Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶

@thecuriousreader

Book lover, tea drinker, question asker

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Bluesky

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Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· 4d

🧶 Pattern: Make It Magic shawl by Alina Appasova found on Ravelry Yarn: Prickly Pear and a bright sapphire blue fingering from Bad Sheep Yarn Needles: size 4 The pattern is less complicated than it looks and is a fun knit. #showmeyourknits #wip

Picture of knitted shawl still on the needles. Pattern is alternating bands of sapphire blue and a variegated skein of mainly yellow, chartreuse, orange, pink, lighter blue, and dark blue in garter stitch, eyelets, and slip stitches.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· 6d

Today’s calendar: "Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people-people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book." -E. B. White

"Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people-people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book."
-E. B. White

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· 6d

“We settled for objectivity when what we long for is communion. But "being right" is a sorry substitute for being loved. And becoming the sort of people who crave recognition for being right has made monsters of us all.” Make Your Home In This Luminous Dark, James K.A. Smith , pg. 46.

If the mystics press beyond knowledge, it is to address a deeper fear: something like the fear of abandonment—a cosmic, existential loneliness, an inchoate, unspoken fear of not being seen, not being loved. Hegel described this as humanity's fundamental need for recognition. If something like this is true, then all of our philosophical projects for securing some "indubitable" foundation or assuring ourselves that we've "got it right" mask what is, at root, a social desire. What look like epistemological debates are sublimated quests to satisfy a social longing. Modernity taught us to crave knowledge as a substitute for being embedded in communities where being known is the practical foundation for going on. We settled for objectivity when what we long for is communion. But "being right" is a sorry substitute for being loved. And becoming the sort of people who crave recognition for being right has made monsters of us all.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· 13d

Grandpa Ott morning glory from seed from my local library’s seed bank. #bloomscrolling

Picture of a Grandpa Ott morning glory bloom close to the ground by a white mailbox post in partial sun. The bloom is deep purple with a white center with dark streaks on the petals forming a star pattern.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· 15d

Post something good or beautiful or true and add some joy.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· 23d

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you." -Mortimer J. Adler From today’s page-a-day Book Lover’s calendar.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· 28d

Pink miniature roses in the late afternoon sun. #bloomscrolling

Close up of bright pink miniature rose bush with 3 blooms in the late afternoon sun.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Jul 8

“In the thought reform milieu, as in all situations of ideological totalism, the experiential world is sharply divided into the pure & the impure, into the absolutely good & the absolutely evil.” Losing Reality: Cults, Cultism, & the Mindset of Political & Religious Zealotry, Robert Lifton, pg. 73

The Demand for Purity

In the thought reform milieu, as in all situations of ideological totalism, the experiential world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The good and the pure are of course those ideas, feelings, and actions consistent with the totalist ideology and policy; anything else is apt to be relegated to the bad and the impure. Nothing human is immune from the flood of stern moral judgments. All "taints" and "poisons" that contribute to the existing state of impurity must be searched out and eliminated.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Jul 2

Today’s page-a-day book lover’s calendar 📚📚📚

"A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them."
-Lemony Snicket

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Jun 12

First gardenias of the season. The fragrance is heavenly. #bloomscrolling

Picture of several cut gardenias in a glass vase on a wooden kitchen table.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Jun 10

“We don't need a kinder, more inclusive settler colonialism—a bigger tower built on the same rotten unstable base. A decolonized faith says no to empire consistently, outside and within. Our safety & security cannot come at the expense of anyone else. May we see that ever more clearly.” Patty Krawec

People may know that they will never be royals, but they believe they will be safe in the white supremacist, Christian nationalist world being built with their cooperation. They believe they will never feel the violence that lands on those who are not the same, whose skin color means they will never be the same no matter what they say or do. People will protect their innocence by denying the harms or reframing them as help or safety.

That, I believe, is what made God so mad: Exploitation and authoritarian control that wages the violence of imposed sameness. Same language, same beliefs, same goals, same everything. It might sound nice until you start to consider the cost of that sameness…

Picture of the title page of the article:
Why Did the Tower of Babel Make God So Mad? A lesson for those who build movements.
By Patty Krawec, illustrations by Ben Hickey
Sojourners, April 2026

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· May 20

“The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain.” Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong, pg. 49.

The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don't think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it's 2, maybe it's not worth telling my story. If it's 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.

Of course, writers of color must tell their stories of racial trauma, but for too long our stories have been shaped by the white imagination. Publishers expect authors to privatize their trauma: an exceptional family or historic tragedy tests the character before they arrive at a revelation of self-affirmation. In many Asian American novels, writers set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not a reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism; the outlying forces that cause their pain — Asian Patriarchal Fathers, White People Back Then — are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader, off the hook.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· May 8

Ginkgo green

A closeup of a cluster of ginkgo leaves in the sun. The color is a glorious green.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· May 1

Starting sunflowers from seeds indoors. They sprouted in 5 days.

