God is never lost. In the midst of great evil, God is there. I have long wondered how Jonestown fits into such ideas. In the 1970s, Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple founded the settlement in the jungles of Guyana. After a few years of communal living, Jones led his followers to commit a mass suicide/murder that left over 900 people dead. The last words the community ever heard were recorded. Jones’ words are beyond disturbing. Evil resonates with... Read more
“I’ve been living on a hope for a long time…” -Jim Jones Hope is not all that complicated of a construct. When we find it, we’re alive. When we don’t, we’re dead. There is no life apart from hope. Hope is God. God is Hope. When I hear Jim Jones’ words, I struggle to believe him. I know what was about to go down and so did he. Hope is about life not death. Jones is prove to... Read more
“I’ve always put my lot with you.” -Jim Jones There is Christ and there is Anti-Christ. In what might sound like the words of Christ, Jim Jones declared that he was putting his lot with his community. Unfortunately, this didn’t turn out to be true. Jones was pushing the community to a suicide that he would not fully emulate. When the time came to die, almost everyone in the community took a lethal dose of cyanide. Afraid of... Read more
In many places, I’ve sought the Queer God. Sometimes I find divinity and sometimes divinity finds me. The nature of seeking is that God always finds us. Every journey is queer, unlike any other journey. The queerness of our lives is an emulation of the Queer God, in whose image we’re made. We are constantly living into God’s image…our own queerness. The queerer we become, the closer we draw near to divinity. To engage God in normative ways is... Read more
God is never lost. In the midst of great evil, God is there. I have long wondered how Jonestown fits into such ideas. In the 1970s, Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple founded the settlement in the jungles of Guyana. After a few years of communal living, Jones led his followers to commit a mass suicide/murder that left over 900 people dead. The last words the community ever heard were recorded. Jones’ words are beyond disturbing. Evil resonates... Read more
God is never lost. In the midst of great evil, God is there. I have long wondered how Jonestown fits into such ideas. In the 1970s, Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple founded the settlement in the jungles of Guyana. After a few years of communal living, Jones led his followers to commit a mass suicide/murder that left over 900 people dead. The last words the community ever heard were recorded. Jones’ words are beyond disturbing. Evil resonates with... Read more
God is never lost. In the midst of great evil, God is there. I have long wondered how Jonestown fits into such ideas. In the 1970s, Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple founded the settlement in the jungles of Guyana. After a few years of communal living, Jones led his followers to commit a mass suicide/murder that left over 900 people dead. The last words the community ever heard were recorded. Jones’ words are beyond disturbing. Evil resonates with... Read more
God is never lost. In the midst of great evil, God is there. I have long wondered how Jonestown fits into such ideas. In the 1970s, Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple founded the settlement in the jungles of Guyana. After a few years of communal living, Jones led his followers to commit a mass suicide/murder that left over 900 people dead. The last words the community ever heard were recorded. Jones’ words are beyond disturbing. Evil resonates with... Read more
“Do you believe in a literal hell?” Even though it was more than a decade ago, I’ll never forget that first question. In the midst of my Southern Baptist ordination council, the gathered men wanted to make sure that I would carefully toe the line of fundamentalism. At the time, I was growing more and more conflicted with these beliefs that I’d ultimately come to reject. Back then, I blurred the lines of fundamentalism and answered the question thusly, “I... Read more
God is never lost. In the midst of great evil, God is there. I have long wondered how Jonestown fits into such ideas. In the 1970s, Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple founded the settlement in the jungles of Guyana. After a few years of communal living, Jones led his followers to commit a mass suicide/murder that left over 900 people dead. The last words the community ever heard were recorded. Jones’ words are beyond disturbing. Evil resonates with... Read more
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