The Emergent Self

Questioning what we're told it means to be human

The Weight of a Cloud

A fair-weather cloud weighs over a million pounds and looks like nothing at all. We make the same mistake about the people around us.

Who Decided What Our Skin Would Mean?

Painting of an empty public swimming pool behind a chain-link fence on a summer afternoon, with flowering trees and a diving board

In 1977, a student in my rural Georgia classroom told me he wasn’t allowed in the city pool. That moment raised a question I still carry: who decided what our skin would mean, and who gains from the answer?

Why Flatterers Turn on You

Why flatterers turn on you: an illustration of a conference table where employees hold smiling masks in front of wary faces as they turn toward the boss at the head of the table.

The person who flatters you most may be the one most likely to turn on you. A meeting I came to dread, the research behind it, and why the truth people can’t tell you goes somewhere else.

A God You Can Keep in a ZIP Code

An older White woman in a Sunday coat and hat stands in a sunlit church, seen from behind, looking up at a large Haitian-style creation tapestry of Black figures, animals and a golden sun

A parishioner once told me a tapestry did not belong in church because there were no White people in it. Thirty years later I have the words for what she was defending: not God, but a mascot.

From the Altar to the Streets

Open doors of a grand Catholic church, seen from the altar with a green chasuble in the foreground, looking out on a neighborhood street where neighbors talk together

I loved the liturgy and served a near-northside Indianapolis parish as White flight hollowed it out. Spinoza helped me understand why I had to leave, and what true piety asks of us.

Dignity Is Something We Do

Watercolor of an elderly woman in a pink cardigan speaking with a nurse who listens closely in a sunlit examination room, while a gray-haired man sits quietly in the corner with his back to the viewer.

In the emergency room, I answered every question the staff asked my mother. My answers were correct, and that was the problem. What that morning taught me about dignity.

Was My Depression Really a Gift?

Watercolor of a man seen from behind on a bench in a dim office break room, a second coffee cup set beside him as dawn light comes through the window, asking whether depression was really a gift

Was my depression really a gift? A former priest tests his own claim that the dark years after he left the priesthood were a gift.

Leaving Can Be Its Own Kind of Arriving

Watercolor of a man standing in a doorway with his back to the viewer, a black clerical shirt left on a chair in the dim room behind him and a bright 1990s office ahead, where a plane climbs past the window.

After I left the priesthood, I spent a year in temp jobs, standing in a doorway between who I had been and who I would become. Leaving, I have come to believe, is its own kind of arriving.