The Way of the Source

Tag: Mystical Christianity

  • The Gospel of Rain

    Photo by Aleksandar Pasaric on Pexels.com

    It’s been raining here.
    A lot.

    Not the soft, wistful kind of rain that makes you want to stare out a window with a cup of tea and listen to Sigur Ros. We’ve had that too, but this has been the relentless kind. The kind of rain that soaks through boots and schedules and small talk. The kind that doesn’t ask permission before it starts washing things away.

    And yet… I’ve been paying close attention.
    Because something in me has started to wonder if the rain knows what it’s doing.
    I’ve been learning about soil. About herbs and healing and the ancient ways—those old paths that understood the body as part of the Earth, the Earth as part of the divine, and healing as a return to harmony and flow, not just the absence of pain.

    I’ve got garden beds waiting to be filled in the backyard. One will be for fruits and foods, the other for herbs and medicines. I’m making my herbalism dreams a reality. An aloe on the windowsill that was thriving until the repotting and still might make it, if grace holds. Grow bags lined up like little promises to my future self. And in the middle of it all, I’ve been watching how the rain seeps into everything—how it turns the compost, softens the crust, reminds the seeds they’re not forgotten down there.

    But this isn’t just a story about gardening.

    This past week, our friends lost everything in their basement. Three feet of rainwater swallowed their world. We spent the weekend cutting drywall, lifting soaked furniture, tossing years of life into a dumpster while their kids watched from the stairs. There’s a particular kind of silence that fills a house after the flood. And there’s a strange kind of holiness in carrying waterlogged pieces of someone’s story, shoulder to shoulder, soaked to the bone, laughing when you can, crying when you need to.

    I work with water for a living. Storm drains. Pipes. Septic tanks. Systems that most people only think about when they fail. I know firsthand what happens when the flow gets blocked. I know how dangerous it truly gets when what was meant to flow stagnates.

    And I think that’s what this rain has been showing me.

    So this is not a weather report.

    This is a gospel.

    A gospel written in raindrops.
    A gospel for anyone who’s ever felt the ground beneath them has turned to mud.
    A gospel for the overwhelmed, the uprooted, the ones learning to grow again.
    Because the rain isn’t here to ruin us.
    It’s here to bring life.
    It’s here to return us.
    To the soil.
    To each other.
    To something older and deeper and far more alive than the life we built on the surface.

    Welcome to The Gospel of Rain.
    Let it soak in.

    -JD

    We are made of these…things…

    dirt… and water… and breath.

    That’s not poetry. That’s Genesis. That’s biology.

    Rain doesn’t just fall from the clouds. It gives. It baptizes the ordinary. It brings the hidden back to life. And if you truly pay attention you’ll start to notice: the Earth doesn’t just respond to rain. It remembers it in a beautiful way.

    And maybe we do too.

    We as people have forgotten the gospel of the ground. The good news written into roots. The sacred story woven by weeds and worms and wild herbs growing in the cracks. Somewhere along the way, we’ve traded the ancient truth for convenience, plastic packaging, and produce that doesn’t rot because it’s so stripped of life it doesn’t even know how to properly die.

    But the gardens still sing the old song. And if we’re willing to slow down, become aware, and listen, it will teach us how to sing along again.

    Jesus, Soil, and the Mystery of Seeds

    Jesus didn’t build temples. He didn’t establish seminaries. He told stories about soil.

    In Matthew 13, he says the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, small and overlooked but capable of becoming a tree that is a shelter for birds. He says some seeds fall on rocky ground, some on shallow soil, some among thorns, and some on good soil…and the difference isn’t in the seeds. It’s in the readiness of the Earth.

    The soul, like the soil, must be open… soft enough to receive, nourished enough to sustain, deep enough to grow.

    This wasn’t purely metaphor. It was sacred geometry. Divine agriculture. A cosmic parable encoded into every living thing: life comes through death, transformation takes time, and good fruit only comes through rootedness.

    Jesus didn’t say believe these doctrines or memorize these creeds. He said:

    “Consider the lilies…”

    “Look at the birds…”

    “The kingdom is like a seed…”

    He was pointing at the Earth, not away from it.

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    Honor Your Father and Mother

    There’s an old commandment, one many of us learned in childhood:

    Honor your father and your mother.

    It’s usually read as a family ethic. But I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t so much more.

