out](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/03/03/oh-they-will-give-out/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmjMFPSLXI4 Wye Oak Civilian "Holy, Holy" Merge Records
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/02/02/the-eternal-return-6/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [Put Your Hands Up...](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/02/12/put-your-hands-up/) - http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1C5I5kHrNqg "No One is Lost," No One is Lost, Stars, 2014.
- [Elements of Lent](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/02/10/elements-of-lent/) - Lent arrives with a sigh and the dust of snow. Is it time again, this eternal return? So soon? The smoothing out of wrinkled parchment, the reordering of our lives. Or is it the notice that order is not what it once was? What have I given up that I keep returning to Lent? What
- [MLK and the White Church's Memory Hole](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/01/18/mlk-and-the-white-churchs-memory-hole/) - Today marks the annual federal recognition of the life, work, and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. For many Americans, this will be our only explicit nod to not just the man, but what many of us consider a positive face of race relations. It is hard not to be caught up in the vision
- [.REQUIEM.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2016/01/12/requiem/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kszLwBaC4Sw
- [Guns: Idols of Force](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/12/03/guns-idols-of-force/) - "A gun is the jaws of an idea." These words came to me as I was wrestling to develop my personal ethics about war. I was trying to connect a shooter's intention to a bullet hitting someone. It's rudimentary, but we work within our frameworks as we develop our maturing ideas. This idea about ideology and gun came to me during
- [The Dangers of Dostoevsky](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/10/14/the-dangers-of-dostoevsky/) - http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=soR996AcbJQ​ This story from The Moth entitled "Rescue Mission" about a young actress in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen in 1988 completely seized me.
- [Our Gun Plague](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/10/08/our-gun-plague/) - I am suffering what I call "gun fatigue" and I believe that I am not alone. It's the exhaustion that comes from grief over so much death, the feeling of helplessness of both the direct ability to change anything and the indirect ability to see things changed. I would not be surprised if what I
- [Our Inaction is Our Complicity. ](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/10/01/our-inaction-is-our-complicity/) - As a nation, it seems we are thoroughly willing to not accept but to rather endorse, in a wholesale strict constructionist interpretation of our Second Amendment, the guaranteed unfettered freedom to acquire arms and to seek out and kill men, women, and children and to kill them at such a level and rate that it
- [On fire and theology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/09/29/on-fire-and-theology/) - An arsonist, by nature, leaves. Because their job and passion is starting fires. Arsonists are interested in ashes billowing from conflagration. And then they're off. Burning buildings and hearts, alike. And in the smouldering wake of that manic Nietzschean fire starter, is the Nietzschean protector of horses, weeping for mercy and kindness. Tumbling into the
- [Death in the Age of Facebook](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/09/23/death-in-the-age-of-facebook/) - I discovered, yesterday, that a friend from my college years passed away unexpectedly. I learned through that stuttering flutter that is Facebook updates. A few cryptic posts of loss and praise. And then a chorus of strangers clamber for more information, joining in some confused and networked online howl. This is our digital sorrow. For more
- [Black-Eyed Angels Swam With Me](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/09/11/black-eyed-angels-swam-with-me/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2VzLn6DMCE The air was exactly like it was 80 miles west of me. I got out of my preaching class at 9:15 and overheard a construction worker on his cellphone trying to comprehend that the towers had been hit by airplanes. I'll never forget how blue that sky was. How cool that morning was, before
- [Vesuvius](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/08/24/vesuvius/) - And no one could help them. August 24, 79 CE.
- [A blur of memory](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/08/06/a-blur-of-memory/) - While I can remember that my father died on the same day Hiroshima suffered the first atomic weapon, the year it happened, however, tends to blur. It always feels like it was only a few months ago and that I've only now recently come out of the hazy shock of losing one's parent. The anniversary
- [Kierkegaard on the Art of Preaching](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/07/21/kierkegaard-on-the-art-of-preaching/) - "But to preach is the most difficult of all arts and is essentially the art that Socrates praised, the art of being able to converse. It goes without saying that the need is not for someone in the congregation to provide an answer or that it would be of help continually to introduce a respondent.
- [Bloomsday.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/06/16/bloomsday/) - -- History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick? -- The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal,
- [Rethinking the Roles of Theologians and Biblical Critics for Today's Church](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/06/11/rethinking-the-roles-of-theologians-and-biblical-critics-for-todays-church/) - This is the first post in a series about the roles certain kinds of academics play in Christian life and community in the present United States. I encourage you to share and respond to these posts to help create a kind of conversation I feel is not taking place within and among religious communities. Constructive criticism is always
- [Thoughts against a Birthday's End](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/05/06/thoughts-against-a-birthdays-end/) - (This was written last night, just before midnight.) There is a little time tonight before Kierkegaard's birthday passes for another year. I hoped to finish The Present Age on the train home, but I left my battered copy on my office desk. I'm surprised how upset I was about it, especially since I had dragged
- [This Is The Crisis I Knew Had To Come](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/04/03/this-is-the-crisis-i-knew-had-to-come-2/) - http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8_NggH3O90oDestroying the balance I kept.
- [How Not To Get By During Holy Week](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/04/02/how-not-to-get-by-during-holy-week/) - For the past week, I have been obsessed with a single song off the freshly-released album by England's indie band, the ebullient and bubbly The Go! Team. Catching me off guard while listening to KEXP online, this song floored me with its Age of Aquarius choir grounded only by an infectious drum track and ear
- ["Acceptance" (A Lenten Poem)](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/02/23/acceptance-a-lenten-poem/) - This morning, as I rose out of the subway station and the grey, cold sky welcomed me with sharp kisses upon my lips and cheeks, I closed my eyes to smile as grief's last stage filled my heart. And I breathed in an eternal winter, where spring is only a story and only arrives as
- [Our Endpoints of Dust](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/02/18/our-endpoints-of-dust/) - Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Here ends the year. Here begins the year. Today, our years are pressed into our forehead. Each life marked as an oily smudge. It is Ash Wednesday and for those of us who take the time, we collectively catch our breaths and remember
- [Burn the Fronds. Prepare for Lent.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/02/17/burn-the-fronds/) - Today, we must burn the palm fronds. The fronds we waved last Palm Sunday, that nasty, brutish day. Our Lent begins in winter. It is cold. Bitterly cold here in the American Northeast. Today, we prepare the ashes for tomorrow. We prepare ourselves for our season. We will feel a fleeting warmth as we watch the
- [When I Hated A Yellow Cow](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/02/13/when-i-hated-a-yellow-cow/) - There was a time when a painting of a cow used to enrage me like no other. The bright colors and cool distant mountains, the sloping curves and happy scene reached deep within me and brought forth some kind of churning, livid reaction. I hated that cow. Viscerally. That cow annoyed the fuck out of me. In
- [Trouble So Hard](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/02/11/trouble-so-hard/) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6w3s_spyKQ Lent approaches.
- [When We Are Untimely](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/02/01/when-we-are-untimely/) - The more I drift from my daily engagement with formal academic theology, namely in an editorial capacity, I feel my small driftskiff beginning to take on a kind of water. Which is fine. So I pour out ink and blood and tears, my water. Because the personal is the theological (like the political), we tend
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/02/02/the-eternal-return-5/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/02/the-eternal-return-3/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [Existentialist Games](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/02/01/existentialist-games/) - Tom Toro in The New Yorker, February 2, 2015.
- ["A Kind of Stopping"](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/01/24/a-kind-of-stopping/) - Sorrow Marie Howe So now it has our complete attention, and we are made whole. We take it into our hands like a rope, grateful and tethered, freed from waiting for it to happen. It is here, precisely as we imagined. If the man has died, if the child's illness has taken a sudden turn,
- [The Disappointment of Martin Luther King](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/01/19/the-disappointment-of-martin-luther-king/) - Today, the day we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., we will reflect upon the past year of tumult and tragedy, and the legacy upon which that is built: racial oppression and discrimination. And many people will raise up and herald and praise and listen to the famous and canonical "I have a dream" speech. But
- [A Trafficker of the Creative Impulse](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/01/14/a-trafficker-of-the-creative-impulse/) - I'm very pleased to see that my multi-talented friend Jacob Slichter has finally condemned himself to blogging at Portable Philosophy, where he writes about "music, writing, teaching, and more." Jacob is primarily known as a musician. He drums. Chances are, you've heard one of his bands. But he is also a writer and also a teacher
- [An Evening's Thoughts on Faulkner](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2015/01/12/an-evenings-thoughts-on-faulkner/) - Darl is my favorite character in As I Lay Dying. Maybe I identify with him. If it is, it might be only because I love the way he speaks. Faulkner struck me first with this: The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light
- [We See Them Burnin' Crosses/See the Flames, Higher and Higher.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/12/07/we-see-them-burnin-crossessee-the-flames-higher-and-higher/) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ifY1UV3CM Outside is America. #AdventIsNow #blacklivesmatter
- [Advent is Eric Garner, dead from a cop's chokehold. ](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/12/03/advent-is-eric-garner-dead-from-a-cops-chokehold/) - In light of the two grand jury decisions to not indict the police officers who killed two young black men, I'm posting tonight the text version of the sermon I preached at St. Lydia's a few weeks ago. This is, after all, the first week of Advent. #blacklivesmatter (You can listen to the recording here). I'm so
- [A Very William S. Burroughs Thanksgiving](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/11/27/a-very-william-s-burroughs-thanksgiving/) - In countercultural America, Thanksgiving traditions fall into two main categories: Arlo Guthrie's epic story "Alice's Restaurant" and William S. Burroughs' "A Thanksgiving Prayer." Clearly, this being a theology blog, we take a moment to bow our heads and pray along with St. Burroughs. Dear Lord, hear our prayer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLSveRGmpIE
- [The End is Near - A Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/11/11/the-end-is-near-a-sermon-for-the-first-sunday-of-lent/) - I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's in Brooklyn, NY on the First Sunday of Advent on the evenings of Sunday, November 9 and Monday, November 10. This recording is from the latter. The title is "The End is Near: Finding Our Voices in the Wilderness of Advent." https://soundcloud.com/bleak-theology/the-end-is-near-finding-our-voices-in-the-wilderness-of-lent The Scripture is Jeremiah 33.14-16 NRSV.
