Joel Mathis

On my last day at the Lawrence Journal-World, I burned all my bridges. The whys and wherefores don’t really matter; indeed, they’ve basically turned to dust. What matters is that I had seen the end coming, had arranged to move onto a lucrative new job elsewhere in media, and then — once everything had been put into motion — got my feelings hurt. I reacted badly. I went around the newsroom, shook hands, made it plain that I was full of rage, gathered up my belongings and rather ostentatiously marched out the front door. It was impetuous, and probably stupid. I was 34, married a bit more than a year, had a few nice awards under my belt and considered myself somewhat ambitious. I was still young enough to think I had a future.  What I didn’t count on was a series of cascading failures: The economy, the media industry, my health. I really didn’t have a clear-eyed view of my own foibles, for that matter, and how they could bring me down. When my health went, in 2011, I was already at the en

Photo by  Nikko Tan  from  Pexels Discussing the debates within the Southern Baptist Church, David French offers a distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists (and no, he emphasizes, the two are not the same): Instead, I’d frame the difference in a number of different ways—“grace versus law,” or perhaps “open-hearted versus closed-minded.” In an earlier newsletter , I described fundamentalists as possessing “fierce existential certainty.” The fundamentalist Christian typically possesses little tolerance for dissent and accepts few sources of truth outside of the insights that can be gleaned directly from the pages of scripture. (Snip.) Evangelicals often also have a higher view of grace than fundamentalists. They emphasize God’s grace more than God’s rules and are more prone to focus on God’s mercies than God’s judgment. In my real life and my online/writing life, I refer to myself as a lapsed Mennonite, but it's actually more complicated than that. I was raised and bapti

Does he, though? I used to be a real churchy guy. One reason I moved to Lawrence in 2000 -- aside from the newspaper job -- is that I already knew of a lefty Mennonite church in town that I had come to adore. For the first few years I lived here, the congregation was my home. By that time, my late 20s, I had come to define my Christianity as a sort of language: I didn't think it was necessarily the only right language, but it was the language I knew and had grown up in, so it was the language I would use. The congregation was a place where I could be open about that, and it was ok. And the community was terriffic - the most meaningful of my life. Church-goers were my mentors, my friends, the people I watched movies with and drank with and, once or twice, even tried to date. (Unsuccessfully.) I may never find that again, and that hurts. After 9/11, though, even my loose definition of faith began to feel implausible. Everywhere I looked, it seemed, people were doing terrible things i

My dad baptized me on Feb. 27, 1983 in the Emporia Church of Christ. It's funny that I remember the date so precisely, but it seemed at the time like it might be the most important thing in my life -- a marker signifying whether I would go to heaven or hell someday. The baptism came at a Sunday night service. We always went to church twice on Sundays, and usually went on Wednesday nights as well. The preacher that Sunday night didn't do a sermon, as per usual -- he instead gave answers to presubmitted questions. One was about how young was too young to get baptized. I don't remember his answer. What I do remember is that at the end of it, my dad nudged me and asked: "Do you want to get baptized?" I did.  I had asked, in fact, to be baptized a few months before. It had been judged that I was not ready. (By the time this particular Sunday night occurred, I was about a month short of my tenth birthday.) But my grandmother, in particular, had queried me from time to t

Me outside the Empire State Building (on the right!) on the trip in question. The first time I stayed at the Hotel Pennsylvania was in the fall of 2004. I had turned 30 a year previously, and had recently concluded it was time for me to be done waiting. I had spent the bulk of my adult life waiting for a mate -- somebody to make me complete, an actual grownup. It was only then, I thought, that I could embark on grownup adventures like trips to New York. Who would ever do such a thing on their own? There was an obstacle, however: Money. I wasn’t poor, exactly, but I was a journalist, and of course had little money saved. But the idea of a New York trip -- centered around the annual New Yorker Festival -- had taken hold of me. So I resolved to be profligate -- I would use a credit card -- but not too profligate. I would stay at the cheapest non-scary hotel I could find in Manhattan. A search at Hotels.com gave me just one plausible answer. For less than $200 a night, I could stay