    What if the Father is referring to our Divine Source, the heavenly blueprint in the stars, the radiant Spirit that animates all things…

    And the Mother is the Earth, the womb of form, the soil of becoming, the very dust from which we were made?

    In Hebrew, the word for “earth” is adamah—the root of the name Adam. In the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, Adam represents not just a man, but humanity as a whole—the cosmic being, both formed from the dust and filled with divine breath.

    To honor the Father and the Mother, then, would be to walk in alignment with where we come from—Spirit and Soil. Breath and Body. Mystery and Matter.

    When we dishonor either; by spiritualizing everything and denying the body, or by commodifying the Earth and forgetting the sacred, we lose our way.

    We lose our very selves.

    Wisdom from the East

    The Taoist tradition teaches us about living in harmony with the natural rhythms of life. The Tao is the Way—the Source from which all things emerge and to which all things return. It flows like water, nourishes like rain, moves like wind through trees and time.

    “The Tao does nothing, yet nothing is left undone.” – Lao Tzu

    In gardening, this wisdom becomes real. You can’t force a plant to grow. You prepare the soil, tend the space, and then you must trust the seed to know what to do. This is the heart of both mystical faith and herbal practice: alignment and harmony, not control.

    In Hinduism, the idea of dharma reflects your truest path—your alignment with nature, spirit, and self. There’s a beautiful teaching that all beings have their own dharma, even a leaf or a river. To live your dharma is to live like a tree: rooted, patient, in service to the whole.

    Herbalism becomes dharma when we begin to see each plant as a bearer of wisdom, each root as a teacher. We don’t just utilize them—we commune with them and we learn from them.

    Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

    Soil as Scripture, Rain as Revelation

    We were made from the dust. That’s not a demotion. Honestly, it’s a deep honor. The same elements that form stars form your cells. The same carbon in a fallen tree lives on in your bones. The Earth isn’t beneath us. She is of us.

    The Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1).

    And the Earth?
    She doesn’t just absorb the rain
    She listens. She remembers. She responds.

    Rain isn’t just water falling from the sky.
    It’s the memory of the heavens returning to the soil.
    It’s the baptism that makes resurrection possible.

    Soil isn’t just dirt.
    It’s alive. Teeming. Holy.
    A thin place where death becomes nourishment.

    And the herbs we plant?
    They’re not just medicine.
    They’re messengers.
    Whispers from the old world,
    carrying healing that’s older than any of the systems we’ve created.

    The Garden is Calling Us Back

    We live in a time when disconnection is profitable.
    But reconnection is powerful.
    Revolutionary.
    Healing.

    When you grow your own food, you remember that abundance isn’t just an idea, it’s a practice.

    When you tend to your herbs, you remember that healing is not always instant.
    It’s relational.

    When you let the rain baptize your garden, you remember that nothing living thrives without receiving.

    This is the gospel of the garden.

    The truth that’s been growing since the beginning.

    Eden is not lost, it’s waiting for us to honor our Father and our Mother.

    Since you’re still here, I wanna know:

    What are you growing this season in the soil?
    In your body?
    In your spirit?

    What rhythms are you aligning with that the world told you to ignore?

    What would it look like to honor both your Father in heaven and your Mother beneath your feet?

  • Sleep Token – Euclid: The Perfect Worship Song

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    There’s this moment.

    If you’ve ever been in a worship service—like, really been in it—you know the one.

    It’s not the opening song, where people are still settling in, still checking their phones, still thinking about where they’ll eat after. It’s not the big anthem in the middle, the one designed to stir things up, to get people moving and responding.

    No, the moment comes later. Near the end.

    It’s the one where the room feels different. Where the lights are low, and everyone is connected by something more. Where the music swells, not because it has to, but because it can’t do anything but split open the sky.

    It’s the moment where the weight of everything—the doubt, the longing, the unspeakable ache—finds its way into the melody. The guitars shimmer, the drums carry like distant thunder, and the chorus, once whispered, is now belted from the deepest part of the chest.

    And then, just like that, it’s gone.

    That moment?

    That’s Euclid.

    This isn’t just a song. It’s a Benediction.