- [Disaster, "Bad Stars," and Occupy Sandy](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/10/29/disaster-bad-stars-and-occupy-sandy/) - Today is the second anniversary of Hurricane Sandy's landfall in New York. We continue to suffer the consequences, both materially and immaterially. Sandy lives with us. For a Brooklynite, this is significant. When St. Lydia's was looking for a new space, one real concern was water. "This is the New New York," one of us
- [Bad Theodicy and the Summer that Sucks.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/08/14/theodicy-and-the-summer-that-sucks/) - Ferguson. ISIS. Robin Williams' suicide. Gaza Strip. Ebola. Border refugee crisis. Ukraine. Syrian civil war. Boko Haram. Global warming. It's been a bleak summer worldwide. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it sucks. I've found that when significantly bad things happen, I don't write something. Sometimes, it's because I have an
- [Bring 'Em All Back To Life](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/02/14/bring-em-all-back-to-life-2/) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbnHmFKxPgA Feist, Metals, "Graveyard." I would sing this song at Bushwick Abbey.
- [Let the Dead Bury the Dead](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/08/06/let-the-dead-bury-the-dead/) - Death is exhausting. "Let the dead bury the dead," recommends Jesus to the man, the man who's lost his father. I lost my father three years ago. I felt his hand twitch one last time in the earliest hours of August 6. His slow, solitary death, alone with his family in a Fort Worth hospice,
- [It Really, Really, Really Could Happen.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/07/08/it-really-really-really-could-happen/) - http://youtu.be/BrbxWOMpwfs Blur "The Universal" The Great Escape
- [The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/07/07/the-greatest-light-is-the-greatest-shade-2/) - God haunts me. Let me count the ways. There are days that I wish could escape the whole matter. But it is hard to be a writer or thinker without the skulking raven in the room, except this raven not only says “nevermore,” but “evermore,” as well. And the paradox of God haunts me, too.
- [Help Us Fund St. Lydia's New Home! Share In The Meal.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/06/30/help-us-fund-st-lydias-new-home-share-in-the-meal/) - St. Lydia’s is a dinner church. It is an exercise in radical hospitality and a place where I find community here in New York City, a city both inhumane and all too human. St. Lydia’s is grounded in the Christian story of life, death, and resurrection. It is a community that welcomes each stranger as
- [Bleak Theology 101: theology, Theology™, and the theological](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/06/26/bleak-theology-101-theology-theology-and-the-theological/) - When I started this blog, I had no idea how it would be received. I just wanted to express my frustrations about, well, God and God-ish things. And I've been surprised that in sharing my frustrations, readers have shared my frustrations with others. So, thank you, readers, you very diverse lot. Misery does love company. But
- [Dana Horn's Guide For The Perplexed](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/06/01/dana-horns-guide-for-the-perplexed/) - Upon the recommendation of Tor.com, I read Dana Horn's A Guide for the Perplexed, a modern retelling of Genesis' Joseph story, here with two Ashkenazi sisters Josephine and Judith, of when he is thrown into a pit/sold into slavery and thought dead. It is intertwined with stories of Moses Maimonides, the author of the eponymous
- [Sarah Palin's Weaponized Baptism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/04/29/sarah-palins-weaponized-baptism/) - Perhaps you've heard by now Sarah Palin's infamous comment about that if she were in charge, "they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists." The crowd at the NRA annual meeting went wild with applause. Aghast, commentators from across the political spectrum chastised her for employing the sacrament of baptism as a torture
- [I Used To Think That The Day Would Never Come](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/04/20/i-used-to-think-that-the-day-would-never-come/) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_rhnHpRSXQ And now I feel you've left me standing/in a world that's so demanding
- [An Unexpected Burden of Lent](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/04/19/an-unexpected-burden-of-lent/) - It has been an unusually difficult Lent. An infant concretizes time in ways never before considered. Against the season, nothing moves slowly. A baby's cry at 3am assures that. If I want to do anything, I have to give myself a buffer of thirty minutes to even get started. I have to plan in ways
- [My Valentine's Day Massacre](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/02/14/valentines-day-massacre/) - There are plenty of problems with Valentine's Day. There's the consumeristic cultural pressure to conform to purchasing some fetish object that signifies a perceived-appropriate kind and level of affective significance. There's the capitalistic exploitation of (genuine or contrived) affection and desire to sell, well, everything. There's the matter of poor St. Valentine, himself, brutally martyred
- [Your City Lies in Dust, My Friend](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/03/14/your-city-lies-in-dust-my-friend/) - http://youtu.be/L8dRc9wwmuE
- [Birdstrike](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/03/12/birdstrike/) - I got nothin'. Some nights, it feels like everything you write is a bird into a window.
- [Interlude](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/03/11/interlude/) - I live on the liminal sounds of the city, not even a mile from the harbor, where the boats mourn to one another. Their sorrowful cries echo about the sleeping streets. The water is cold. The air is cold. Taxis hiss down below me. Brooklyn is waking. Rosy-fingered dawn runs her hands along my windows and
- [Our Uncanny Wilderness](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/03/10/our-uncanny-wilderness/) - Make no mistake: there has always been theological Wilderness. The Genesis writer described a Garden in the midst of the Wilderness. Before the Fall, there exists Wilderness. Wilderness is a part of Creation. It did not come into existence with humanity's Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was part of the separation of the Earth and
- [They Had Tears in Their Eyes. [Wilderness]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/03/05/they-had-tears-in-their-eyes-wilderness/) - http://youtu.be/tZhKV32Vf7U Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures, "Wilderness" Lent is our migration into exile, into our Wilderness. For the next forty days, we make it our home. We are nomads, dislocated from our familiar lands, with only our tattered pasts as markers, seeking out uncertain futures toward Easter. Forced on, our power of travel seems transcendent. We cross
- [Eat fast. You're gonna need it.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/03/04/eat-fast-youre-gonna-need-it/) - Gear up. Load up. Eat fast. Prepare. Be ready. Lent starts tomorrow. Hurry. Now. We don't think about Mardi Gras in this way, but it is a subtext. Eat all the sweets you can before you can't. You'll be fasting. You'll have given up chocolate or... whatever it is you've decided to give up. But
- [Lost in the Cloud](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/03/02/lost-in-the-cloud/) - http://youtu.be/cqBujJ9OVFU
- [The Threat of Freedom](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/02/27/the-threat-of-freedom/) - It was a rough day for bigotry, yesterday. First, a federal judge overturned the Texas constitutional amendment that reserved marriage to be between a man and woman. Then later in the day, Arizona governor Jan Brewer vetoed SB 1062, which was intended to protect "religious liberty." Unsurprisingly, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said he'd appeal
- [The Unknown Pleasures of Lent.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/02/20/the-unknown-pleasures-of-lent/) - Lent approaches, as always, silently and without fanfare. This year, I will shape my Lenten writings around the songs of Joy Division. Consider it a commentary for a kind of Lenten soundtrack. Mind you, this is not a Christianizing of Joy Division in any way. If anything, it is a drawing of Lenten observers further
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/02/02/the-eternal-return-4/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [The Cruelty of Creativity.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/01/31/the-cruelty-of-creativity/) - Writing is not difficult. Writing well, however, can be. And what I find as difficult as writing well is writing at all. There worst thing a writer can do instead of writing is to think about writing. By this I don't mean criticism. No, I mean thinking about the fact that I could be writing when
- [The Joy and Terror of New Life.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2014/01/27/the-joy-and-terror-of-new-life/) - Last year was difficult, to say the least. And while there were many things that occurred that required attention, I think it was the abiding anticipation of the birth of our first child that served as the sword of Damocles about everything else. Then, in the earliest hours of mid-September, my beloved wife gave birth
- [Bleak Theologies of Nature and Culture](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/07/02/bleak-theologies-of-nature-and-culture/) - Let's blow the dust off this thing. Over the past week, my blog stats have spiked and I can't figure out why. So I googled "bleak theology" to see if anyone had linked to me. Not that what I found caused the spike, but I found the blog of one Leon Niemoczynski (a great last
- [Trinity Sunday [Bad Analogies with Gaiman and Pratchett]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/05/26/trinity-sunday-neil-gaiman-vs-terry-pratchett/) - Yay! Trinity Sunday! WTF. Erm... the Trinity! The confounded and confounding Christian doctrine that seeks to explain the three Actors - wait... one Actor, oh I don't know how to explain it. Today is the day on the calendar when the Church reminds itself that it probably would be a good day to praise God
- [My Art of Interrupting Interrupting Art [The Creative Process]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/05/25/my-art-of-interrupting-interrupting-art-the-creative-process/) - At the risk of sounding snotty, on this wonderfully dreary Saturday afternoon, I was catching up on my Paris Reviews, by polishing off Issue 203, and listening to NYC's classical music station WQXR's online contemporary station, Q2, and discovered Nico Muhly's I Drink The Air Before Me: Music Under Pressure 3. " I Drink the Air Before
