Religion

  • Before We Name It

    Before We Name It

    I have been sitting with a question for a while now, and the longer I sit with it, the less interested I am in answering it and the more interested I become in why it keeps showing up, again and again, in such recognizable ways. Across history and across cultures, people have talked about moments…

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  • Living with the Legend of the Screaming House vs. Reality

    I see the Screaming House brought up in groups, pages, and podcasts from time to time, and it always gives me pause. Not because I am eager to revisit it, but because it is a strange thing to watch your own life get discussed when you never said a word. That happens more than I…

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  • I Don’t Know

    I Don’t Know

    When it comes to the unknown or the paranormal, I am not chasing answers. I am trying to understand what we are actually dealing with. I think the desire for answers is natural. We all want them. But with something like the paranormal, what you are more likely to encounter are ideas, patterns, and possibilities,…

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  • The America We Were Sold

    I wish I still believed in the United States of America we were sold when we were kids. You remember the one. The country built on the solid foundation of freedom. The place where all men were said to be created equal, and where anyone could achieve the American dream if they worked hard enough.…

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  • The Chosen

    My relationship with God is not a complicated one. I live on very even ground with Him. We have an understanding, a quiet agreement that I am who He made me to be. Sometimes I believe that being gay has actually made me one of His chosen. Think about it. You come into this world…

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  • Angels?

    What do I believe? That question has haunted me for years. Angels. Guiding beings. Protectors. Light. Love. The word itself carries a kind of warmth, does it not? But what if we have been looking at them all wrong? During the Screaming House haunting, something strange would happen. The phone would ring, and on the…

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  • I’m Wondering

    How many places do we touch in an average day that once held meaning for the living? How many rooms have we slept in where someone took their last breath? You might think that sounds strange, but is it really? How many hotel beds, how many houses, how many quiet corners have absorbed a final…

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  • Examining the gap between the Constitution’s ideals and lived reality Many will tell you the United States is a great country. In some ways, they are not wrong. There is a difference between the ideals written on paper and the reality lived by its people. For some, especially those who are white, straight, and Christian,…

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  • The Satan We Don’t See

    We like to imagine evil as obvious. We picture horns, a pitchfork, a sinister laugh. Or at least a villain with the flair of a comic-book nemesis, grand speeches, black suits, and a mustache to twirl. Even in politics, we point at figures like Trump or Vance and say, “There. That’s the bad guy.” It…

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  • Seventeen years ago my book The Uninvited was released into the world. At the time, my son Elliot looked at me and asked a question that has stayed with me ever since: “Who would want to read about our lives?” It was honest, simple, and impossible for me to answer back then. What I did…

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