    Sleep Token has returned with Even in Arcadia, an album that feels like it emerged from the wreckage of a collapsed cathedral, still echoing with unanswered prayers. It opens with the haunting question: “Will you halt this eclipse in me?” That’s not just poetic. That’s liturgical. That’s a soul asking for the sun to rise again inside their own chest. And while the album offers no easy resolution, it does what all sacred art does—it leads us deeper into the ache, and maybe, gently, toward the light.

    And in the context of this new release, Euclid doesn’t just feel like a final track from the previous arc. It feels like an intercession whispered across time. A response to the eclipse.

    Vessel from Sleep Token

    For those unfamiliar with Sleep Token, Euclid is the final track on their previous release Take Me Back to Eden, the last of a three-album arc that has unfolded like some kind of a modern mythos.

    It’s a story of devotion, obsession, of something (or someone) greater-than beckoning from beyond. A love that might not be love. A god that might not be god. A voice that calls and calls until you can no longer tell if it’s leading you home or leading you into the abyss.

    And here, at the end of it all, we get Euclid.

    Not with a bang. Not with fury or vengeance or some grand declaration. But with a soft, fragile acceptance and surrender.

    Like the best worship songs.

    Like the best endings.

    The Worship Song Structure™, Perfected.

    Worship music lives and dies on its ability to create space. Space to feel. Space to ache. Space to let go.

    And Euclid? It builds that space like a sanctuary. Listen along if you want as I break it down.

    • The Opening: A Whispered Prayer
      Soft keys. A voice, hushed, almost afraid to enter the room.
      It’s the vulnerable invocation. The invitation.
      Come and see.
    • The Build: Anticipation & Devotion
      The instrumentation layers build slowly, reverently, like walking into something sacred. Each verse adds weight, each chorus expands, the vocoder gives musical space for tension, the pulse quickens… kinda like a heartbeat in a quiet room. The drums are in complete control of the energy building here.
      And then, everything shifts.
    • The Release: The Spirit Moves
      The final chorus erupts, the guitars crashing like waves, the drums relentless. Voices layered upon voices. A song that was once a whisper is now a flood.
      It’s the “Oceans” moment.
      The “With Everything” moment.
      The moment in every worship set where arms lift, eyes close, and the room isn’t just a room anymore.
      It’s so much bigger than that now.
    • The Benediction: Letting Go
      And then?
      The fade. The sigh. The last note rings out, soft as breath.
      No resolution. No closure. Leaving something stirring within your soul which is now ripe for transformation.
      Like the best worship songs.
      Like the best prayers.

    Why It Works (And Why Worship Leaders Should Take Notes)

    There’s a reason modern worship music thrives on these dynamics. It’s not just about lyrics, or theology, or even belief. It’s about energy. Tension. Release. Surrender.

    The best worship songs aren’t just sung or performed.

    They’re entered into. They’re experienced.

    And Euclid is nothing if not a complete experience.

    It starts in a place of intimacy. Moves through longing. Climbs toward something unspeakably powerful. And then, in one final breathtaking surge, it arrives like a flood—not at certainty, not at resolution, but at the only thing that ever truly remains:

    Love.

    Not the easy kind. Not the simple Hallmark all-smiles kind.

    But the real kind. The aching kind. The kind that knows loss, and still chooses to give. The kind that breaks, and still finds a way to hold on.

    So maybe Sleep Token didn’t write Euclid as a “worship” song.

    Maybe they did.

    But either way, if you’ve ever stood in a room filled with voices that were bigger than those in the room, if you’ve ever let a melody carry you beyond yourself, if you’ve ever felt something break and build and become—

    Then you know.

    This song belongs there.

    A Quick Word on Sleep Token

    For the uninitiated, Sleep Token is more than just a band—it’s a ritual. An anonymous collective led by the enigmatic Vessel, they blend genres and spiritual archetypes with reckless grace, weaving metal, R&B, ambient, and pop into something altogether sacred. Their live shows are called “Rituals.” Their lyrics read like confessions. And their music often feels less like performance and more like invocation.

    To those of us exploring the Way of the Source—a path rooted in oneness, mysticism, and sacred resonance—Sleep Token doesn’t just entertain. They echo. Their work hums with that same divine ache: the desire to be known, to be transformed, to belong to something greater.

    It’s not doctrine. It’s devotion. And in a world drowning in noise and algorithms, that matters.

    Let those with ears to hear, listen.