- [A Scout Is...](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/05/24/a-scout-is/) - Yesterday, the Boy Scouts of America's National Council, by a 61% margin, voted to accept boys who self-identify as gay into their ranks, i.e., "approved a resolution to remove the restriction denying membership to youth on the basis of sexual orientation alone". Here is the official statement. Immediate reaction is mixed and pointed, even by the
- [Don't Walk Away [Ian Curtis Buried]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/05/18/dont-walk-away-ian-curtis-buried/) - Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, passed away by his own hand thirty-three years ago, today. There was a time when that anniversary was not as important in the popular culture as it is now. Now, in the hands of two aging generations, Joy Division flourishes. Joy Division street art abounds around the world. The
- [Friday Whatever Post](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/05/17/friday-whatever-post/) - On Wednesday, our Theology Circle finished Bonhoeffer's Life Together. It seemed that everyone really enjoyed reading it and got a lot of insight out of it. As one reads through it, one discerns Bonhoeffer's real attempt to lead the reader to the goal of communion, of Christian community. There is a real trajectory there. It's
- [Gracefully "Hiking the Appalachian Trail"](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/05/08/gracefully-hiking-the-appalachian-trail/) - So, former South Carolina governor, Mark Sanford, won his old congressional seat last night, defeating Elizabeth Colbert Busch with 55% of the vote. To be honest, I didn't think he'd win. But for all the moral posturing of social conservatives, I think that the New York Times summed it up: “We are not trying to
- [Happy 200th Birthday, Søren](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/05/05/happy-200th-birthday-soren/) - Today is the two-hundredth birthday of Søren Kierkegaard. It's hard to grasp that. This man, this singular man and thinker has been more influential upon my thinking and sense of self and understanding of the world than any other person. In fact, it's difficult to say much about him and his influence, it is so
- [The Battles of Marathon](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/04/21/the-battles-of-marathon/) - The marathon begins in violence, death, and tragedy. Most people do not know that Pheipippides, who ran from the Battle of Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over the Persian threat in 490 BCE, died with the words, "Rejoice, we win!" on his lips. We, as civilizations, have worked hard, through the institution
- [On Hiatus.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/04/15/on-hiatus/) - For the duration of this week, I am in a location within which it is difficult to be filled existential angst and theological misery. We'll see how things feel after my first surf lesson this afternoon. In the meantime, please enjoy this academic and spiritual resource, the Lutheran Insulter, by which you can receive a
- [The Man with the Cinched Spine [Theodicy]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/04/12/the-man-with-the-cinched-spine/) - Early last night, as I passed through Manhattan's Columbus Circle subway station on the way home, there was a beggar sitting and hunched awry at the bottom of the steps to the A train. His legs were splayed around him, as if in a strange circle, his hands raised. His right hand held a cup.
- [Fearful Christianity | Sects and Violence in the Ancient World](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/04/05/fearful-christianity-sects-and-violence-in-the-ancient-world/) - Fearful Christianity | Sects and Violence in the Ancient World. The always insightful Steve Wiggins writes on the recent (and reactionary) bill in North Carolina to make Christianity the state religion. A choice quote: Which Christianity would they choose? Who would be welcome in New North Carolina? Mormons? Mennonites? Methodists? Catholics? Well, at least Catholics
- [Sleep [April 4, 1968]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/04/04/sleep-april-4-1968/) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDH7oD_AQW8 "MLK", U2
- [The World Ends a Little Bit Every Day [Sit and Eat]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/04/02/the-world-ends-a-little-bit-every-day-sit-and-eat/) - Emily Scott, St. Lydia's pastor, has quickly become one of my favorite sermon writers and preachers. Enjoy this sermon from Lent. I meant to post this earlier, of course. The World Ends a Little Bit Every Day. Here's the beginning. Click above to read the rest at her blog, Sit and Eat. I preached this
- [Art, the Salve.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/04/02/art-the-salve/) - As you can guess, Holy Week stresses me out to the point that for a time afterward I feel like I have some unceasing tuning fork in my hands. Today is no different. And it seems that it would be best to stop talking about the difficulty to fathom everything and to just look at
- [A Day for Hubris](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/04/01/a-day-for-hubris/) - Easter Monday is a bit of a letdown, which is a good thing, because expectations are not as high, but also people are going back to their daily lives. Yes, Easter came. The Lord is risen. The Lord is risen, indeed. Christos anesti. Thanks. Yes. I know. Please stop. I have a headache. Easter Monday.
- [](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/02/i-like-her-sermons-httpsitandeattypepadcomblog201204ripeness-and-rot-html/) - I like her sermons: http://sitandeat.typepad.com/blog/2012/04/ripeness-and-rot-.html
- [Dietrich Bonhoeffer. April 9, 1945. Tegel Prison, Germany.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/09/bonhoeffer-april-9-1945-tegel-prison-germany/)
- [Easter, I Don't Know How to Quit You](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/03/31/easter-i-dont-know-how-to-quit-you/) - Oh, Easter! You ruin everything. You ruin everything so much that I can't even figure out how to write about you. I want to believe. I want to not believe. Your four stories don't line up, even the gospel writers don't know what to do with you. You're very confusing. And Easter is confusing. We've
- [Church Strippers](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/03/28/the-betrayal/) - Last night, we had our first Theology Circle on Bonhoeffer. Twelve of us, beers in hand, crammed together on a long picnic table in the back of a low-lit, noisy Brooklyn bar and talked about the meaning of "church". To set the scene, I started out talking about Bonhoeffer's life and context and how much
- [Life Together in Brooklyn](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/03/26/life-together-in-brooklyn/) - Tomorrow, our Theology Circle gathers to start discussing Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together (Gemeinsames Leben). If you're in NYC, come join us. Details are below. I picked LT because it is a very modern, positive exploration of what intentional Christian community can look like and an exploration of what fellowship is. It is a small, accessible
- [This is the Crisis I Knew Had to Come](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/03/25/this-is-the-crisis-i-knew-had-to-come/) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrtXsFvIw7g Joy Division, "Passover" live at Ajanta Club, Derby, UK, April 19, 1980.
- [EV'RY DAY I'M PASTORIN'... - EASTER MUSICAL ON PALM SUNDAY](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/03/24/evry-day-im-pastorin-easter-musical-on-palm-sunday/) - EV'RY DAY I'M PASTORIN'... - EASTER MUSICAL ON PALM SUNDAY.
- [The Theologies of Neil Gaiman](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/27/the-theologies-of-neil-gaiman/) - After a relative period of non-fiction, I have just picked up a copy of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which is a long time coming, really. I have learned that I have to pace myself with interests. The reason is I tend to get obsessed with something and not let it go until I've burned myself out
- [On the Waterfront](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/24/on-the-waterfront/) - Last night, we watched Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando and Karl Malden. Budd Schulberg wrote the screenplay. Nominated for twelve Academy Awards, it won eight. The picture, Kazan, Brando, and Schulberg all won Oscars in 1954. Malden got snubbed. While most people remember Brando lamenting that he "could've been a contender", the
- [On Croaking](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/21/on-croaking/) - The New Yorker - Cartoon by Eric Lewis. For....
- [Worry: A Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/19/463/) - This sermon was offered at St. Lydia's in Brooklyn, New York on the first Sunday of Lent, February 17, 2013. Worry. Luke 12.13-34 I was an anxious child. I worried about being left alone. I worried about doing the right thing, whatever that was. I worried that other kids would pick on me. I worried. And as I
- [The Lenten Nietzsche begins. "On The Three Metamorphoses"](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/03/10/3meta/) - Over the years, I have worked on a collection of (un)timely essays, Lenten reflections upon Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, his anti-gospel. Surprising to some, Nietzsche is often a favorite "atheologian" for those of us trained in the theological arts. The son of a preacher man (a Lutheran pastor), Nietzsche knew his Christianity well, having
- [Troubled Sleep](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/03/16/troubled-sleep/) - The Academic Chairs of Virtue (Today's Reading) What is virtue? Does anyone know anymore? Socrates, in Meno, attempts to define it and cannot. He determines that it is recollected by the soul rather than taught by an instructor. Arete, excellence - this is the Greek word for virtue. And what is the difference between virtue, itself, and
- [Just Like Heaven [Nietzsche vs. Kierkegaard Knife Fight Edition]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/18/just-like-heaven-nietzsche-vs-kierkegaard-knife-fight-edition/) - On the Afterworldly (a reading from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra) How is Heaven like a hospital? It is the place where the sick go to get well when they die. Such a terrible thing to say! The sick are supposed to be healed and free from illness when they go to Heaven. But this is
- [Come Enjoy Bleak Theology at St. Lydia's, Sunday, February 16.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/16/come-enjoy-bleak-theology-at-st-lydias-sunday-february-16/) - So, I've been asked to preach at St. Lydia's tomorrow night. The text is Luke 12:13-34. If you'd like to join us, find us in Brooklyn. Arrive any time between 6:30 and 7pm.
