rebirthing

My final blog posts on rude truth were meditations on the birth doula training I was finishing in 2015. So I thought I'd pick up where I left off (sort of), with the theme of rebirth. Welcome back to rude truth, again, nearly a decade later.

I might've gone with a new title altogether, since this is a new start and all. Plus, a year after I started the OG blog, Philip Roth used the phrase for his 2006 title and ever since I've felt a little odd about competing with a famous author person in google searches. But I still love it, goddammit, and the Emerson snippet that is its inspiration. (I assume this is also Roth's allusion but to be honest I have never actually read that book so I don't actually know. But surely it has to be.)

I also find the practice of speaking rude truth difficult, and always have, and it doesn't hurt to keep this in front of our eyeballs as an aspiration. Especially now.

Changes: well, I'm older, my kids are older, my back lowkey hurts a lot and perimenopause is a helluva constant companion, I've given up on the tenure-track thing but I'm lucky enough to have a job that keeps me in contact with academia and students, I've gotten divorced and remarried, and divorced, and astonishingly happily remarried, I haven't been to church but once since Covid, and don't really practice as a birth doula but use my DONA training in some way every single day. Rebirth has been a long and twisting negotiation through shifting circumstance, but I came through it okay. 

(I don't know if I'm the baby or the mother, there.)

A decade or so ago, I was still envisioning work within the Churches of Christ on gender justice as my life's project, and assuming that at some point I would find myself teaching theology in a Church of Christ school, or perhaps some other university, but still, orienting my scholarly work around contributing to the Church of Christ world in some significant way. I never actually intentionally "left" the CofC, as so many of my smart and principled friends have found it necessary to do. Instead I just gradually became aware that somewhere along the line, the CofC world had withdrawn from me, and I from it, and there was nothing much we had to say to one another that made any sense any more. It was a weird sort of break up, a very millenial ghosting type of thing. 

So I'm a theologian-at-large, and maybe even exile, who doesn't really do theology much anymore, but perhaps this is what blogs are really good for, yeah? The truth is, I don't know why I'm cranking up the old thing now. I don't have a coherent project in mind, unlike the old days. I'm not searching for one, either. 

But perhaps this is exactly parallel to the very beginning: in 2005, I didn't want an audience, and didn't have a project, other than my blog was a desperate reach for a mechanism to help recover the ability to speak aloud what I was thinking, when the competitive atmosphere of doctoral seminars had produced a kind of paralysis in me. It's difficult to speak the rude truth into any space, but when the spaces you're inhabiting make it much easier to keep quiet, you need a place to practice. That was the original point. And maybe that's all a blog is really meant to be.