    If this stirred something in you, make sure to subscribe and join the conversation—I’m building a community of seekers, skeptics, and mystics who see beyond the surface and hear the sacred in unexpected places.

    Also, keep an eye out for my upcoming field guide: How Not to Lose Your Family While Losing Your Religion. It’s a resource for navigating the beautiful, brutal path of deconstruction without burning every bridge along the way.

    🖤JD

  • The Cross Was Never “Plan A”

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    At my church growing up, Easter was an event.

    Not just Sunday morning services. I’m talking full-scale theatrical production, like small-town Broadway with a crucifixion. We called it an Easter play, but really, it was a full-blown Passion drama — complete with billboards along the highway featuring my sister on Jesus’ lap, men in the congregation growing out their beards for historical accuracy, and a backstage makeup crew armed with fake blood and latex scars like a low-budget horror film masquerading as salvation.

    My actual sister talking to Jesus, aka my friend’s dad Jim, for our Easter Spectacular

    The sanctuary would transform into ancient Jerusalem. Lights dimmed. Smoke machines puffed out an eerie haze. Roman soldiers stomped around in homemade armor. I can still hear the clank of their plastic spears on dowels against the grey-carpeted plywood stage. And then there was Jesus — usually played by the same middle-aged volunteer every year, my friend’s dad Jim, who somehow managed to look both exhausted and radiant under the spotlight as they lashed him and led him to the cross he had just carried through the audience.

    Musical numbers were woven throughout, of course. These weren’t your tame, soft-rock worship hits. (Although we definitely included Avalon’s timeless CCM banger, “Testify To Love”) These were operatic, full-throated ballads about blood, sacrifice, and salvation. High drama. Choir robes swaying. And every spring, as the trees outside the church began to bud and bloom, those songs would crawl back into my head like ghosts of Easter past.

    We didn’t just perform it once, either. No, we ran it for a full weekend, sometimes longer. And after the play wrapped, we’d leave the cross standing at the front of the church like a trophy. For weeks afterward, during regular services, it loomed there — scarred, splintered, stained — casting its shadow over every sermon, every song.

    I remember sitting there as a kid, sandwiched between my friends, half-distracted by thoughts of holding hands with one of the girls in the youth group, sneaking glances during altar calls. Hormones and holy fear mixed together in a strange cocktail of confusion.

    But beneath my adolescent daydreams, another thought kept gnawing at me.

    Why did it have to be this way?

    Even as a kid, part of me wondered why the story was written in blood. Why the whole spectacle — the torment, the torture, the grotesque display of violence — was presented as good news. Why God, who supposedly loved us beyond comprehension, needed so much suffering to be satisfied.

    I didn’t have the words for it then. I just knew something felt off.

    Now, all these years later, I’ve started to understand what that feeling was.

    It wasn’t doubt.

    It was an invitation.

    That invitation would take years to answer. But eventually, it led me to question everything I thought I knew about the cross.

    Photo by Patricia McCarty on Pexels.com

    I grew up believing the cross was God’s “Plan A”.

    That from the dawn of time, God had been building toward this gruesome, brutal solution to the problem of human sin. That our rebellion was so total, so cosmic, that the only way for God to stomach our existence was to watch His own Son be tortured to death like a common criminal.

    They told me this was love.

    But I remember staring at the blood-stained cross in the sanctuary, week after week, and feeling something under my ribs tighten. Not reverence. Not relief.

    Grief.

    Confusion.

    A quiet, trembling sense that something here didn’t fully add up.

    Because if God is love… real love, unconditional love, not transaction-in-disguise love… then why the need to demand blood at all? Why set up a system of cosmic justice that could only be balanced by violence? Why build a universe that requires innocent suffering to fix what fear and separation broke?

    The deeper I went, the harder it became to reconcile the claim that Jesus’ death was necessary with the belief that God is, at essence, goodness itself. Not just good “to us,” but good at His very core level of being.

    And it turns out, the language had been whispering to me the whole time. I just didn’t know how to listen.

    Photo by Karol Wiu015bniewski on Pexels.com

    See, we inherited a story shaped not just by scripture, but by centuries of empire. Empire loves blood sacrifice — because empire lives by the sword and dies by the sword. Empire loves a violent god, because it justifies its own violence.

    But buried beneath the empire’s version of the gospel is an older song.

