The Post I'd Probably Pin if I were Disappearing for a Month here in 2026

—Off-Canon Substack conversations with my pal, Tori, have been so much fun. We’re putting our conversations onto this audio podcast. Meanwhile, we’re taking a break til August.

—Speaking of taking a break, I’ll probably do the same with posting here for a few weeks. I got a book to write. It’s fun, but it’s taking a lot of my time.

—I hope you can join us for Pre-Theology Beer Camp this October in KC.👇🏼

1-Name injustice, but be quick to name yourself in the mix, for who of us really knows where we end, and evil begins?

2-Love your neighbor, the biblical test case of which is your enemy. These days, there are a lot of enemies. See? You’re blessed. Now you have lots of opportunities to practice love.

3-Outsourcing all your writing to AI isn’t good for you. (Using it as a tool is another matter, but that goes beyond the scope of this post.) So, yes, using AI too much is an unhealthy shortcut. Oh, and scapegoating AI and the techno-bros is a shortcut, too — a shortcut to gain peace by joining forces with others to make victims. I suspect love is inviting us to evolve, not overagainst technology, but with technology. It’s not fashionable to say such things. Dang.

4-Respond rather than react. Encourage rather than shut down. Empower rather than shame. Do this for others and do this for yourself.

5-I suspect that anti-love powers and principalities exist; that they are neither separate from matter nor humans. I think everything, at some level, is in a co-evolving relationship. The bible references the anti-love stuff in a couple of different ways, suggesting that sometimes they are energized by the diabolos—Greek for “division,” or the devil—and at times, like the ha-satan—Hebrew for “the accuser,” or Satan.

It works like this: What the diabolos divides, the ha-satan unites.

Yeah, a two-pronged approach:

• Divide us by leveraging our fears, anger, jealousy, insecurity, and anxiety.

• Unite us by getting us to offload our problems onto a common enemy. In our unity, we agree that everyone should loathe, hate, and blame that enemy. And then we push them in the volcano, shove them in the gas chamber, lynch them on a tree, crucify them on a cross, and say bad things about them on instagram.

In all of this, we might see the powers and principalities at work in our world. And in all this, we might see the answer to the question Jesus posed: “Can satan cast out satan?” Actually, yes, it can. Anti-love can divide us, then get us to unify over casting something out, all of which keeps us in an endless loop of pain and keeps itself alive and well. It’s brilliant, sinister but brilliant in its hidden effectiveness.

6-I was talking with my therapist niece recently about this and other things (Btw, I don’t call her therapist niece, I call her Lauren), and she said, “I think you’re trying to help people move to a ‘depressive position,’ which is one that holds paradox and live in the uncertain space without collapsing as a means to ward off fear… The question becomes, how do we survive our own fear?”

Yeah, that’s a great question: how will humanity survive its own fear?

Well, we know what our pattern is with fear: project it onto others and blow ‘em up. Or take it upon ourselves and implode. Both moves require a type of sacrifice and violence. But love doesn’t need sacrifice. Or violence. Good grief, name one time when violence has actually rid the world of violence. Love’s a different game, bro.

7-Go for love. Do your best to rid your politics of sacrifice and violence. Your economics, too. Most of all, your religion.

The next time your pastor hints that certain people, any people, are outside of God’s purview, care, affection, grace, or love, find him and well, give him a hug. (I say “him” because not everyone is as cool as I am and has a female Sr. pastor.) Anyhow, give him a hug, hold it a little longer than normal, so that everyone starts to feel a little uncomfortable. Try not to say anything. Wait a couple of weeks, then slip him an anonymous note that says something like, “Jesus isn’t on the cross to ‘fix ‘ the world; Jesus is on the cross, arms outstretched to hold the world together.”

8-Give lots of hugs.

9-Above all, never forget this: the only thing that matters, like, really matters is faith expressing itself in love.

I have no caption for this sketch but clearly the three robots have been programmed to consider the one robot with finger pointing claw-pointing suspicion.

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