When I was 19 years old, I floated down the middle of Bourbon Street on Fat Tuesday. Ten months earlier, I wasn’t succeeding in class, wasn’t succeeding outside of class, felt disoriented in regards to my future and needed a structured incubator where I could find the pieces of myself that seemed scattered and in …
Each summer, our youth group joined other churches from our Super-Christian North Texas district for a week of camp that took place at a Pentecostally-sanctioned camp ground. It was a week of field-day games, non-coed swimming, sexually-repressed flirting with other sexually-repressed teenagers and no less than two hellfire and brimstone services each day. None of …
I was born into the church the way Prince William was born into the royal family; I had no choice in the matter. The level of involvement and understanding of Pentecostal decorum I had from a young age isn’t normal to most children, but I never knew any different. It wasn’t that I was expected …
In the late 90s, the Bible Belt was an almost mythological place to live if you were of the Evangelical persuasion. The economy was flush, your religious liberties weren’t really in jeopardy and you rested easy within your enclosed, profanity-free, abortionless corner of society. Oh the world may be falling apart everywhere else, but in …
Easter is the biggest day on the church-going calendar and for many, a pastel-colored morning which serves as their annual check-in to make sure nothing in the Bible has changed since they heard it a year ago. Those people usually sit somewhere near the back of the room so they aren’t close enough to catch …
Ryan Brinson 