    Take atonement, for example. We were taught it meant appeasing God’s wrath. But the English word comes from “at-one-ment.” Union. Restoration of relationship.

    Or repentance. The Greek is metanoia — not groveling, but a change of mind. A widening of perception. A turning toward the light.

    And in Hebrew, there’s teshuvah — not a groveling apology, but a return. A homecoming. It literally means “to turn back,” not toward punishment, but toward the Source of life itself. Teshuvah is the art of remembering where we belong, of finding our way back to wholeness when we’ve lost the path. (I wrote about it at length in this blog post a few weeks ago.)

    Even sin. The Greek hamartia means “to miss the mark.” Not a legal violation deserving execution or bloodshed, but a distortion of aim. A sickness needing healing, not punishment.

    And sacrifice? Long before it became code for slaughter, the Latin roots point to “to make sacred.”

    To make sacred.

    What if Jesus didn’t die to satisfy God’s demand for violence, but to make sacred even the ugliest parts of our human story? To enter into the belly of the beast — into the empire’s machine of war, death, and brutality — and expose it for what it really is?

    A sham.

    A system built on fear, fed by scapegoats, perpetuated by people too terrified to imagine another way.

    The cross was never Plan A.

    Plan A was — and always has been — union.

    Plan A was the Garden. Walking together in the cool of the day. No separation, no shame, no sacrifice needed.

    Plan A was breath. Spirit. Ruach. The animating presence of God in all things.

    But we lost our way. Not because God demanded blood, but because we did. We built religions of fear and altars of violence, believing that blood would keep the gods at bay.

    And Jesus — Yeshua — stepped into our madness not to affirm it, but to dismantle it from the inside.

    To let it exhaust itself on his body.

    And then, to rise from the grave, holding out his wounds not as receipts of divine satisfaction, but as evidence of our deliverance from the system we thought would save us.

    The cross is not a transaction.

    It’s a revelation.

    A revelation of what happens when divine love collides with human fear.

    And a revelation that, in the end, love always has the last word.

    I’ll be unpacking this more in my next post: Does God Need Blood?

    But for tonight, let this question linger:

    What if the cross was never Plan A?

    What if God’s original plan was never punishment, but participation?
    Never condemnation, but communion?

    And what if the resurrection is not God’s bailout of a broken system, but the unveiling of a love, miraculous and powerful, that has been beneath it all, waiting to be discovered?

    We’ll go there.

    Soon.

    Stay tuned.

    Thanks for taking the time to read my blogs! I’d love it if you subscribed or left a comment, especially if something resonates with you or if your church had an easter play and I brought up some memories! -JD

  • Literal or Literate?: How Your Understanding of the Bible Can Awaken Your Faith

    Most of my life, I read the Bible the way I was taught: like an instruction manual, each verse standing alone, perfectly clear in its meaning without any errors. If it said the world was made in six days, then six literal 24-hour days it was. If Jesus said, pluck out your eye if it causes you to sin, well, thank God no one took that literally… but we understood most of it that way—at face value. As if the text had been written last week, by God himself, in plain English for a modern American audience.

    Turns out, that’s not how books—especially ancient books—work.

    The word bible actually means “the books”, and if you took Spanish you may already know that it is etymologically tied to the word library. Most Protestant and Evangelical churches teach the Bible as a monolithic univocal document dropped from the sky in its final form, rather than the living, breathing, deeply human library of writings it actually is. And when we flatten it, we lose its beauty, depth, and—ironically—its truth.

    The problem, however, is not the Bible itself. The problem, my friends, is how we often read and interpret it.  The way in which we read the Bible (or our hermeneutics for short) changes everything. What happens if we read it literately instead of literally? What if we took it seriously enough to see it as it actually is—a collection of books with different genres, written by different people across centuries, in different cultural contexts, with different purposes? Suddenly, the Bible doesn’t just make more sense. It comes alive.

    What Does It Mean to Read the Bible Literately?

    To read literately means reading with an awareness of what kind of text we’re dealing with. Is it poetry? Prophecy? Myth? Parable? A first-century Jewish sermon? A legal code from a nomadic desert tribe? A deeply symbolic apocalyptic vision?

    Imagine streaming Breaking Bad like a DIY tutorial. You’d walk away thinking anyone with a Winnebago and a chemistry set can build an empire. That’s how many modern Christians read the Bible—mistaking poetry for science, metaphor for history, and cultural laws for eternal commandments for all people throughout time.