- [Icon, Idol, I Don't Know.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/16/icon-idol-i-dont-know/) - Over at Sects and Violence in the Ancient World, Steve Wiggins ponders the question of when a decades-old portrait of Jesus in an Ohio school building becomes a religious object. Fast forward a few decades. The world has changed drastically. We are multicultural. The internet entertains us with such stories as this. If not for
- [On This Morning's Meteor Explosion and Tonight's Asteroid Pass](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/15/on-tonights-near-miss-asteroid-pass-and-on-knowing/) - Tonight, Asteroid 2012 DA14 passes between us and our moon. Oh, you didn't know that? What an Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day we would have had if its trajectory had been different. The asteroid is about 150 feet wide and will miss us by a distance less than a round trip between New York City
- [Black Ashes and Red Roses in a Brooklyn Subway Station](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/14/black-ashes-and-red-roses-in-a-brooklyn-subway-station/) - Last night, our small band of Lydians gathered in Brooklyn's Atlantic-Barclay's subway terminal, same busy corridor as last year, with a fiddle, shruti, and drum, we offered ashes to all who want them. Again, strangers came out of the river of traveling people to ask for ashes. And they thanked us for offering a simple ritual
- [The Unkindness of the Boy Scouts of America](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/07/the-coming-schism-and-exodus-in-the-boy-scouts-of-america/) - Just to get this out of the way, I am an Eagle Scout. From about age eight through sixteen, my non-academic life was scouting. I went through Cub Scouts, Webelos, attended countless summer camps, the Sixteenth World Jamboree in Australia in 1987/88, the 1990 US National Jamboree, the 1990 Nippon Jamboree, have held pretty much
- [Remember, You Are Going to Die. Peace Be With You.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/13/remember-you-are-going-to-die-peace-be-with-you/) - Today we remember that we are dust - just like last year and the year before and for as far back as we can remember caring about this day, Ash Wednesday. But we must be told we are dust. We tell each other we are dust. It's not enough to tell ourselves that we are
- [Dust in the Subway Station.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/02/23/dust-in-the-subway/) - Last night, I spent two hours standing in Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street subway station reminding complete strangers of their mortality. Each Ash Wednesday, a small band of St. Lydia's community offers ashes to the people passing by. Last year, it was in Union Square (when I first saw them, but did not know who they
- [After the Ashes](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/02/24/after-the-ashes/) - Ash Wednesday is sexy. At least, in comparison to the rest of Lent. We've gone through the excess of Tuesday and have become painfully self-aware on Wednesday. We've all felt very communal and together and we've gotten over our hangovers and we've washed our faces and now everything has the potential to go back to
- [Bursting Day](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/12/bursting-day/) - Sprengidagur! Bursting Day! Yes, today is Bursting Day in Iceland, when you eat all the salted lamb (saltkjot) and pea soup you can eat. Or can't eat. What other culture would call their day before Ash Wednesday "Bursting Day"? I don't know, but Iceland continues to be AWESOME. The challenge is that being vegetarian, I
- [Come, Armageddon. Come.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/10/everyday-is-like-sunday/) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmPKVvxFb1c "Everyday is like Sunday" Viva Hate Morrissey
- [Beware!](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/03/15/beware-the-ides-of-march-that-is-all/) - Beware the Ides of March. That is all.
- [The Ongoing Scandal of the Evangelical Mind [Texas Education Edition]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/06/slacker/) - I'm adding Slactivist to my list of blogs to read. I've read him for years - most notably for his insightful running commentary on the Left Behind series, a level of literary and theological pulp that I just won't read so I let him read it for me. It's good stuff. He also does insightful
- [Alles gut zum Geburtstag!](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/04/alles-gut-zum-geburtstag/) - Happy birthday, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, my old friend. Today, you are 107.
- [Why Your Theology is Trapped in High School](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/02/04/why-your-theology-is-trapped-in-high-school/) - In a recent issue of New York Magazine, I came across one of those articles where something in your brain clicks and a long-missing Tetris block falls into place. The subcultural locus of my bleak theology is somewhat grounded, aesthetically, in the (then-called) "alternative", post-punk music I discovered in high school in the late 80s/early
- [Don't Let Yourself Be Lost](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/01/19/dont-let-yourself-be-lost/) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUTyT8SGayQ Laura Veirs "Don't Lose Yourself" Saltbreakers
- [Exiles At The Table](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/01/17/exiles-at-the-table/) - For a recent meeting of St. Lydia's Leadership Table (basically, our vestry), I was asked to offer a reflection on the lectionary text of the week, Luke 4.16-24. Afterwards, I was asked if I'd write it up for St. Lydia's blog, if you'd like to read it. I swear a bit, so you know it's
- [Breathing a life of gathering gloom](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/01/07/breathing-a-life-of-gathering-gloom/) - I did a lot of traveling on Epiphany. One place where I stopped on my journey was at Seattle's Church of the Apostles, more commonly known as COTA. I had heard a bit about COTA, that they were doing interesting things with liturgical community in the ELCA/ECUSA partnership. I have a few friends who are
- [Let Us Pretend We've Got It Together. Let Us Ignore The Coming Sun.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/02/24/let-us-pretend-weve-got-it-together/) - "We Sing In Time" The Lonely Forest
- [The Obscenities of Barth and Burroughs](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/02/13/obscenties/) - The humanities' Fallen (read: academics who aren't actively in a college or university department), like myself, tend to preen themselves, in order to prop up their self esteem, with their personal libraries. I obsess over my academic bookcase. Every few months, I'll make sure the books are in a particular order: chronological? alphabetical? thematic? Must... re-sort... them!
- [Ash Wednesday: The Beginning of the End.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/03/09/bang-the-drum-slowly/) - Ash Wednesday. And no one cares to make any money off of it. So it doesn't matter. There's no party. No consumption. In fact, the only consumption is lack. We take on emptiness to feel present and presence. And yet advertising is all about need - created need, commodification, distinction, distanciation, fear, insufficiency, desire. Is
- [Ad Hoc Ashes](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/03/09/ad-hoc-ashes/) - Seen in Union Square, NYC.
- [April is the cruelest month and Palm Sunday is the cruelest Sunday of all.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/04/17/april-is-the-cruelest-month-and-palm-sunday-is-the-cruelest-sunday-of-all/) - Holy Week is a real bitch. And Palm Sunday is when we remember how we are most human. How it is not that we are hypocritical, but rather inconsistent and duplicitous. We are human, all too human. Palm Sunday is when we are at our weakest and most unsuspecting about ourselves. Palm Sunday is our day
- [What, Now? What is Bleak Theology?](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/01/06/what-now-1/) - This blog comes out of numerous conversations I've had with my fellow biblical critics and theologians of a certain age and cultural context. Many of us have been trained in all sorts of history, language, culture, theory, methodology, philosophy, doctrine, what have you. Many of us remember our youth during the cultural anxiety and fallout of
- [MLK's Silence.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/01/17/mlk/) - I must admit that MLK is one of those critical figures in American history that I should know much more about, but haven't taken the time to do so. However, I think I can safely say that about each of us regarding the Reverend Doctor King. Here is a man for whom we have a
- [Eat, Drink, and Be Merry for Tomorrow We Die.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/03/06/eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die/) - Like much of American culture, there is a disconnection between celebrations and their roots. I find this most apparent in the nation's observation of religious holidays. Perhaps one of the most significant is Mardi Gras, also known as Carnival. We praise Tuesday as a great celebration, an expression of Spring Fever, a dance to the
- [The Craft of Homiletics](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/02/23/if-you-really-want-to-learn-how-to-write-a-convincing-story-for-more-people-than-you-could-ever-convince-is-true-or-meaningfu/) - If you really want to learn how to write a convincing story for more people than you could ever convince is true or meaningful, learn to write a sermon. You'll neither forge a more silvery tongue, nor craft a more deft set of instruments. Sermons are of the most dangerous rhetorics.
- [Precious Princess](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/02/17/the-gendering-disneyfication-of-evangelical-christianity-continues-steve-wiggins-warns-of-zondervans-news-precious-princess/) - The gendering Disneyfication of Evangelical Christianity continues: Steve Wiggins warns of Zondervan's news "Precious Princess Bible." http://sawiggins.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/agenda-in-pink/
- [A Valentine's Day Massacre](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/02/14/historically-all-we-know-about-st-valentine-is-that-he-was-martyred-in-about-269-making-today-all-the-more-morose-and-maca/) - Historically, all we know about St. Valentine is that he was martyred in about 269, making today all the more morose and macabre.
