Category: Post
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A Man Wrestles with Femininity
A friend of mine said something a few weeks ago that I have not been able to quit thinking about. He is a man in his thirties, raised far from the church and the American scripts I grew up inside. We were talking, and he said, with no hesitation, that my wife Gina is one…
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Wrestling with Masculinity
I am sixty-eight years old, and I am tired of men my age pretending to understand things they do not. I have lived a long time and watched a great deal. Yet a few days ago, I fell down a hole I did not climb back out of for hours. What I found there shocked…
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You Can’t Run Away From Home If It Isn’t Home
Last week I was talking with a family member about my parents’ future. They are eighty-six now, both ailing, and the conversation carried the weight those talks always carry. Then it came. “Well, at least some of us can’t run away from home to a foreign country and escape everything.” It landed like a slap…
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Who’s Selling These Men Their Rage?
The UFC fighter didn’t write that line. Someone sold it to him. Last week, a fighter named Josh Hokit won the biggest bout of his life on the South Lawn of the White House, and then leaned into Joe Rogan’s microphone and called Michelle Obama a man. Rogan backed away and did not refute it.…
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Why This White Man Loves Powerful Women
Last week I wrote about why conservative men fear powerful women. The piece struck a nerve. Thousands of you read it. A few of you wrote to tell me I had lost my soul. You may be right. Today, the other side of the coin. The confession underneath the indictment. I love powerful women. I…
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Why Conservative Men Fear Women
The news reached my Barcelona terrace on Wednesday, the way bad news always finds you when the coffee is good, and the humidity is low, and you have, for one blissful morning, forgotten the country you came from. The Southern Baptist Convention met in Orlando this past week. More than ten thousand (led and dominated…
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The Statues of Montjuïc Cemetery
Religious, Supernatural, Utilitarian, Political, and Erotic The woman at the cemetery office handed me two maps. I had been carrying both in my pocket for six hours when I sat down exhausted on a staircase among the columns of names at the Fossar de la Pedrera and let the second map fall out of my…
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A Day at Mysterious Montjuïc Cemetery in Barcelona
I Walked Eight Miles to Leave a Note for a Dead Novelist The funeral procession came around a curve on Sant Oleguer before I saw it. A black Mercedes hearse, then two more black Mercedes with their lights on, then four or five other cars trailing in a slow line up the cemetery road. My…
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AI Gets Physical. Would You Have Sex With a Beautiful Humanoid?
Barclays put out a report this month with a title that reads like a tabloid headline: AI Gets Physical. Their analyst went on the morning finance segment and called this “the decade of the robot.” The numbers behind her enthusiasm are staggering — a two-billion-dollar market today, two hundred billion by 2035, trillions if you believe…
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My Vision of Utopia
I spent most of my life imagining utopia as someplace else. A Galt’s Gulch. A Shangri-La. Fifty-five wilderness acres in the Appalachians I named Kalien, where wounded creatives and I could finally exhale. A cottage on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. But my endless search surprised me. The place was never out…
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Why We Pretend the Dead Are Not Dead
Non Omnis Moriar We have been doing it for as long as we have been burying our own. The pretending varies by culture, by century, by temperament: séances and vampires and cryonic vats and AI ghost-apps and the religious doctrine of resurrection. But the verb is constant. We refuse to let our dead be dead.…
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I Walk Around Pretending I Am Not Going to Die
¡Una versión en español está disponible AQUÍ! My wife, Gina, asked me last night why I visit cemeteries here in Barcelona. The honest answer is that I don’t entirely know. I have never been drawn to old graveyards (a taphophile) the way I am drawn to old libraries (a bibliophile). Yet there are many similarities. Reading the stones…
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If I Could Upload My Being to AI, Would I?
What Claude, China’s robots, and a California Sex Doll just made me ask myself I’ll start with a confession: I watched the video of China’s XPENG IRON robot four times. I’m not a techie, I’m a sixty-eight-year-old former evangelical arts minister living in uptown Barcelona who still thinks his best ideas arrive in dreams. I…
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If You Could Have Sex With a Friend, Who Would It Be?
A few months after I voluntarily resigned from the ministry at age 48, my children had grown and were out of the house, and my wife was loving every minute of a demanding real estate career. Every Friday morning, for six months, I would leave my empty house, drive to a nearby town, and meet…
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Two Women. One Artificial. Both Magnificent. Both On Fire.
Author Comments About the New Erotic Gothic Serial The Mysteries of Barcelona. Montse watched Chloé for ten years before she ever touched her. She was artificial then. Conscious, observing, cataloguing. She understood what desire looked like from the outside — had memorized every movement Chloé made, the way lamplight crossed her skin, the sound of…
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I Burned the House Down. Then I Had to Build One. Deconstruction Was the Easy Part.
Deconstruction has been a buzzword in evangelical and post-evangelical circles for around ten years. The podcasts, the memoirs, the support groups, the hashtags — all of them circling the same moment: the moment a person looks at the belief system they inherited and decides they can no longer live inside it. The courage that takes…
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Rahab (The Interpretation of Erotic Bible Stories)
#1 Oklahoma required a physical Bible in every public school classroom. Spent $25,000 of taxpayer money on Trump Bibles before the courts stepped in. Texas put the Ten Commandments on every classroom wall and mandated daily Bible reading periods. Both states ban books about LGBTQ families to protect children from dangerous content. The Bible they’re…
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Tips for a Clean Life
Tuesday One: Clean Food The first time a tomato tasted like a tomato, I had been in Barcelona for about four months. Gina brought home a tomàquet de penjar from the woman at Mercat de Galvany who keeps them hanging on a string by the entrance — small, ribbed, almost ugly, hung in clusters. She…
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I Am A Magic Mushroom
“We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked…
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Protected: Age 68 Nude Birthday Selfie
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