    A literate approach considers the:

    • Genre – Are we reading history, poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, a letter, or an apocalyptic vision? Each one of these requires an entirely different lens.

    • Author & Audience – Who wrote this, who were they writing to, and why? A letter from Paul to a church in 1st-century Rome isn’t a universal law for all people for all of time.

    • Original Language – Words in Hebrew and Greek often don’t translate neatly into English. Nuance gets lost. A single word, sometimes even a letter, can change everything.

    • Historical and Cultural Context – What was happening in their world when this was written? What cultural assumptions would the original readers have had? Where is the setting?

    How We’ve Gotten It Wrong

    Let’s take a look at a few well-known passages and see how a literate approach changes things:

    • Genesis 1 – The creation story here is structured poetically, with rhythmic repetition and symbolic numbers (7 days, representing perfection and completeness). It’s less a scientific blueprint and more a beautiful theological statement: God, our Source, brings order from chaos. And did you know there are actually 2 different creation stories in the book of Genesis? And if we try to read it literally, the creation stories have some pretty significant differences, including which name it calls God.

    • The Book of Job – Often misunderstood as a historical account, Job reads more like an ancient drama exploring human suffering and the nature of God. It opens with a heavenly wager between God and “the Satan” (which means ‘the accuser,’ not necessarily the devil who is never even mentioned in the Hebrew Bible) — a setup that sounds more like a stage play than a court transcript.

    • The Parables of Jesus – The Good Samaritan isn’t just a nice story about kindness. To Jesus’ audience, Samaritans were despised outsiders from another country. His point was and still is scandalous: The “enemy” is the one who is showing God’s love. A literal English reading often misses that gut-punch.

    • Revelation – Apocalyptic literature is highly symbolic. Reading Revelation like a future newspaper misses its original purpose: to offer hope to persecuted Christians under Roman rule. The Beast isn’t your least favorite politician from that other evil party — it most likely represented Emperor Nero. You know… in Rome?

    How This Can Change Your Faith (For the Better)

    If you stop reading the Bible like a list of divine tweets straight from God’s thumbs and start reading it as a collection of ancient, sacred, deeply human writings wrestling with the divine, something happens.

    1. It becomes way more interesting – No more boring, redundant rulebook. Instead, you’re diving into ancient poetry, mystical visions, political resistance literature, and letters of encouragement to underground faith communities.
    2. It opens itself to mystery – Instead of needing everything to be perfectly clear, rigid, and factual, you may start embracing subversive language, paradox, symbol, and meanings with deeply rich layers.
    3. It frees you from harmful interpretations – A literal reading has been used to justify war, slavery, misogyny, homophobia, and genocide. A literate reading recognizes when a text is describing something, not prescribing it.
    4. It deepens your connection to the Divine – Rather than a static set of rules and doctrines, you encounter a dynamic conversation with God, one that invites you, like its characters, to wrestle, question, doubt, misunderstand, and grow.

    Jesus Read the Scriptures This Way… So We Should Too.

    Jesus himself did not read Scripture literally. He was so intimately aware of the spirit within the words that he reinterpreted, reframed, and challenged the common readings of his time. “You have heard it said… but I tell you…” was his way of saying, Hey, you’ve been reading this wrong. Let me show you what it actually means. Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

    When we move from literalism to literacy, we’re by no means abandoning Scripture—we’re respecting it. We’re engaging with it the way it was meant to be engaged: as an unfolding revelation, a window into the divine, a story that pulls us deeper into love, justice, peace, and transformation.

    I think that’s part of what Jesus meant when he said, “The truth will set you free.“

    And maybe, just maybe, it starts by learning how to read.

    Resources

    If you’re curious about diving deeper, here are some authors and books that have been helpful to me:

    • Inspired by Rachel Held Evans

    • The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns

    • What Is the Bible? by Rob Bell

    • Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright

    • Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth E. Bailey

    • The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr

    Also check out the fascinating public scholar work of Dan McClellan.  He’s about to release his first book since he took his work public called “The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues” on April 29th.  In the meantime check him out on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube. I also have a resources tab here, but I haven’t had the time to really put much together over there yet while I focus on writing and getting this blogging thing started.

    Happy reading.

    And happy un-reading, too.