Bookin' It in 2022

I finished 20 books in 2022.  The titles in bold were particularly influential, inspiring or intriguing.

1. Cack-Handed: A Memoir by Gina Yashere 
2. Can Black People Grow Hair? by Andrea Krystal 
3.  Call Us What We Carry: Poems by Amanda Gorman
4. Rainbow Warrior: My Life in Color by Gilbert Baker
5. Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon
6. High School by Sara Quin & Tegan Quin
7. Femme in Public by ALOK
8. Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism by Megan Phelps-Roper
9. Unprotected: A Memoir by Billy Porter
10. Your Wound / My Garden by ALOK
11. If You Give a Pig the White House by Faye Kanouse
12. Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity Edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane
13. Joan Jett & The Blackhearts 40x40: Bad Reputation / I Love Rock-n-Roll
14. Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson
15. Bearing My Seoul by Taryn Blake
16. The Little Book of Pride: Love Is Love by Joanna Gray
17. Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family by Amanda Jetté Knox
18. Enter the Blue by Dave Chisholm
19. Wolfpack: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game by Abby Wambach
20. Saint Peter and the Goldfinch: Poems by Jack Ridl

Quote of the Day

The journalist Andrew Mueller is of the opinion that pledging yourself to any particular religion "is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith."

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 233

Quote of the Day

The answer to bad ideas is to publicly reason against them, to advocate for and propagate better ones.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 277

Quote of the Day

Others with stories like mine have shown me repeatedly that the root of Westboro's ideology -- the idea that our beliefs were "the one true way" -- is not by any means limited to Westboro members.  In truth, that idea is common, widespread, and on display everywhere humans gather, from religious circles to political ones.  It gives a comforting sense of certainty, freeing the believer from existential angst and providing a sense of stability -- a foundation on which to build a life. But the costs of that certainty can be enormous and difficult to identify.  Ultimately, the same quality that makes Westboro so easy to dismiss -- it extremism -- is also what helps highlight the destructive nature of viewing the world in black and white, the danger of becoming calcified in a position and impervious to change.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 275-276

Quote of the Day

(Westboro Baptist Church)'s garish signs lend themselves to this view of its members as crazed doomsayers, cartoonish villains who celebrate the calamities of others with fiendish glee.  But the truth is that the church's radical, recalcitrant position is the result of very common, very human forces -- everything from fear, family, guilt, and shame, to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias.  These are forces whose power affects us all, consciously and subconsciously, to one degree or another at every stage of our lives.  And when these forces are coupled with group dynamics and a belief system that caters to so many of our most basic needs as human beings -- a sense of meaning, of identity, of purpose, of reward, of goodness, of community -- they provide group members with an astonishing level of motivation to cohere and conform, no matter the cost.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 275

Quote of the Day

While I engaged church members as an outsider, I started to understand that doubt was the point -- that it was the most basic shift in how I experienced the world.  Doubt was nothing more than epistemological humility: a deep and practical awareness that outside our sphere of knowledge there existed information and experiences that might show our position to be in error.  Doubt causes us to hold a strong position a bit more loosely, such that an acknowledgment of ignorance or error doesn't crush our sense of self or leave us totally unmoored if our position proves untenable.  Certainty is the opposite: it hampers inquiry and hinders growth.  It teaches us to ignore evidence that contradicts our ideas, and encourages us to defend our position at all costs, even as it reveals itself as indefensible.  Certainty sees compromise as weak, hypocritical, evil, suppressing empathy and allowing us to justify inflicting horrible pain on others.  Doubt wasn't the sin, I came to believe.  It was the arrogance of certainty that poisoned Westboro at it foundations.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 273-274

Quote of the Day

In court, (Aunt) Margie's job was to present and defend her interpretation of the facts and the law before a judge, who would hear all sides before making a final decision, which was subject to review by higher courts.  But when it came to the purported Word of God, in all its complexity, we considered our judgment to be so reliable as to merit absolute confidence, so unquestionable that we could insist that all of humankind follow it.  I shook my head and inwardly cringed.  Coming face-to-face with my arrogance, aggressive in its misplaced certainty, was a special sort of shame.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 251-252