- [On the horizon.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/02/04/on-the-horizon/) - I would very much like to attend the forthcoming conference, The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion at Syracuse. My ilk (and a few AAR drinking buddies) will be presenting there. These people do good work. My schedule prohibits me, though.
- [Christian Nihilism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/02/02/during-my-undergrad-years-when-i-had-regular-contact-with-the-southern-baptists-a-friend-called-me-a-christian-nihilist-i/) - During my undergrad years, when I had regular contact with the Southern Baptists, a friend called me a "Christian nihilist." I couldn't disagree more. It's not that I believe in nothing. It's that I'm mostly pessimistic about those things I do believe.
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/02/02/the-eternal-return-2/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [Cranmer Rolls in his Grave](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/01/22/the-book-of-common-despair/) - The Book of Common Despair.
- [On New Year's Day, the Wretched.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/01/02/on-new-years-day-the-wretched/) - For New Year's Day, my wife, two friends, and I saw Les Misérables. Visually, it's amazing. I found Anne Hathaway's performance most compelling and I decided that Eponine, played here by the broad-shouldered, tiny-waisted Samantha Barks, should have been called "Corsette." There is the critical scene in Hugo's masterpiece where Bishop Myriel, also known as
- [So, This is the New Year](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/01/01/so-this-is-the-new-year/) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSgHGFuPNus Death Cab for Cutie, Transatlantic, "The New Year"
- [The Nones: Not Elsewhere, but Nowhere.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/12/31/the-nones-not-elsewhere-but-nowhere/) - Yesterday, the New York Times published a story on Evangelicals' shift from the waning stadium/corporate retreat megachurch model to experimentation with communities that are more localized and based on the arts. It's a response to the growing population of "Nones", those people who identify themselves with no religious affiliation. These are individuals, usually younger, who
- ["Holy Land"](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/12/30/holy-land/) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP-MBHdka90 King Dude, Burning Daylight, "Holy Land" Pitchfork's review of Burning Daylight. Burning Daylight's pitch-black narratives, set in charred landscapes where God and the Devil wage a final battle for supremacy, are superficially presented as nightmares, with Cowgill singing in a low, sinister croak pitched at a subterranean frequency somewhere between Johnny Cash at half the
- [After the Palms](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/02/after-the-palms/) - On weekend mornings, I like to go for long runs, six miles or so. I run around Prospect Park, the Central Park of Brooklyn. It's just over a mile from my apartment. Because yesterday was Palm Sunday, I saw people walking home with fronds in their hands. Some were elaborately braided, some held in bunches,
- [Tools of the Trade](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/12/15/tools-of-the-trade/) - I once saw an episode of PBS's Frontline about prison inmates and mental illness and there was an interview with a (now murdered) man, Michael Grissett. I remember that he said he was haunted by the voices of the devil. And when he was asked about them, he said, They ask me, say, "Mr. Michael
- [Here We Are Now. Entertain Us.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/05/20/here-we-are-now-entertain-us/) - If you haven't heard the end of the world is on Saturday at 6pm (local time zone), you haven't been paying attention, which means you haven't been online. The autodidactic and self-styled doomsayer, Harold Camping, nonagenerian founder and leader of Family Radio, has offered his second prediction (he attributes his misfire in 1994 to bad
- [Theodicy Odyssey](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/12/17/theodicy-odyssey/) - Dude. Major conservative evangelical backlash on Sandy Hook, blaming it on lack of school prayer. The theodical ramifications are substantial: is this God, who enables and endorses the slaughter of children? Heavy duty. It's an old saw often used by evangelicals, but let's use it anyway: what would Jesus do?
- [Onward.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/12/16/onward/) - There has been a groundswell among the American population in reaction to Sandy Hook. Here again, a mentally unstable person had access to considerable, legal firepower. It was George W. Bush who let the Clinton-era Federal Assault Weapon Ban (AWB) expire in September 2004. After eight years, four of them in Obama's first term, no
- [God in the time of Trauma.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/12/15/sandy-hook/) - The Sandy Hook shootings still haven't really sunk in, nor should they. This is the nature of trauma, this unique kind of wound. If we were to comprehend it, it would make us inhumane, since events like this are something that humans cannot comprehend. We can only stand (or perhaps our legs have already given
- [Requiescat in Pacem.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/11/11/requiescat-in-pacem/) - November 11, 1855. Søren Aaybe Kierkegaard is dead. His last words are, "The bomb explodes and the conflagration follows." The fire still rages. It still rages.
- [And there was nothing to fear, nothing to doubt.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/09/11/and-there-was-nothing-to-fear-nothing-to-doubt/) - When I hear Radiohead's Pyramid Song, I am taken back to the brightest day I can remember, that Tuesday morning eleven years ago. The weather in New Haven, CT is perfect, with a slight chill on the hill of Yale Divinity School, where I had just left my homiletics class. And every time there
- [](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/08/12/it-is-unsurprising-that-two-of-my-of-my-favorite-political-theologians-dietrich-bonhoeffer-and-sophie-scholl-were-martyred/) - It is unsurprising that two of my of my favorite political theologians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie Scholl, were martyred. My Red Virgin, Simone Weil, in her own idiosyncratic solidarity, drove herself into the ground. Only Dorothy Day saw a long life, yet always on the margins. Obviously, my theological politics are an exercise in ever-unrealized
- [The Fear of Evangelicalism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/08/04/the-fear-of-evangelicalism/) - Yesterday, I finished reading Mark Noll's landmark The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which begins with the indictment, "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." Almost twenty years later, this indictment is, for the most part, still valid. And the evangelical Noll, who described himself in
- [Resurrection of the Soldiers](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/07/24/resurrection-of-the-soldiers/) - Resurrection of the Soldiers (1926-1932), Stanley Spencer
- [On theological illiteracy](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/07/22/on-theological-illiteracy/) - As long as I have been interested in theology, I have been frustrated that many people - whether they consider themselves religious or not - have not thought carefully about theology. By that I mean careful, critical thought about the relationships between humanity and divinity. And with that, to think carefully about what kinds of
- [The Gods of the Seventeenth Century](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/07/15/the-gods-of-the-seventeenth-century-1/) - A number of years ago, I started reading Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and was struck how little I had really thought about virtue and values, major themes under Nietzsche's attack. I then went to Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. It was a monumental work for me and the point he makes
- [Decompression](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/07/13/decompression/) - After a long week, why not refresh with an iced coffee and some Altizer?
- [Kierkegaard Against the Hedge Fund Managers](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/07/11/kierkegaard-against-the-hedge-fund-managers/) - For the knight [of faith] will then, in the first place, have the strength to concentrate the whole of his life's content and the meaning of reality in a single wish. If a person lacks this concentration, this focus, his soul is disintegrated from the start, and then he will never come to make the
- [The Weight of the World](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/07/08/sybil-andrews-gethsemane-1951-no-2460/) - Sybil Andrews, Gethsemane, 1951, no. 24/60.
- [Some birds I know are moving on this weekend.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/07/02/some-birds-i-know-are-moving-on-this-weekend/) - for rp.
- [Spend your summer in fear and trembling.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/06/20/spend-your-summer-in-fear-and-trembling/) - This summer, I will be teaching a short four-week course on how to think theologically and I'll be using Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling as the basic text. Yes, it does seem like a your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter/your-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate sort of debacle, but I believe it will work. I was pleased with the response and believe there's wider interest
- [Someone's Got to Help Me Dig](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/05/07/someones-got-to-help-me-dig/)
- [Perichoresis](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/05/06/perichoresis/) - I once fed the Holy Spirit.She was a flock of pigeonspecking by the bench in a Brooklyn park.I threw her bread crumbs,bits of the Body that was given for you.She ate the bread hungrily,a kind of omophagia in action.It was a Trinitarian action, too - almost.Two thirds of a triangle, aside, a god missingtwo angles
- [The Tomb is the Abyss.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/08/the-tomb-is-the-abyss/) - It is Easter. If there ever was an apocalyptic day, this is it. (The weather here in Brooklyn is absolutely gorgeous, by the way). Easter is confusing. It is unsettling. And if you dwell on it for long enough, it can reduce you to tears. What does it mean to even claim that God has
- [World Ends.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/07/world-ends/) - A big thanks to CHIRP Radio's Scott McKenna for last night's shout out about this blog and my introduction to Anilore. He played this song, as well as Joy Division's Passover for us. Happy Black Saturday, Scott. Thanks for helping make it bleak.
- [I do not know that man.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/07/i-do-not-know-that-man/)
- [I Can't Believe This Has Happened.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/07/i-cant-believe-this-happened/) - Everything is quiet now. There is nothing left to be said. Nothing can be said. Our dust settles upon the ground and the wind of the week has stopped swirling. It is very quiet. We cannot wait. By that, I mean, we ought not to wait. By that I mean, to wait is betrayal of
- [Whither is God?](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/06/a-good-friday-parable/) - From Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science: The madman.—Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter.
