Synopsis Of Falling Back In Love With Being Human Letters To Lost Souls

Falling Back in Love with Being Human

A national bestseller in Canada, hailed by The New York Times as an “intimate expression of self-acceptance and forgiveness, tenderly written to fellow trans women and others.” “Required reading.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 bestselling author of Untamed A THEM AND AUTOSTRADDLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD What happens when we imagine loving the people—and the parts of ourselves—that we do not believe are worthy of love? Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, and spiritual healer, she’s always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred. But then Kai Cheng found herself in a crisis of faith, overwhelmed by the viciousness with which people treated one another, and barely clinging to the values and ideals she’d built her life around: justice, hope, love, and healing. Rather than succumb to despair and cynicism, she gathered all her rage and grief and took one last leap of faith: she wrote. Whether prayers or spells or poems—and whether there’s a difference—she wrote to affirm the outcasts and runaways she calls her kin. She wrote to flawed but nonetheless lovable men, to people with good intentions who harm their own, to racists and transphobes seemingly beyond saving. What emerged was a blueprint for falling back in love with being human.

Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs

Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs confronts the enduring effects of religious trauma by centering the body as both a site of harm and a source of healing. This collection offers a necessary space for truth telling, grief, and renewal. Bringing together critical autoethnographies and theoretical reflection, this volume examines how purity culture intersects with sexuality, gender, race, ability, class, neurodiversity, and spirituality. Contesting evangelicalism’s focus on bodily autonomy and sexual politics, contributors explore how embodied storytelling becomes a means of resistance and transformation. Addressing topics such as reproductive rights in fundamentalist contexts, eugenics-inspired rhetoric linking queerness and disability, and ritual practices like tattooing, each chapter testifies to the ways individuals remember, resist, and reclaim wholeness after harm. By foregrounding lived experience, the book shifts the study of religious rhetoric from theology and persuasion toward embodiment and trauma, illuminating not only what religious discourse does but what it costs. Scholars and students of religion, feminist and queer studies, and rhetoric—as well as activists engaged in justice and healing work—will find in this volume both critical insight and a call to action. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Hannah Benefiel, Mathew Boedy, Carrie Drake, Susan Garza, Amanda K. Gross, Ada Hubrig, Deborah Leiter, Camille Kaminski Lewis, Chaim McNamee, Haleh Mir Miri, Tessi Muskrat, Christopher Peace, Mary Pitts, Joseph Richards, Elaine Schnabel, Julie J. Sisler, and Kylie Sommer.

All nations [afterw.] The Missionary review of all nations. Ed. by J. Jackson