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Welcome to The Way of the Source.

This is a space for Christians with honest questions, skeptics hungry for wonder, exhausted church kids, quiet mystics, spiritual misfits, doubters, and anyone drawn toward the Source beneath our religions, our questions, and our longing to belong.

I’m JD.

I grew up in Pentecostal Christianity: altar calls, prophecy, worship music, fear, wonder, certainty, and fire. Later, I fronted a Christian metal band, toured the country, and spent years leading worship in a thriving local church community.

I was sincere. I was all in. I loved God with all that I was and all that I knew.

But over time, the questions underneath my faith became too honest to ignore.

Why did so much of religion seem disconnected from love?
Why did certainty so often produce cruelty?
Why did the God I encountered in ordinary life feel bigger, wilder, and more beautiful than the one I often heard described in church?

Those questions almost destroyed my spirituality, but instead they transformed it.

They led me into a deeper search for the Source beneath the symbols, stories, systems, and traditions we build around the sacred.

That search is what this space is about.

The Way of the Source is not about tearing everything down. It’s about returning to what is deepest and most alive.

A return to love.
A return to wonder.
A return to the body, the earth, the neighbor, and the present moment.
A return to the living Source from which our religions, spiritualities, philosophies, and understandings of the world first emerged.

Here, I write about faith, deconstruction, reconstruction, mysticism, scripture, embodiment, justice, compassion, philosophy, music, art, beauty, and the sacred hiding in plain sight.

But this is not meant to be only a blog.

My hope is that, over time, it becomes a living conversation. A practice. A gathering place. A spiritual community for people who are not trying to go backward, but who are also not content to live disconnected from the holy.

This is for people seeking wisdom without surrendering their honesty.

For people learning to honor the traditions that formed them without being trapped by them.

For people who believe love is not sentimental, but central.

That is the path I’m exploring here.

A Way of returning to the Source.
A Way of living awake.
A Way of becoming more fully human together.

A few good places to begin:

And if you’d like to walk this path alongside me, you can subscribe below for new essays and updates.

Thanks for being here.

— JD

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