- [The Day of Ache](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/06/the-day-of-ache/) - The next three days are tough. Here we find the variance of perspectives on who Jesus of Nazareth was and who the Christ is. Some live on today and see a man die in one of the more creatively brutal institutional forms of execution devised by members the human race. Others live in tomorrow, the
- [Moving Along In Our God-Given Ways, Safety is Sat by the Fire](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/05/moving-along-in-our-god-given-ways/)
- [This Is All We Have.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/05/this-is-all-we-have-ii/) - During Passion Week, everything moves faster. We've been trudging through Lent, our disciplines starting to bite by now, and the routine has started to take on a tedium. Then Passion Week and boom, suddenly things kick into high gear: Jesus is heralded into Jerusalem and just over seventy-two hours later, we find ourselves at Maundy
- [St. Martin Luther King, Jr.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/04/my-entry/)
- [Shot Rings Out](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/04/shot-rings-out/)
- [The Killing Joke](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/04/01/the-killing-joke/) - Today, many people will hear sermons and read posts about Palm Sunday and varieties of foolishness: Jesus as God's Fool, the human race being foolish towards the Gospel, and whatnot. Some people will sing Michael Card's God's Own Fool or songs from that underground clown passion, Godspell. Some will quote Paul's first letter to the Corinthians,
- [Lent Madness](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/03/22/lent-madness/) - If you're not following Lent Madness, come join in the fun and vote for your favorite Christian troublemaker.
- [The Ides, Failure, and Grace](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/03/15/the-ides-failure-and-grace/) - Today is the Ides of March, so everyone be careful out there. It is a day about tyrannies and ideologies and internal threats. It is also about failed expectations and unhappy truths. Julius Caesar, ambitious with and for power, is killed by his inner circle. And the world changes in an instant. With the betrayal
- [](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/03/11/one-year-ago-disaster-stuck-japan-we-remember-the-15000-killed/) - One year ago, disaster stuck Japan. We remember the 15,000 killed.
- [It's the terror of knowing what this world is about](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/03/02/its-the-terror-of-knowing-what-this-world-is-about/) - Queen and David Bowie "Under Pressure"
- [Take and Eat](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/03/01/take-and-eat/) - Lent is a time of fasting writ large. Many people take on some kind of dietary restriction like fasting during daylight, not eating chocolate or drinking coffee or alcohol. And it's for Lent only, as if it were being seasonally kosher. The tide returns with Easter and we can raise a beer glass to a
- [I Don't Know What More to Ask For](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/02/29/i-dont-know-what-more-to-ask-for/) - Röyksopp "What Else Is There?"
- [Gravity, Hope, and Our Rock](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/02/28/gravity-hope-and-rock/) - It's hard for me to go through Lent and not gravitate back towards the writings of the existentialists. Camus, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are the most influential upon me. Like your typical angst-ridden teen, I discovered them while in high school. A friend liked Camus' "The Stranger" and I was intrigued. And I wanted to learn
- [Ash Wednesday](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/02/22/ash-wednesday/) - Ash-Wednesday by TS Eliot Because I do not hope to turn againBecause I do not hopeBecause I do not hope to turnDesiring this man’s gift and that man’s scopeI no longer strive to strive towards such things(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)Why should I mournThe vanished power of the usual reign?Because I do
- [Our Meridians of Mortality](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/02/22/our-meridians-of-mortality/) - Fat Tuesday snuck up on me this year, which means that Lent did, too. I had been very busy with work and a recent vacation to Iceland. And I had lost track of the liturgical calendar, which can also mean that I had not been to church in some time. For those of us for
- [Animated: Robert Johnson’s Classic Blues Tune  Me and the Devil Blues](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/02/21/animated-robert-johnsons-classic-blues-tune-me-and-the-devil-blues/) - Animated: Robert Johnson’s Classic Blues Tune Me and the Devil Blues .
- [If only...](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/02/20/if-only/) - Lent is coming. And I wanted to get back into the right frame of mind this year. Through internet meandering a few months before, I had come upon St. Lydia's, a dinner church here in Brooklyn. They had finally set root not too far from my apartment, so last night I meandered across the Gowanus
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2012/02/02/the-eternal-return/) - The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
- [Our virtue ethic.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/07/10/our-virtue-ethic/) - "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett
- [Analogy](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/07/10/analogy/) - I sit on the marble steps outside St. Peter's Church (ELCA) in Manhattan and watch through the glass the end of their service. I eat my banh mi sandwich as the congregation greets each other in their farewells. A young sparrow hops next to me and flies away before I can offer a bit of
- [Crime Scene](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/04/21/crime-scene/)
- [The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/04/20/the-greatest-light-is-the-greatest-shade/) - Tenebrae. Nietzsche wrote that we would not be rid of God until we have vanquished his shadow. These are the matters that vex me.
- ["Passover" - Joy Division](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/04/18/passover-joy-division/) - This is a crisis I knew had to come, Destroying the balance I'd kept. Doubting, unsettling and turning around, Wondering what will come next. Is this the role that you wanted to live?I was foolish to ask for so much. Without the protection and infancy's guard, It all falls apart at first touch.Watching the reel as it comes to
- [Have You Abandoned Your Creativity?](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/03/23/have-you-abandoned-your-creativity/) - On the Despisers of the Body (The Reading) In the season of Lent, it is customary to give up something of personal worth. Traditionally, this has been the giving up of meat. Some people, from dawn to dusk, give up eating entirely, believing that the fast shall offer spiritual insight. Nietzsche has no time for
- ["On Not Feeling It" or "The Treachery of Up and Down"](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/03/21/not-feeling-it/) - So now we're well into Lent and its novelty has surely worn off. The pathos of the Ash Wednesday's sorrowful soot-smudge has been washed away and we are starting to notice the nagging itch of what we have given up/taken on, this itch of desire. Such is Lent. It's a strange "presence-in-absence" sort of moment.
- [Let Us Give When We Have Lost Everything. [St. Patrick's Day Edition]](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/03/17/let-us-give-when-we-have-lost-everything/) - Daylight Savings has wreaked particular havoc on me this year. My friends and colleagues have lamented its effects as well. Just a single shift of an hour has reset everything: when I wake up, when I go to bed, when I eat, when I see the sun and when I feel its light on my
- [Be Careful Why Things Happen](https://www.bleaktheology.com/2011/03/14/be-careful-why-things-happen/) - If you say "Everything happens for a reason," be careful you do no commit idolatry. If you say "God is in control," again, be careful. Sure, you will tell me of Biblical prophecies and stories where "God's plan" was explicated and executed. But that is the Bible. And I urge you to be careful that

## Pages

- [About Bleak Theology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/about-bleak-theology/) - This blog is a theology of loss, lamentation, and elegy. It works out its salvation in fear and trembling in a post-punk bricolage inspired by Kierkegaard (I read a lot of Kierkegaard), biblical studies, and the arts. With the absurd always in mind, we seek to act by virtue of the absurd. This is a
- [Other Writings in Other Places](https://www.bleaktheology.com/other-writings-in-other-places/) - I am a member of Killing the Buddha’s Editorial Collective. Our Lenten Wilderness: Unknown Pleasures and Revelations, February 28, 2020 Image Journal's "Good Letters" blog. I'll Be Your Mirror: St. Andy Warhol, Holy Fool, November 1, 2019. Visions of Hilma af Klint, June 19, 2019. Good Friday in Brooklyn, April 19, 2019. The Lonely Boy:
- [Podcast](https://www.bleaktheology.com/podcast/) - The Bleak Theology Podcast episodes and show notes are available through the links. If you have questions or comments, you can share them below. The Bleak Theology Podcast is written and produced by Burke Gerstenschlager.Special assistance by Adam DJ Brett.Logo design by Matthew Baker at Entheos Designs.The theme music is “The Glacial Age” by cryptic scenery.