Close up of a seed a starting tray with 12 emerging seedlings.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Apr 30

“Is there a God who collects the tears, who honors hope and rewards the ordeals of the guiltless?” Man Is Not Alone, Abraham Joshua Heschel, pg. 55

“Is it order that matters supremely? Is order the utmost that divine wisdom could produce? We are more anxious to know whether there is a God of justice than to learn whether there is a God of order. Is there a God who collects the tears, who honors hope and rewards the ordeals of the guiltless?”
Man Is Not Alone, Abraham Joshua Heschel, pg. 55

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Apr 20

“the settler narrative constructs a myth of innocence that covers over innumerable acts of violence and casts massacres as battles against hostile Indians.” Undoing Manifest Destiny, L. Daniel Hawk, pgs. 103-104. (Celebrating 250 years should be tempered with Indigenous history. Truth > myths.)

SETTLER VIOLENCE AND THE MYTH OF INNOCENCE

Nothing exemplifies more clearly the denial mechanisms that configure the American settler narrative than its determination to suppress the violence that White settlers perpetrated. Instead of acknowledging and addressing

countless atrocities, the settler narrative constructs a myth of innocence that covers over innumerable acts of violence and casts massacres as battles against hostile Indians. In so doing, the myth covers over deliberate, determined, and calculated efforts to exterminate the peoples of the land, by both informal and formal means, throughout the entirety of the colonial program.

The myth would have us believe that White settlers had a right to the land by virtue of discovery and followed a divine mandate to transform a disordered wilderness into an ordered, replenished Eden. The people of the land were savage, heathenish, and lawless nations, who had the right only to occupy the land. When Indigenous nations resisted colonial expansion, as they almost always did, settler pioneers and regimes defended themselves and the nation's destiny through just wars and violence. By this move, then, the myth could place blame for the violence suffered by Indigenous peoples squarely on their own shoulders.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Apr 20

“The search of reason ends at the shore of the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding.” Man Is Not Alone, Abraham Joshua Heschel, pg. 8.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Apr 16

“we understand that Christianity basically married empire with the Emperor Constantine and has never been able to separate itself from empire ever since.” “Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview” by Randy S. Woodley, pg. 44-45 (And therein lies many of our current problems IMO.)

How would you differentiate Christianity from following Jesus?

I think what we do, and this part pertains to our worldview, is to pick and choose the parts of Christianity that we like. We all have bad actors in our families, right, that we, well, maybe don't put them up front right away? But if we take the whole of the religion and we study it honestly, we understand that Christianity basically married empire with the Emperor Constantine and has never been able to separate itself from empire

ever since. So it doesn't mean that Christians can't follow Jesus, but I say it this way: you can be a Christian and follow Jesus, but it's very difficult.

Picture of the book “ Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview: A Decolonized Approach to Christian Doctrine” by Randy S. Woodley.

The cover is black with a picture of a shoulder cape from the Great Lakes Native Peoples.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Apr 10

“Assimilation is a survival response of the colonized.” We Mend With Gold, Kristin T. Lee, pg. 39.

Assimilation is a survival response of the colonized. It is an often-unconscious acquiescence to the order of things, a belief that accepting the power structures that exist might serve us better than resisting. It may appear voluntary, but it's as voluntary as scrambling to the roof of your house during a flood.

Picture of the book We Mend With Gold. Cover is light peach with the title words in red capital letters - one word per line staggered left and right. Four hands of different skin tone extend palm up, 2 on each side, with loops of gold held by the hands. The subtitle “An Immigrant Daughter’s Reckoning with American Christianity” is in gold at the top. The author’s name is in gold at the bottom.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Apr 4

“Christian nationalism subordinates the Kingdom to the country such that commitment to Jesus Christ and his church dissolves under its corrosive influence.” Faithful Politics, Miranda Zapor Cruz, pg. 176.

Christian nationalism is a political ideology first and foremost. Instead of being a Christian approach to politics, it is a political approach to Christianity. Christian nationalism subordinates the Kingdom to the country such that commitment to Jesus Christ and his church dissolves under its corrosive influence. Christian nationalism is incompatible with faithful citizenship in the Kingdom of God.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Apr 3

Bright green ginkgo leaves and blue sky.

Picture of branches of a ginkgo tree in full sun with blue sky in the background.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Mar 31

“Violence is not a perversion or misapplication of dominionism; it is the logical result of its foundational beliefs… Dominionism promises the whole world; all it will cost is our souls.” Faithful Politics, Miranda Zapor Cruz, pg. 174.

On January 6, 2021, lethal violence followed in the wake of miraculous discourse employed in the service of seizing political authority for Trump. Violence is not a perversion or misapplication of dominionism; it is the logical result of its foundational beliefs.

