"The true shunyata ["emptiness"] empties itself as well as everything else. Through its self-emptying it makes everything else exist as it is and work as it does." —Masao Abe

"I asked him about God. 'If you don't believe God is real, why would God help you?' "'God is a story,' he said. 'I believe in stories, and God knows this. Stories are real, my boy. They matter.'" —Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness, 538

"We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not possess." —Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Prudence"

"The rise of AI . . . poses an existential danger to humankind not because of the malevolence of computers but because of our own shortcomings." —Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus, chap. 11

The issue isn't how religious you are; it's how you are religious.

"Inside? Outside? What is the difference and how can you tell? When a sound enters your body through your ears and merges with your mind, what happens to it? Is it still a sound then, or has it become something else?" —Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness, 51

"Her faith allowed her to see beyond *what exists*, because she saw what *could* and *ought* to exist." —Tourmaline, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson. 249.

"'God told me to do it,' Marsha explained to the police. She had painted her whole body white and was wearing only a pink slip and a feather boa." —Tourmaline, Marsha, 201

What if we stopped thinking of revelation as the conveyance of divine authority in one place, or a limited number of places, and thought of it instead as the promise of divine presence in every place?

"Christian exceptionalism relies on conjuring a history that did not exist." religiondispatches.org/2026/02/23/d...

Donald Trump's Violent Mentality is Quite Literally Biblical

One could be forgiven for coming away from Leighton Woodhouse’s “Donald Trump, Pagan King” op-ed in the New York Times with the nagging suspicion that he hasn’t actually read the biblical or ‘Pagan’ w...

religiondispatches.org

My article, "How I Became Religiously Multiple," made Christian Century's "Top 25 of 2025"! 😊 See the link for it, and the other top articles, here: www.christiancentury.org/editor-s-pos...

Our top 25 of 2025

Here are the Century articles from last year that enjoyed the most online...

christiancentury.org

"But the universe would not turn backward. It was a great engine . . . inviting humankind to attempt other forms of order and disorder." —Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (1976)

For this #MLKday, some timely selections from Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermon "A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart": . . .

"What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?" —Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah (1969)

"There wasn’t even clear evidence that those drug traffickers were from Venezuela, let alone that they were governed by Maduro in any sense." —Susan Breau, prof. of international law and senior associate research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Is there any legal justification for the US attack on Venezuela?

International law experts expect Washington to claim self-defence and face little serious pushback

theguardian.com

My old college classmate Brett McCracken has frustrated me many times in the past with his Gospel Coalition conservatism, but this review of Wake Up Dead Man seems targeted to upset me. He twice uses the term “true Christianity.” The headline itself is outrageous bothsidesism.

I'm tempted to say that I like Everybody Scream even more than I like Dance Fever. Maybe that's just the charm of the new. But maybe not?

a man sitting in front of a microphone with the nbc logo on the bottom right

ALT: a man sitting in front of a microphone with the nbc logo on the bottom right

media.tenor.com

Literal eschatology—the expectation that an outside power will one day swoop in and "set everything right"—is a recipe for tragically unconstructive discontentment. It discourages both working to change present circumstances and looking for happiness in the present.

"Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible; without emptiness, nothing is possible." —Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.14

"Many . . . are drawn into thinking that emptiness is the ground of being, the ontological ground of everything. But emptiness, when understood rightly, is the absence of *any* ontological ground. . . . It is not any kind of absolute or ultimate reality." —Thich Nhat Hanh, The Other Shore, chap. 4

"The results show that urgent action is needed to stop forest loss or the world risks losing one of its most important natural carbon buffers. . . ." www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Africa’s forests transformed from carbon sink to carbon source, study finds

Alarming shift since 2010 means planet’s three main rainforest regions now contribute to climate breakdown

theguardian.com

Check out my article from the August 2025 issue of the Christian Century. 😊🙏

Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya)@alexdemarco.bsky.social · 12mo ago

"Relational pluralism . . . opened my eyes to how mainstream Christian theology, even in its inclusive forms, excludes other religious perspectives and paths from the kind of access to saving truth that it claims for itself." #Pluralism #Religion #Theology www.christiancentury.org/features/how...

"The name (of) 'God' is not the name of an assured presence but of a tremulous coming-to-presence, of a soft voice that disturbs the peace of the present and pries it open to the prospect of what is coming." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 175

"God's existence, like ours, is contingent, fragile, unstable, and uncertain, because it is dependent upon the extent to which *we* manage to make this event [God] come true." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 143

"Revelation [is not] a special delivery from on high that has disclosed information beyond the reach of human wit. Revelation is the self-revelation of the Spirit, & it arises from the bowels of being, revealing the inner essence of the forces with which we resonate." —Caputo, What to Believe?, 70

I'm looking forward to #AARSBL2025 this weekend. I'm especially excited to celebrate with Greg and Edwin their new books, The Essential "City of God" and The Incarnation as God's First Intention, which I had the pleasure of working on with them this past year.

"This is the greatest honor that the soul can pay to God, to leave God to himself and to be free of him." —Meister Eckhart

Apophasis for the masses:

Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya)@alexdemarco.bsky.social · 9mo ago

God is neither a man nor upstairs.

God is neither a man nor upstairs.