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- [leap of faith](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/leap-of-faith/)
- [Time](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/time/)
- [Simone Weil](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/simone-weil/)
- [Japan](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/japan/)
- [Ireland](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ireland/)
- [help](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/help/)
- [kindness](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/kindness/)
- [daylight savings](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/daylight-savings/)
- [St. Patrick's Day](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/st-patricks-day/)
- [After Virtue](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/after-virtue/)
- [Alistair McIntyre](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/alistair-mcintyre/)
- [sleep](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sleep/)
- [dreams](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/dreams/)
- [Meno](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/meno/)
- [Socrates](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/socrates/)
- [Iliad](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/iliad/)
- [Diomedes](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/diomedes/)
- [virtue](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/virtue/)
- [arete](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/arete/)
- [natural evil](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/natural-evil/)
- [disaster](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/disaster/)
- [prooftexting](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/prooftexting/)
- [rationale](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/rationale/)
- [lapsarianism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/lapsarianism/)
- [Thus Spake Zarathustra](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/thus-spake-zarathustra/)
- [existentialism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/existentialism/)
- [despair](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/despair/)
- [absurdity](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/absurdity/)
- [Karl Barth](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/karl-barth/)
- [William S. Burroughs](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/william-s-burroughs/)
- [Church Dogmatics](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/church-dogmatics/)
- [Naked Lunch](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/naked-lunch/)
- [Groundhog Day](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/groundhog-day/)
- [The Eternal Return](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-eternal-return/)
- [bleak theology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/bleak-theology/)
- [MLK](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mlk/)
- [Frontline](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/frontline/)
- [Nones](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/nones/)
- [Pentecostalism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/pentecostalism/)
- [Mainline denominations](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mainline-denominations/)
- [pneumatology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/pneumatology/)
- [spirituality](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/spirituality/)
- [Evangelicalism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/evangelicalism/)
- [ecclesiology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ecclesiology/)
- [Les Miserables](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/les-miserables/)
- [atonement](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/atonement/)
- [ransom theory](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ransom-theory/)
- [law/grace](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/lawgrace/)
- [Dionysus](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/dionysus/)
- [ethics](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ethics/)
- [film](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/film/)
- [Death Cab for Cutie](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/death-cab-for-cutie/)
- [afterglow](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/afterglow/)
- [music videos](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/music-videos/)
- [New Year's Day](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/new-years-day/)
- [New Year's Eve](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/new-years-eve/)
- [We Three Kings](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/we-three-kings/)
- [myrhh](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/myrhh/)
- [COTA](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/cota/)
- [Church of the Apostles](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/church-of-the-apostles/)
- [Seattle](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/seattle/)
- [shoegazer](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/shoegazer/)
- [embalming fluid](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/embalming-fluid/)
- [BCP](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/bcp/)
- [Book of Common Prayer](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/book-of-common-prayer/)
- [Episcopalia](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/episcopalia/)
- [Friedrich Nietzsche](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/friedrich-nietzsche/)
- [I Got You Babe](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ive-got-you-babe/)
- [The Gay Science](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-gay-science/)
- [nihilism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/nihilism/)
- [pessimism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/pessimism/)
- [Southern Baptists](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/southern-baptists/)
- [undergrad days](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/undergrad-days/)
- [theology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/theology/)
- [continental philosophy](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/continental-philosophy/)
- [literature](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/literature/)
- [canon](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/canon-2/)
- [St. Valentine](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/st-valentine/)
- [martyrdom](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/martyrdom/)
- [Valentine's Day](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/valentines-day/)
- [history](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/history/)
- [Zondervan](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/zondervan/)
- [Disneyfication](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/disneyfication/)
- [homiletics](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/homiletics/)
- [sermons](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sermons/)
- [writing](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/writing/)
- [rhetoric](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/rhetoric/)
- [food](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/food/)
- [Mardi Gras](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mardi-gras/)
- [Martin Luther King](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/martin-luther-king/)
- [Letter from a Birmingham Jail](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/letter-from-a-birmingham-jail/)
- [ashes](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ashes/)
- [New York City](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/new-york-city/)
- [The Lonely Forest](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-lonely-forest/)
- [thanatopsis](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/thanatopsis/)
- [kairos](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/kairos/)
- [chronos](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/chronos/)
- [memorials](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/memorials/)
- [identity](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/identity/)
- [self-consideration](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/self-consideration/)
- [birthday](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/birthday/)
- [racial injustice](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/racial-injustice/)
- [complacency](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/complacency/)
- [Systems™](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/systems/)
- [psalms](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/psalms/)
- [lamentation](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/lamentation/)
- [Odyssey](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/odyssey/)
- [Albert Camus](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/albert-camus/)
- [They Myth of Sisyphus](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/they-myth-of-sisyphus/)
- [Eternal Recurrence](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/eternal-recurrence/)
- [Søren Kierkegaard](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/soren-kierkegaard/)
- [The Concept of Anxiety](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-concept-of-anxiety/)
- [The Sickness Unto Death](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-sickness-unto-death/)
- [Repetition](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/repetition/)
- [trauma](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/trauma/)
- [Romanticism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/romanticism/)
- [Morrissey](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/morrissey/)
- [Lord Byron](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/lord-byron/)
- [John Keats](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/john-keats/)
- [Mary Shelley](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mary-shelley/)
- [industrialization](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/industrialization/)
- [post-industrialization](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/post-industrialization/)
- [Christendom](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/christendom/)
- [theological aesthetics](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/theological-aesthetics/)
- [desire](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/desire/)
- [high school](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/high-school/)
- [angst](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/angst/)
- [sociology of religion](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sociology-of-religion/)
- [hierarchies](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/hierarchies/)
- [oppression](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/oppression/)
- [Dietrich Bonhoeffer](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/dietrich-bonhoeffer/)
- [Texas](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/texas/)
- [education](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/education/)
- [Armageddon](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/armageddon/)
- [nuclear war](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/nuclear-war/)
- [Boy Scouts of America](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/boy-scouts-of-america/)
- [unkindness](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/unkindness/)
- [LGBTQI](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/lgbtqi/)
- [subway station](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/subway-station/)
- [death](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/death/)
- [a happy death](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/a-happy-death/)
- [memory](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/memory/)
- [recollection](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/recollection/)
- [peace](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/peace/)
- [There is a Light That Never Goes Out](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/there-is-a-light-that-never-goes-out/)
- [2012 DA14](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/2012-da14/)
- [Tunguska Impact](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/tunguska-impact/)
- [asteroid](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/asteroid/)
- [science](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/science/)
- [Satka](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/satka/)
- [meteor](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/meteor/)
- [Thus Spoke Zarathustra](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/thus-spoke-zarathustra/)
- [Idioteque](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/idioteque/)
- [Sweet and Tender Hooligan](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sweet-and-tender-hooligan/)
- [Roxy Music](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/roxy-music/)
- [In Every Dream Home a Heartache](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/in-every-dream-home-a-heartache/)
- [dust](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/dust/)
- [life](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/life/)
- [ravens](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ravens/)
- [poverty](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/poverty/)
- [injustice](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/injustice/)
- [social justice](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/social-justice/)
- [imperialism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/imperialism/)
- [empire](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/empire/)
- [Kingdom](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/kingdom/)
- [Gospel of Luke](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/gospel-of-luke/)
- [meals](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/meals/)
- [community](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/community/)
- [treasure](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/treasure/)
- [anxiety](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/anxiety/)
- [worry](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/worry/)
- [The New Yorker](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-new-yorker/)
- [On the Waterfront](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/on-the-waterfront/)
- [Marlon Brando](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/marlon-brando/)
- [Karl Malden](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/karl-malden/)
- [John Corridan](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/john-corridan/)
- [Budd Schulberg](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/budd-schulberg/)
- [Academy Awards](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/academy-awards/)
- [crucifixion](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/crucifixion/)
- [Neil Gaiman](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/neil-gaiman/)
- [American Gods](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/american-gods/)
- [myth](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/myth/)
- [Neverwhere](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/neverwhere/)
- [Marcus Borg](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/marcus-borg/)
- [Reading the Bible Again for the First Time](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/reading-the-bible-again-for-the-first-time/)
- [Sandman](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sandman/)
- [Good Omens](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/good-omens/)
- [Terry Pratchett](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/terry-pratchett/)
- [Mircea Eliade](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mircea-eliade/)
- [Myth and Reality](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/myth-and-reality/)
- [mythology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mythology/)
- [fantasy](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/fantasy/)
- [fiction](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/fiction/)
- [truth/s](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/truths/)
- [Grand Theft Colt](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/grand-theft-colt/)
- [Pharisees](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/pharisees/)
- [Luke 19 Defense](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/luke-19-defense/)
- [Ev'ry Day I'm Pastorin'](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/evry-day-im-pastorin/)
- [Life Together](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/life-together/)
- [St. Lydia's Theology Circle](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/st-lydias-theology-circle/)
- [Eucharist](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/eucharist/)
- [failure](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/failure/)
- [Holy Week](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/holy-week/)
- [The Last Supper](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-last-supper/)
- [Samuel Beckett](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/samuel-beckett/)
- [April Fool's Day](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/april-fools-day/)
- [hubris](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/hubris/)
- [Easter Monday](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/easter-monday/)
- [He Qi](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/he-qi/)
- [Eastertide](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/eastertide/)
- [art](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/art/)
- [disillusionment](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/disillusionment/)
- [North Carolina](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/north-carolina/)
- [academic freedom](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/academic-freedom/)
- [religious freedom](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/religious-freedom/)
- [politics](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/politics/)
- [Martin Luther](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/martin-luther/)
- [surfing](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/surfing/)
- [insults](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/insults/)
- [Boston Marathon](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/boston-marathon/)
- [Battle of Marathon](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/battle-of-marathon/)
- [Iraq](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/iraq/)
- [analytic theology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/analytic-theology/)
- [ancient Greece](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ancient-greece/)
- [Olympic Games](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/olympic-games/)
- [Fear and Trembling](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/fear-and-trembling/)