Quote of the Day

That's one thing I have never understood about (Megan Phelps-Roper's) family.  They're all lawyers, right?  The U.S. Constitution was written some two hundred years ago in essentially modern English, and there's so much disagreement about how the U.S. Supreme Court should interpret and apply those words today.  The Bible was written thousands of years ago in languages no one speaks anymore...and somehow, Westboro alone has figured out its one true meaning?

-- Jeff Chu, as told by Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 251

Quote of the Day

We had never learned how to "agree to disagree," because to church members, such a concept was blasphemous.  Can two walk together, except they be agreed?  What communion hath light with darkness?  At Westboro, every decision had moral implications.  Every question had a single correct answer.  Miscommunication required blame, and mistakes required punishment.  My sister and I knew how to cajole, issue ultimatums, attribute ill motives, and assign moral failure to the other party in a dispute, but we couldn't compromise and we couldn't move forward without a resolution as to which of us was in the wrong.  Without an absolute authority who could resolve the problem and declare one side as just and righteous, we floundered [in the days and months after leaving the church].

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 227

Quote of the Day

I thought about the last time we'd heard from Nana -- a birthday card she's sent to [my sister] Grace back in October.  I had felt so sad for her, ignored by our family for years on end.  Happy birthday, Grace, she'd written.  I'll bet you are growing up beautiful.  Wish I could hear from someone.  I love you.  As little as I'd seen Nana, she hadn't missed sending us birthday cards in all my years.  Like my mother, I had seen her efforts as a pitiful substitute for having a real presence in our lives, but now the gesture seemed like determined persistence -- an effort to maintain an open door despite my parents' attempts to seal all doors shut.  Nana had been trying to show that she loved us, even though she couldn't be around us.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 223

Quote of the Day

[My sister] Grace and I had wept that night, realizing that it was gay people -- I'd stopped using the "f" word by then -- who would best understand what we were going through.  The community we [at Westboro Baptist Church] had antagonized more than any other.  I hated that it had had to come to this for me to understand what the church had been doing to vulnerable people for so long.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 200

Quote of the Day

(A couple at the church) had planned a "double date" with another young couple, and that, too, had been disallowed.  I was baffled.  Having meals together was a regular part of our fellowship, and had been for as long as I had been alive.  To my mind, it was now undeniable that the elders' decisions were primarily driven not by Scripture, but by a need to keep church members in our place.  To make us understand that bending to their will was the only option.  Nothing else mattered.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 186

Quote of the Day

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.  I couldn't believe how our love within the church had been warped beyond recognition by the elders' unscripted will to punish.  By their implacable demands for unquestioning obedience.  By their pernicious need for superiority and control.  They had developed a toxic sense of certainty in their own righteousness, seizing for themselves the role of the ultimate arbiter of divine truth -- and they now seemed wiling to lay waste to anyone who disagreed with them.  It was a heinous arrogance and sinfulness that could not be denied.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 158-159

Quote of the Day

I had never seen a member of my immediate family subjected to church discipline before, but it wasn't special family ties that made the situation untenable.  It was the fact that for the first time in my life, the accused were people I lived with and knew most intimately.  I had direct, firsthand knowledge of their daily lives and habits, and I knew that the judgements leveled by the elders were wrong.  They were wrong about my mother.  They were wrong about my sister.  And I strongly suspected they'd been wrong about my cousin, too.  I could not acquiesce to their conclusions the way I'd done with so many others before.  I could no longer blindly trust the judgment of these men.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 158

Quote of the Day

By visceral instinct more than conscious deliberation, I understood that no force silences doubt as effectively as zeal -- a passionate clinging to familiar and reliable truths that quiets dissonance and snuffs out uncertainty in an avalanche of action.

-- Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, p. 147