#breaking binaries

Theology is different if we apply to it a transgendered way of thinking. If we recognize and insist on the presence of things that transcend, encompass, or fail to fit the categories at all, then we approach seemingly opposite-looking things for that which binds them together or goes beyond them altogether. ... Religious groups can be all too hasty to present an either-or view of the world. Things are either good or evil, we hear Christian clerics proclaim. People will go either to heave or hell. There is Jesus’ way and the wrong way. In reality, however, good and evil, right and wrong are not always so easy to distinguish. ... Jesus calls us to a more complex way of examining the world, a way that requires us to see things in a broader context. Jesus’ faith and teaching was not about easy answers but about just ways of moving and living in a complicated world. The Jewish commentaries on the law and the prophets function in the same way. The point is not to know the only way of looking at a text, but to tease out all of its possible meanings so that the reader has the richest available knowledge of how God spoke, and speaks, through the passage. Looking beyond binary thinking is a faithful way of viewing the world. ... Given that we can only know the smallest fraction of the divine in the course of a human lifetime, increasing our knowledge of God by using all of the ways available to us may allow us to expand our access.

We know the experience of ‘outsiderdom’ very well, as does our God. Throughout the sacred writings of the Jewish and Christian traditions, outsiders speak of God: the prophets who were maligned and threatened because of the words they spoke, Job the afflicted one, Mary who proclaimed that God would bring the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly, John the Baptist in the wilderness drawing the ire of the political establishment... We who live on the margins have learned that we can find the Holy One there. A sacred beauty is present at the margins, a kind of spiritual honesty that is not found in places of comfort and power. I see God at work in the transwoman who gets up in the morning and has the courage to go to work, gracefully ignoring the stares of co-workers. I see God in the lives of transmen and transwomen who pass and choose to speak out for our collective liberation, rather than simply melting into the crowd. I see the divine presence in every one who questions their gender and knows in their heart of hearts that they are different. I know that God was present with Brandon Teena and Tyra Hunter and all of the other martyrs. God is present with each tearful, defiant, proud, frightened, and hopeful one of us. ... In seeing God at the margins, we discover something else. We learn that wherever we are, we are at the center of the heart of God. God’s center is where God’s people are, particularly when we are in need of God, wherever that may be. When those of us at the margins seek God, then the margins are the place where the center can be found, and we are at the center of God’s heart, and thus the world comes full circle. Margins and center occupy the same space, the same lives, the same hearts. The center of the universe of faith is wherever God is present, and God is at the margins.

Week 3: DJP #3

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction… The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

assumption: you don't hate on the skinny girls!