- [Appalachian Trail](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/appalachian-trail/)
- [Mark Sanford](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mark-sanford/)
- [South Carolina](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/south-carolina/)
- [Bill Clinton](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/bill-clinton/)
- [adultery](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/adultery/)
- [grace](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/grace/)
- [2 Samuel](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/2-samuel/)
- [King David](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/king-david/)
- [Nathan](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/nathan/)
- [Bathsheba](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/bathsheba/)
- [marriage](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/marriage/)
- [Ian Curtis](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ian-curtis/)
- [Atmosphere](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/atmosphere/)
- [fire](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/fire/)
- [abandonment](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/abandonment/)
- [Holy Spirit](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/holy-spirit/)
- [Paraclete](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/paraclete/)
- [queer](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/queer/)
- [Church](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/church/)
- [cake](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/cake/)
- [shock](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/shock/)
- [scouting](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/scouting/)
- [diversity](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/diversity/)
- [power](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/power/)
- [service](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/service/)
- [reverence](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/reverence/)
- [Nico Muhly](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/nico-muhly/)
- [music](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/music/)
- [aesthetics](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/aesthetics/)
- [Psalm 19](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/psalm-19/)
- [Trinity](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/trinity/)
- [bad analogies](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/bad-analogies/)
- [Discworld](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/discworld/)
- [Sabellianism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sabellianism/)
- [love](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/love/)
- [deconstruction](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/deconstruction/)
- [différance](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/differance/)
- [Jacques Derrida](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/jacques-derrida/)
- [apophatic](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/apophatic/)
- [Feist](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/feist/)
- [resurrection](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/resurrection/)
- [Wilderness](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/wilderness/)
- [discrimination](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/discrimination/)
- [SCOTUS](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/scotus/)
- [gay rights](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/gay-rights/)
- [freedom](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/freedom/)
- [religious right](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/religious-right/)
- [equality](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/equality/)
- [Transfiguration](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/transfiguration/)
- [Sufjan Stevens](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sufjan-stevens/)
- [Chernobyl](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/chernobyl/)
- [Wasteland](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/wasteland/)
- [fallout](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/fallout/)
- [Ukraine](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ukraine/)
- [the profane](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-profane/)
- [profanity](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/profanity/)
- [Pripyat](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/pripyat/)
- [ash](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ash/)
- [The Church](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-church/)
- [exile](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/exile/)
- [uncanny](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/uncanny/)
- [parousia](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/parousia/)
- [writer's block](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/writers-block/)
- [Siouxsie and the Banshees](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/siouxsie-and-the-banshees/)
- [Pompeii](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/pompeii/)
- [urban studies](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/urban-studies/)
- [apocalypse](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/apocalypse/)
- [Vesuvius](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/vesuvius/)
- [SPQR](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/spqr/)
- [Triduum](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/triduum/)
- [parenthood](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/parenthood-2/)
- [Sarah Palin](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sarah-palin/)
- [baptism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/baptism/)
- [cruelty](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/cruelty/)
- [nationalism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/nationalism/)
- [torture](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/torture/)
- [sacrament](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sacrament/)
- [National Rifle Association](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/national-rifle-association/)
- [Tea Party](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/tea-party/)
- [Peter Rollins](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/peter-rollins/)
- [pyrotheology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/pyrotheology/)
- [religion](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/religion/)
- [a/theology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/atheology/)
- [dialectic](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/dialectic/)
- [discourse](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/discourse/)
- [philoxenia](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/philoxenia/)
- [Abraham](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/abraham/)
- [Michel Foucault](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/michel-foucault/)
- [faith](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/faith/)
- [Blur](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/blur/)
- [grief](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/grief/)
- [the Kingdom of God](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-kingdom-of-god/)
- [Luke 9.57-62](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/luke-9-57-62/)
- [Hiroshima](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/hiroshima/)
- [publishing](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/publishing/)
- [academia](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/academia/)
- [books](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/books/)
- [Hurricane Sandy](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/hurricane-sandy/)
- [Occupy Sandy](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/occupy-sandy/)
- [bad star](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/bad-star/)
- [Jeremiah](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/jeremiah/)
- [Thanksgiving](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/thanksgiving/)
- [prayer](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/prayer/)
- [Eric Garner](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/eric-garner/)
- [U2](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/u2/)
- [Marie Rowe](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/marie-rowe/)
- [poetry](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/poetry/)
- [sorrow](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sorrow/)
- [Moby](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/moby/)
- [Franz Marc](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/franz-marc/)
- [Yellow Cow](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/yellow-cow/)
- [Expressionism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/expressionism/)
- [cubism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/cubism/)
- [animals](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/animals/)
- [Shrove Tuesday](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/shrove-tuesday/)
- [palms](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/palms/)
- [Glow Cloud God](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/glow-cloud-god/)
- [Still](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/still/)
- [winter](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/winter/)
- [Heaven's Gate](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/heavens-gate/)
- [The Go! Team](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-go-team/)
- [biblical critics](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/biblical-critics/)
- [vocation](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/vocation/)
- [Ulysses](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ulysses/)
- [Bloomsday](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/bloomsday/)
- [Odysseus](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/odysseus/)
- [Stephen Dedalus](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/stephen-dedalus/)
- [Leopold Bloom](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/leopold-bloom/)
- [God is a shout in the street](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/god-is-a-shout-in-the-street/)
- [fathers](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/fathers/)
- [hope](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/hope/)
- [theodicy](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/theodicy/)
- [suffering](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/suffering/)
- [Maundy Thursday](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/maundy-thursday/)
- [St. Lydia's](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/st-lydias/)
- [Easter](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/easter/)
- [Holy Saturday](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/holy-saturday/)
- [Lent](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/lent/)
- [Palm Sunday](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/palm-sunday/)
- [Ash Wednesday](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ash-wednesday/)
- [Epiphany](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/epiphany/)
- [Theologians](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/theologians/)
- [Pentecost](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/pentecost/)
- [Advent](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/advent/)
- [Second Amendmend](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/second-amendmend/)
- [guns](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/guns/)
- [gun violence](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/gun-violence/)
- [Black Death](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/black-death/)
- [mass shootings](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mass-shootings/)
- [idolatry](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/idolatry/)
- [Moloch](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/moloch/)
- [ideology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ideology/)
- [David Bowie](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/david-bowie/)
- [inspiration](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/inspiration/)
- [Apollo](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/apollo/)
- [Lazarus](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/lazarus/)
- [requiem](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/requiem/)
- [Martin Luther King Jr.](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/martin-luther-king-jr/)
- [memory hole](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/memory-hole/)
- [black lives matter](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/black-lives-matter/)
- [Nietzsche](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/nietzsche/)
- [Stars](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/stars/)
- [Sounds So Happy Means So Sad](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sounds-so-happy-means-so-sad/)
- [John Kolchak](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/john-kolchak/)
- [gospels](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/gospels/)
- [book review](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/book-review/)
- [Pontius Pilate](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/pontius-pilate/)
- [Wye Oak](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/wye-oak/)
- [trisagion](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/trisagion/)
- [confession](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/confession/)
- [Gospel of John](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/gospel-of-john/)
- [uncertainty](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/uncertainty/)
- [always already](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/always-already/)
- [privilege](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/privilege/)
- [justice](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/justice/)
- [confusion](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/confusion/)
- [Q2](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/q2/)
- [war](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/war/)
- [classical music](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/classical-music/)
- [Gesthemane](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/gesthemane/)
- [Mary Oliver](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mary-oliver/)
- [William Blake](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/william-blake/)
- [The Tiger](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-tiger/)
- [The Lamb](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-lamb/)
- [Patti Smith](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/patti-smith/)
- [Aleppo](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/aleppo/)
- [disbelief](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/disbelief/)
- [Cabaret](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/cabaret/)
- [fascism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/fascism/)
- [election](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/election/)
- [Trumpism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/trumpism/)
- [Weimar culture](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/weimar-culture/)
- [Dada](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/dada/)
- [German expressionism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/german-expressionism/)
- [Black theology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/black-theology/)
- [waiting](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/waiting/)
- [expectation](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/expectation/)
- [The Last Temptation of Christ](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-last-temptation-of-christ/)
- [racism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/racism/)
- [trench theology](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/trench-theology/)
- [resistance](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/resistance/)
- [Mary](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mary/)
- [Magnificat](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/magnificat/)
- [Nazis](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/nazis/)
- [paczki](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/paczki/)
- [number stations](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/number-stations/)
- [mysticism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/mysticism/)
- [icons](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/icons/)
- [sainthood](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sainthood/)
- [The Good Place](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-good-place/)
- [Bill Murray](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/bill-murray/)
- [Lent 2019](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/lent-2019/)
- [misery](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/misery/)
- [Islamophobia](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/islamophobia/)
- [New Zealand](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/new-zealand/)
- [The White Rose](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-white-rose/)
- [Sophie Scholl](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/sophie-scholl/)
- [COVID-19](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/covid-19/)
- [coronavirus](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/coronavirus/)
- [The Plague Epistles](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-plague-epistles/)
- [social distancing](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/social-distancing/)
- [cloistering](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/cloistering/)
- [radical liturgics](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/radical-liturgics/)
- [ritual](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/ritual/)
- [Allen Ginsberg](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/allen-ginsberg/)
- [conservatism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/conservatism/)
- [Howl](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/howl/)
- [betrayal](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/betrayal/)
- [The Black Plague](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-black-plague/)
- [1918 Pandemic](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/1918-pandemic/)
- [Halloween](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/halloween/)
- [All Saints Day](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/all-saints-day/)
- [Christian nationalism](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/christian-nationalism/)
- [insurrection](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/insurrection/)
- [The New Year](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/the-new-year/)
- [CRT](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/crt/)
- [podcast](https://www.bleaktheology.com/tag/podcast/)