I grew up loving Jesus and the Church, was raised traditional Episcopalian, and met my husband in college. I served as a female altar server for ten years of my traditional Episcopalian upbringing until I graduated from high school in 1990. Due to growing liberated gender and sexuality ethics in the Episcopal Church USA in the 1970s and 1980s and not fully understanding my Anglo-Catholic heritage or the LBGTQ+ spectrum, we started our family in the Baptist tradition due to... Read more

I’ve now watched the Catholic trailer below called Wonderfully Made, LBGTQ+ R(eligion) over ten times with no less tears than the first time I watched it.  My ultra-conservative background in the Anglican Church of Nigeria and then in conservative trad Catholic circles awakened my eyes to the damage that can be done when Church teaching is forcefully applied to the point of pushing people into suicide and lasting spiritual and psychological harm. I am not an advocate for dismissing Church... Read more

As a gentle reminder, I am a pediatric specialty therapist with a variety of credentialing and specialties.  I serve children with learning, developmental, and cognitive disabilities.  You can read more about my profession on my do-it-yourself wixsite after this paragraph.  I addition to serving children in therapy sessions through my private practice, I also serve as the Catholic ministry lead for the largest ecumenical religious trauma recovery group in the world for LBGTQIA+ children and their families.  I help Catholic... Read more

Happy Sunday! In my last post, I wrote an article about my journey of becoming an affirming Catholic LBGTQIA+ pediatric specialty therapist.  Considering how conservative my family’s religious background has been over the last 30 years of my life, arriving to a fully-affirming position as a professional took a tremendous amount of work for me, for my patients’ lives depended on it. In short, affirmation of LBGTQIA+ people is about life, death, and human dignity, not sexual activity. Sexual activity... Read more

In this blog today, I want to start sharing my publications about the topic of inclusion and neurodiversity in the institutional church and broader society.  In addition to writing regularly for Patheos, I am a guest contributor for a smaller faith-based publisher called Faith-on-View and a new inclusive ministry in the Catholic Church called Outreach. I professionally define neurodiverse as anyone who does not fit the majority of the population on any spectrum of human psychology, including gender and sexuality... Read more

Now that the loan forgiveness announcement has passed, I am going to move on to a topic I hold dear, the lives and human dignity of LBGTQIA+ people and their families. I confess that I didn’t understand the LBGTQIA+ experience as a heterosexual married conservative Catholic-Christian mother until my profession as a pediatric disability therapist in secular employment strongly encouraged me to do so. Since I am Catholic, the spiritual component was a significant part of both conflict and resolution... Read more

Yesterday, I wrote a piece called “The Hatred of Unconditional Love.”  In my own quotes, “Not comprehending that some middle-aged and older people were as truly as angry as I thought they were about loan forgiveness, I made this post in quotes on my Facebook page with an Avatar megaphone.” “After earning two degrees plus 2 years of post-graduate credentialing, I am thrilled that others will have loan relief.” I innocently declared war. This is not the first time people... Read more

Last night and early today at 5:00 am, I wasn’t able to diminish my internal sorrow of what I witnessed when Joe Biden passed a historic student loan forgiveness act.  As a mother who still has still one college child of multiples who all went to college, it profoundly puzzles me that people my age (50), and especially older, are fuming with anger that Millennials and Gen Z young people would have some much-needed and well-deserved financial relief from college... Read more

    After reading through some of the comments on most of my posts, I now realize that I haven’t devoted enough time to describe why I write the pieces I do. I apologize for this. I understand that some of my writings are indeed controversial and difficult to swallow at times.  I believe it’s important to introduce myself and what I do again, not for the sake of accolades but for the sake of defending the lives and human... Read more

As I sipped on my morning coffee today, I located three website addresses among many which all support the statistics I’ve read, that there is a connection between the church’s leadership and either peace and restoration, or the opposite, the violence we’ve experience and witnessed throughout Trump’s presidency and beyond. Written by faith publishers themselves, I read accounts of active peace and service with decreases in domestic violence and decreases in other types of violence.  I am especially impressed with... Read more