I've recently gotten a bunch more followers (thank you!), so I decided to do a brief introduction.
I'm Dove/Briars. I have an extensive academic education in Judaism and Christianity, particularly biblical studies, and went to Yale Divinity School for a year before dropping out due to illness.
I'm Jewish, but was largely raised in a secular environment. My interest in Christianity is primarily academic rather than lived; my interest in Judaism is both academic and (G-d willing) lived. I had a fairly long flirtation with Buddhism (particularly Zen) in my 20s, and remain interested in it academically, although to a lesser extent than I am with Christianity and Judaism.
I also have a Masters degree in English and I'm working on a Master of Public Administration; I sometimes post about stuff related to those parts of my life.
I also use this blog to talk about academia and the problems I have with it. My basic position on academia boils down to "The grapes of academia are sour."
Feel free to send me asks or DMs. I also have a spirituality sideblog, @agnosticmysticism.
I bring a certain “divine feminine/masculine concepts and archetypes are gender essentialist and ahistorical garbage and a red flag” vibe to the function that many do not like but they also hated Jesus because he spoke the truth so—
(epistemic status: I don't actually believe the following but I think it contains an element that I'm not sure how to better articulate that is important)
After the Resurrection we will live in a society. That society will require communal effort to run. To the extent that we are obligated to participate in that communal effort, we will continue to pay taxes. Of course, without the impulse to evil, we will carry on that effort without needing to be obligated, but the outcome will be the same.
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
also re: ‘serkis is factually incorrect bc there canonically were hobbits with brown skin so tolkien is antiracist’. hobbits with brown skin, in the period tolkien was writing in, did not deliberately signify racialisation. half the famous five kids were referred to as being nut brown. the stars of malory towers were described as brown skinned and were all fully white english. in enid blyton. ie a notoriously racist writer. the kid in the secret garden is described as brown. midcentury writers used brown as a standin for tanned! this is incredibly common! how are we doing ‘oh he’s just of his time’ but not bothering to look at the ‘conventions’ of his time! it’s fine if you want to interpret it as that in fanworks and adaptations but i’m going insane when people are acting like tolkien referring to characters as brown skinned makes them not-white and apparently makes him some sort of antiracist.
Are Hasidic Jewish groups cults or not? They look pretty culty from the outside - strict rules about diet and dress, cults of personality around the leaders, and in many cases isolation from the outside world and getting cut off from your friends and family if you leave - but they're not on the standard list of cults (Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses, Unification Church, etc.). On the other hand, "cult" tends to be only used for new religions (for example, the Amish have most of the traits I listed above but don't usually get called a cult), so I can see why they don't often get called that. What do you think?
"Cult" obviously isn't a technical term or designation. It's a somewhat useful/somewhat pejorative term for a high-control religion (itself not a technical term). From my understanding of Hassidism, which is admittedly not huge, I think there are a lot of Hassidic groups that could fairly be called cults (and, more generally a lot of Haredi--i.e. "ultra-orthodox"*--groups that could be). All of them? I really don't know. But I would, for example, advise anyone considering joining Chabad to at least be wary.
*All Hassidim** are Haredi, but not all Haredim are Hassidic.
**With some exceptions for stuff like neo-Hassids.
unfortunately a literal reading of Luke 14:26 will get you into some pretty dark places. I agree that a healthy take on Christianity should step away from self hatred, but I understand how people take self hatred away from the text.
There's an assumption in a lot of pre-modern religious literature (particularly Christian but by no means limited to Christianity) that assumes that virtually everyone loves themselves way too much to the detriment of their relationships with other people. And I don't know if this means there's been a drastic shift in self-perception in Western society or if it's another case of people assuming something about human nature and making it foundational to their theology.*
*"Punishment is a good deterrent" is an example of this. Almost completely wrong but also foundational to the eschatologies of the Big Three Abrahamic religions.
The nature of other gods in the Tanakh varies. Sometimes they absolutely exist, are powerful, but are also assholes who don't defend the oppressed. Sometimes they are literal statues that can't do anything. And sometimes those fuckers use chariots of iron and like, how is God gonna beat that?
I'd like to protest that there's no way St. Paul thought silence was a virtue. St. Paul was always one question asked away from delivering a five-hour rant.
Someone's got to pull out the tweet about how holiness comes in many forms; how Joseph doesn't speak a single word in Scripture, and how it's doubtful that Saint Paul had a thought that he didn't publish
I'd like to protest that there's no way St. Paul thought silence was a virtue. St. Paul was always one question asked away from delivering a five-hour rant.
I don't care if SSPX is or isn't taxonomically Protestant. I think it's funny to call them that. ohhh you're soo the best Catholics that you have to break away? you have to defy the pope like a Lutheran? the pope has ultimate authority except when you disagree huh? so you admit the Protestants were right? you hate ecumenism so much you have to do Protestantism about it?? Clown behavior
you say you still think of yourselves as belonging to the Catholic Church but you have some very specific disagreements with the ones running it, who you think have corrupted its message
would these specific disagreements be 95 in number, by any chance
Actually on that note, why do we insist in calling Judaism monotheistic. We're also pantheistic. I think the issue is that pantheism has two definitional categories, one of which is more reminiscent of Hindu practice, in that all gods are accepted. And that obviously doesn't characterize Judaism.
