I will begin this post the way I have begun almost every other: I am sorry for not writing in so long. I have been in an unusually cryogenic deep freeze.

Here is the first thaw.

I told my friend Matt today that I have a deconstructionist testimony of Mormonism. For starters, I believe in it because I don’t believe it, because the process of believing that took me toward unbelief brought me more truth than starting with the ‘right’ conclusions ever would have. Continue reading ‘I Want to Bear My Testimony That I Know Derrida Is True’

For the past three months, I have been nesting. Or, rather, I have been making a nest out of anything I could find, pulling bits of ideas from here, strings of words there, fine feathery thoughts and the discarded cores of used-up conclusions. I have been making a nest because I am homeless-mentally, ideologically, spiritually-and a home is all I can hope to have. I am considering, for the first time, the radical possibility that everything I see might contain the truth, and so I have to take it all home with me; no matter how pathetic, I must not just take it home but make it my home-a habitation of thoughts.

I have been nesting, too, because the words I want to say seem too dangerous to say. I have been seized upon by a desire to revive an old conservatism that has never released me; I have been compelled to ask questions and then to ask for help-a dangerous proposition; I have wanted to let loose with a thorough agnosticism, with stifling doubt, and then with joy in the stifling doubt, a phrase that says: Rejoice! For doubt is all there is; I have known a great shrinking at the content and the sound of my own voice; a great silence before I speak words that are my own to speak, and all the terror of that silence; a feeling of preparation, great despair, foolishness, and above all, fear that I am about to be utterly myself and that this ‘myself’ will be utterly incomprehensible to others. I have sat, wooden, unable to write. But under the wood, a secret fungal decomposition, dreadful and dark, remaking the inside and moving out.

In short, I have never had such a cacophony of contradiction to offer before, never had so much good to say about the Institution, never so much forgiveness, never so much disbelief in God but never so much delight in the metaphor.

I have been drawn, in this great racket, to the lamentation of old stories and the spells they cast far beyond their happenings. I have been drawn to the stories of Beats everywhere, of the explosive, prophetic, misunderstood human wherever he or she has appeared. I am learning the meaning of Jack Kerouac’s confession: “I am not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic.”

This is why I finally opened Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. I guess I was finally ready for it. Continue reading ‘Don’t Call it a Comeback (Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith, and the Beatnik Gospel of History)’

The politics of beauty and mercy seek what all great reforms (and reformers) have sought: to universalize their radical subjectivity through the fundamentally unfounded logic of the State.

So what does this all have to do with Elizabeth’s post? What does it have to do with religion being of use or the tension between bottom-up and top-down politics?

Everything. Continue reading ‘Reparation of Church and State, Part IV’

I wanted to post Elizabeth’s reflections because I’ve had so many thoughts on the things she talks about and I desperately need a starting point. These thoughts intersect and diverge in so many ways that I don’t know how to keep them together, so I will simply start writing and hope I cover everything along the way.

First, I have been agonizing about what I a politics of mercy would look like. I have spent months in the belly of the political beast (Washington, DC) working on a political campaign-albeit, a very atypical political campaign-and I have seen again and again the limits of top-down politics.

I remember being in a rhetoric class a few years ago, discussing Continue reading ‘Reparation of Church and State, Part II’