Beatitudes Blog

Stop the Stop-Loss Draft

Submitted by Audrey deCoursey on March 29, 2008 - 4:38am.

My cousin just got back from a tour in Baghdad. His mother, a firm opponent of the war, wrote a letter to the Des Moines Register.

As we conclude our 5th year of occupying Iraq I can personally report that even though our youngest son survived 15 months of combat duty in Baghdad, and although we are extremely grateful he arrived home literally in one piece, the inner struggles of a warrior continue.
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Body, Language, and Christian Redemption
Submitted by Audrey deCoursey on February 15, 2008 - 3:46am.
This week at my seminary is not only Valentine’s Day but “V Week,” a celebration of all things vaginal. The (ahem) seminal event of the week was the performance of The Vagina Monologues on Tuesday night. And any of you in attendance there will have gotten to see me leave the page to traverse the stage.

The director of the Monologues, Kelly Williams, invited me to present the monologue, “Reclaiming Cunt.” As she pointed out, I might be an apt choice for the piece, because of my intimate yet complicated relationship with language. The motivation to reclaim the term ‘cunt’ is respect for words and the power of language, coupled with the re-prioritizing of the bodies those words exist to represent.

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Our Be'ats Summer: Splitting Hairs: Or, New Environmentalists Split from Hairy-Legged Tree-huggers
Submitted by Audrey deCoursey on June 2, 2007 - 5:30am.
Preface: Hooray for religious voices speaking out about environmental causes! Hooray! We're being heard! We're making a difference! We can get into the really interesting discussions now, about how the movement should be, as well as that it should be!

And thus, I present my thoughts on current environmental movement (currents).

Argument: As it grows, today's US environmentalism is moving with two fundamentally different currents: it's a bi-doxy (two sets of ideology and worldview) and, more importantly, a bi-praxy (two sets of actions inspired by those 'doxies'). It is a disagreement about the search for what saves us.

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Our Be'ats summer: Haiku for My Cubicle
Submitted by Audrey deCoursey on June 1, 2007 - 5:19am.
let the epitaph

read: she perished of surfeit

of conference calls

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Our Be'ats summer: Counting The Cost (of a fellowship)
Submitted by Audrey deCoursey on May 31, 2007 - 5:24am.
* Is this TOO cheesy? Oh yes. It is. *

Bicycle ride to work across Oakland (downhill): free

Veggie taco for lunch in the restaurant at the base of your office building: $3.50

Afternoon soymilk chai latte (extra large) from the shop down the street: $3

BART fare home from work (uphill): $1.40

A summer spent helping Christianity progress: priceless!

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Our Be'ats summer: Introductions
Submitted by Audrey deCoursey on May 30, 2007 - 5:11am.
California Interfaith Power and Light
Oakland, California

Greetings of peace to my fellow fellows and our adoring fans.

My name is Audrey deCoursey. I’m an MDiv student at Berkeley’s Pacific School of Religion, an interdenominational seminary known best for its awesome centers: the Institute for Leadership Development & the Study of Pacific and Asian North American Religion (PANA Institute), the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry, and the brand-new Center for Women in Religion. Even if we hadn’t just had Del Brown as our dean, PSR would still be a good place to be a progressive Christian.

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Mourning for Virginia Tech and All Students
Submitted by Audrey deCoursey on April 25, 2007 - 5:06am.
Much can and should be said about the sadness of the violence at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg. . ., but what I would say is to share my sadness and fear about my own mortality as a student. Schools should be safe places, as our Commander in Chief stated this week. Many/most/all places on Earth should be.

But schools fill a particular purpose in society, which makes the murders there all the harder to bear. Schools are the places where we go to develop ourselves in order to go into the world, to make a difference in our futures, and the students killed this week never got that chance. Their lives ended while they were just learning who they were to be in the world, before they got to use all they had been learning to become.

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