But neither does monotheism alone. That isn't to say we cannot be described as "monotheistic" AND something else. We may have been somewhat pioneers of that, sure. But I really think it's most appropriate to use both terms in conjunction to accurately describe Judaism's general outlook.
Pantheistic monotheism? Mono-pantheism?
Whatever. I'm nitpicking. But I do feel like we do ourselves a disservice by only using monotheistic as an identifier.
Judaism isn't necessarily pantheistic/panentheistic. There are kabbalist concepts that suggest the universe is the absence of God, not part of him and apophatic theology makes it nearly impossible to make positive statements regarding God's nature. There are absolutely panentheistic theologies in Judaism, but it's not nearly as required as monotheism/henotheism.
Guys, a Christian religious group isn't Protestant simply because it is not in union with the Catholic or Orthodox Churches. The SSPX isn't Protestant.
The sole characteristic that all Protestant communities have in common is the denial that there is a specific worldly institution that can be identified as the Church that Christ established. The SSPX doesn't believe that; it does believe that the Catholic Church was established by Christ, but that there is a grave dereliction of duty by the current hierarchy.
The SSPX isn't Protestant. The Jehovah's Witnesses are not Protestant. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are not Protestant. They all believe that there is an institution that is to be rightfully identified as Christ's visible Church on earth.
I agree that SSPX isn't Protestant (although I did find the joke funny), but I disagree with your reasoning. The defining trait of Protestant denominations is that they either are or are descended from the schismatic denoms that formed in the Protestant Reformation. I would argue that, e.g., the Waldensians probably aren't Protestant even though they accepted the label once the Reformation started. Mormons and JWs are Protestant and traces of their heritage remain in, e.g., their rejection of the Apocrypha.
SSPX isn't Protestant because their schismatic origin is not the Reformation.
“Protestant” is often used as a catch-all, but it flattens the depth of protestantism. There are many types of protestants. Presbyterians. Lutherans. Baptists. Continental reformed. Methodists. The Society of St Pius X.
Let us consider the four beatitudes that Matthew and Luke have in common. The first three are simple, stark, and even laconic. Jesus declares to be blessed those who are poor, those who mourn or weep, and those who go hungry. Their situation, he promises, will be directly reversed—at the end of history and through the action of God. Those who mourn will be comforted by God; those who hunger now will be satisfied by God.
[...]
Jesus did not qualify his promises with any conditions. These three promises, at least explicitly, did not depend, for instance, on anyone's commitment to him. He did not say, 'blessed are the poor who follow me'; nor 'blessed are those followers of mine who weep and mourn now'; nor did he say 'blessed are those followers of mine who are hungry now'. The promises came with no strings attached. The promises were unconditioned by any reference to Jesus himself. They also came without such qualifications as: 'Blessed are the poor who are always faithful to God. Blessed are those who weep now because they suffer for keeping the divine commandments. Blessed are those who remain hungry because they will not kill others to have more food.'
The poor, the sorrowing, and the hungry have no claim on God, or at least no strict claim. God's loving mercy will be extended to them, even though they do not deserve, or do not strictly deserve, such gracious help. Some parables carry the same message: for instance, those of the Father's Love (Luke 15:11-32), the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:23-35), and the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:10-14). In their different ways, the prodigal son, the servant, and the tax collector are greatly in need, but they have no right to receive the help that will come their way. Thus the first three beatitudes common to Matthew and Luke focus on people who are not said to be virtuous and deserving. They are simply in need and God will help and vindicate them. They are deprived and destitute, and only God will come to their aid. Jesus assures those in great distress that God intends to bring to an end the present state of things. The good news expressed in these first three beatitudes specifies wonderfully what Jesus means by saying elsewhere that 'the poor are brought the good news' (Matthew 11:5).
Gerald O'Collins, S.J. (Jesus: A Portrait, pages 129, 130-131)
Pope Leo is letting American bishops entirely ban trans healthcare for both minors and adults in all Catholic-owned hospitals and clinics, and stop coverage for trans healthcare through Catholic-affiliated health insurance plans!!
People are having surgeries, for which they were on waitlists for years, suddenly cancelled. Hormones no longer covered, their clinicians no longer able to prescribe them. Considering in some states Catholic-owned healthcare organizations make up to a third of the market, as it were, this is a HUGE issue.
Missing hormones. Canceled surgeries. Bureaucratic denials. Late last year the Catholic Church banned all trans healthcare across its sprawl
This has been happening since November of last year, when this vote took place, but no one is talking about it. The rehabilitation of the image of the papacy through Pope Leo is killing me, it’s still the goddamn Catholic Church. You do not gotta hand it to them.
They're also denying medically necessary procedures to pregnant people and making them have unnecessary surgery for things like ectopic pregnancies in order to obey the doctrine of double effect.