The propensity toward violence not only reveals a deeply flawed theology, but damages Christian witness. For these hermeneutical, theological, and missional reasons I conclude that Christian reconstructionism, dominionism, and the NAR are incompatible with faithful citizenship in the Kingdom of God

As Christians, we should be open and attentive to what the Holy Spirit is doing in the world; at the same time, we should be cautious about people and movements that claim unique insight into God's work, especially when their rhetoric fuels division and violence. Dominionism promises the whole world; all it will cost is our souls.”

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Mar 30

It’s azalea time. #bloomscroll

Picture of azalea bush that has sections of blooms that are bright pink, white, and white with pink streaks.

Close up of clusters of bright pink blooms. The clusters are almost spherical.

Azalea bush with small rosy pink flowers.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Mar 29

“Be with us now as we try to reclaim and attune to some beauty in the world. Keep us from despair. Let joy be the arms that carry us from hopelessness.” Black Liturgies, Cole Arthur Riley, pg. 166.

FOR A JOY THAT TRANSCENDS

Honest God,

We don't want to fake it. We can't go on with forced smiles and feigned laughter when happiness seems so far from us. The weight of the world is so heavy, it feels as if we don't have any strength left to carry joy along with it. Be with us now as we try to reclaim and attune to some beauty in the world. Keep us from despair. Let joy be the arms that carry us from hopelessness. Not that we would have to manufacture our own happiness, but that a mysterious peace would comfort us, that joy itself would be the ground beneath our feet when we feel weary. Grant us emotional honesty on the journey, knowing you will never ask us to dismiss our pain; rather, you ensure that our pain doesn't consume us. Remind us that more than one thing can be true at once. That the world can be terrible and still dare to be beautiful. In the fight against oppression in all its forms, may joy protect us. Amen.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Mar 28

We ask that you soften the hearts of the unjust, not that we would view ourselves as responsible for their absolution, but with the awareness that there are times when the vilest of people can be shaken out of their heartlessness & into their humanity. Black Liturgies, Cole Arthur Riley, pgs 139-140

FOR BEFORE A PROTEST

Defiant God,
If you were the voice of the prophets, then you remain a God who speaks against exploitation and oppression. Silence the lies in our minds that tell us our fight is futile. Let hope in our cause swell as

we come together with a shared voice. Awaken our full emotional range, that our work would be fueled by a mysterious entanglement of righteous anger and defiant hope. May we heed the voice of our own interior prophets. Protect our bodies as we resist empire, especially the youngest and most vulnerable among us. Make our protests thoughtful and inclusive, as we submit to and learn from the disabled to create a diversity of paths to fight for justice. We ask that you soften the hearts of the unjust, not that we would view ourselves as responsible for their absolution, but with the awareness that there are times when the vilest of people can be shaken out of their heartlessness and into their humanity. Let us receive the inheritance of courage and steadfast dissent of our ancestors that our steps would be their steps, our bodies their bodies, our protest a sacred echo as we boldly demand justice today. Sustain us, God.
With every block we march, reveal us as forces for liberation in this world. Ase.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Mar 27

“The security of knowledge and religious certainty turned out to be a sterile, lonely cell.” Make Your Home in this Luminous Dark, James K.A. Smith, pg. 2. (I feel seen. This is going to be a good book.)

Philosophy and the sort of faith that captivated my twenty-something self felt mutually reinforcing. Both were about knowing. Both were about winning-arguments and souls, hearts and minds. And both promised me security. I thought that security was protecting me from all sorts of things: ignorance, error, deception, but also temptation, seduction, hell. It would take me twenty-five years before I realized that the security they offered was its own sort of prison. It was a false security that may have locked away the demons I needed to confront, but also locked other people out. The security of knowledge and religious certainty turned out to be a sterile, lonely cell.

Picture of Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark. Cover is dark navy blue almost black fading to brighter blue from left to right. Letters of title shift from periwinkle on the dark navy to white on the brighter blue also from left to right.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Mar 24

"I know there are children in your community with their own dreams.... The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world." -Dolly Parton

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Mar 20

New project. Not the Sophie scarf but similar. It’s a simple pattern that’s easy to memorize and small enough to take to work so I can knit a repeat or two on my lunch break. Pattern: www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib... Yarn: Butterfly Effect worsted from Brediculous Hand Dyed Yarn 🧶

Picture of 10 inches of a narrow triangular garter stitch scarf with I-cord borders. Yarn cake is sitting next to the scarf on a wooden kitchen table. Yarn has shades of green, purple, blue, white, and fuchsia reminiscent of Monet’s water lilies.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Mar 20

Happy first day of spring

Picture of flowering cherry tree in full sun. Blossoms are the palest pink. Bright blue sky in the background.

Persis 🙏🕊️📚🧶@thecuriousreader· Mar 18

“fascism wins by feeding off democracy like a parasite, eliminating the humanity in each of us… Fascism is a cult of power, and it works by intoxicating half the population and filling the other half with dread and despair.” When the demon takes over, Omer Aziz, The Christian Century, April 2026.