A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
I find religion to be quite fascinating, despite the fact that I don't personally believe the fundamentals of any of them. This post will be a bit of a meander through thoughts kicking around in my head related to religion. I would say that I fall somewhere in the vicinity of weak agnostic/soft atheist. By… Continue reading Some Thoughts on My Version of Soft Atheism
But Deliver Me From Crazy by Katie R. Dale is a memoir of living with bipolar disorder. You may know Katie from her blog, Bipolar Brave. She also contributed a story about bipolar I to my book Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis. The book begins when Katie was in high school, when her illness first… Continue reading Book Review: But Deliver Me From Crazy
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari was recommended to me by Nick of Fiction & Ideas after I reviewed Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. This will be even less of review than I usually do; more of a mental chewing over what I read. The… Continue reading Book Review: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Bottled Memories by David Ritter is a short book (40 pages) of poetry capturing both active addiction and the process of recovery. While the poems relate to his own experiences, there are themes many others will relate to, including the lure of "one more," "praying to the porcelain throne," and doing the walk of shame.… Continue reading Book Review: Bottled Memories
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIBiLtzpQX0 I'm not religious, but religion does interest me. For Christmas eve, I thought I'd share some relevant photos from my travels. My camera at the time wasn't great, but I've edited the photos as best I can. The above photos are of the exterior and interior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in… Continue reading Away in a Manger: Photos from the Holy Land
Two men get killed. Some members of the Christian right are calling the man who killed them a hero and a patriot sent by God. Something isn't adding up here. On August 25, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse grabbed his AR-15 style rifle and left his home in Antioch, IL, to head over to Kenosha, WI. He… Continue reading Kyle Rittenhouse as Christian Right Hero?
It seems like every year there is debate around the "right" thing to say come December. Some people say it's not politically correct to say "Merry Christmas", and the preferred alternatives might be "happy holidays" or "season's greetings." Then you've got the Great Pumpkin wanting to obliterate "happy holidays" because it's part of a war… Continue reading Is It Wrong To Say Merry Christmas?
Last week, I heard in the news that the Vatican released a statement essentially saying that transgender identities simply doesn't exist. It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that this was done during Pride Month. Dismissing transgender identities brings to mind a similar question to what's raised by the abortion debate bubbling away in the… Continue reading Who Gets to Decide Others’ Gender Identities?
As U.S. states like Alabama, Kentucky, and Georgia are passing laws restricting abortion and gearing up to challenge the Roe v. Wade decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, I look on from north of the border with dismay and disgust. I wouldn't want to live in a country where limited reproductive rights could mean that… Continue reading Reproductive Rights: My Body Is My Own
