Hitzonim | Outsiders

Here is your starting point, with links to learn more and get to know the author

You are here because you know me and trust my work, or you’ve watched me online, maybe a friend forwarded you a post from this newsletter that caught your attention, or you have the resources to support a creator who is building a space to take seriously an examination of Judaism and Christianity that is divorced from proselytizing and instead seeks to share scholarship from academia in an accessible and transformative way.

Maybe, like me, you’ve wrestled with your own religious identity. You were raised in one tradition, but there’s more to the story, or the tradition in which you were raised betrayed your trust or otherwise made you to feel less than.

Maybe you are on the path toward a new religious way of being through joining a new religion, a new denomination, or a new movement. Maybe your spouse or partner is Jewish and you aren’t, or your spouse or partner isn’t Jewish, but you are. Maybe, like me, you see a world, especially within the United States, that seems gripped by antisemitism, Christian nationalism, and white hegemony, and you know these ideologies that promote peace through victory are both common and deeply at odds with a prophetic message of peace through justice.

Maybe you’ve heard people say things like, “I’m a Christian agnostic,” and that sounded exciting, or someone said, “I’m a Christian atheist,” and that sounded heretical. Maybe you heard, “You can be Jewish and an atheist,” or you are a Jewish atheist! Maybe you see the history of harm and violence in the (“big C”) Church, stemming from colonialism, defense of enslavement, forced conversion, and genocide, and for very good reasons left these institutions. Maybe you’re still in those institutions, reforming from the inside out—either reforming the institution or your own understanding, or both.

Maybe you are deconstructing your theology, joining the ex-evangelical, exvangelical, movement, and you are looking to follow that thread further.

Maybe your view of this entire program of organized religion sees it as farce, a hoax, the opiate of the people, a political framework for power and control, and while I’d mostly agree with you, this is cause for me to learn more, not turn away. With 2.5 billion people claiming some Christian identity globally and the marriage of right-wing politics and Christianity in America, it’s long been my position that we dismantle harmful ideologies brick-by-brick through learning and debate rather than fall back on the same shallow talking points, dog whistles, and uninformed hot takes that are the modus operandi of the Christian Right.

If these themes resonate, I hope you like what’s to come. If you haven’t yet, read the Welcome post to learn more about the project, or read this post to get acquainted with me.

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