I was reading in the gospels. Luke wrote about Jesus's and the women. Death has consumed him. Despair had consumed them. Yet, the women prepared spices. "On the sabbath," he writes, "they rested." The faith of the women teach us this: Hell is shaking. God is working. We can rest.

If our idea of love and unity is dependent upon my silence and my oppression, then our unity is built to protect your power not to make us more equal. And that’s not love, that’s hate.

Love is not code-word for minimal progress and unity is not performative gestures of charity. If love does not embrace my full humanity and unity not committed to my full equality, I don’t want it. It will make the powerful feel good but it will not change the world we live in.

Love means dismantling every harmful ideology, policy, practice, and belief that devalues, de-centers, disrespects, and destroy the humanity, liberation, and peace of another. Unity means protecting another’s humanity, not profiting off of it.

Love is repairing the harm that has been done to another and creating an environment where those who are harmed live in a place they feel seen, protected, and loved. Unity means committing to a collective story-telling that is honest and helpful in leading us to a just future.

Love is not denial, protection, evasion, or justification of toxic ideologies and unloving practices. Love means liberating us to listen, learn, and live in ways that tell our neighbors that we see them, love them, and stand with them. Unity comes after this, not before.

One of the dangers of Christian theology is that our frameworks we inherit will make us see life as an academic endeavor, neighbors as enemies to be conquer, and the life of faith as a battle to be won. Sadly, our journey with Jesus will be less about love and more about fear.

Christianity’s theological history is full of communities who tried to imagine better ways of loving, being together, and being human. Yet also at work in our history are traditions of faith that made Jesus the warrior of our dreams and the community foot soldiers of control.

An ironic thing is that much of this has been centered around ideas of “purity” and nostalgia that rarely takes the world live in seriously, or history honestly, or image-bearers around us truthfully. “Purity” and “orthodoxy” were convenient ways to hide arrogance and insecurity.

So hopefully the more we learn and the more we lean into Jesus and one another, we try to imagine better for ourselves and we give up our idealism and dishonesty and embrace better ways of being Christian, human, and neighbors. Truthfully, God really wants so much better for us.

As many of you know, I was apart of the white evangelical tradition. I have talked about things I learned about being Black in white spaces. Now I want to say some things about what I learned about once being a Black evangelical returning back to the Black church.

A thread.

Spending years in white evangelical churches and schools, specifically from 2012-2018, shapes Black people in more ways than we would like to admit. It shapes us to diminish Blackness, devalue our people’s story, and always test what we have against the white logic and litmus.

This is particular reality for us Black men in that space. White Christians exploit our vulnerabilities, give us the room to speak, while simultaneously subverting and devaluing Black women and their struggles and their grievances. Opportunities abound for us and we take them.

We are invited into the meetings, we are given the mic, we are asked to lead groups on race, the Black church, etc. We are asked though often we actually haven’t read or thought deeply about each. We become a weapon. Profiting and policing/punishing those who get out of line.

All the while, white Christians feel good about themselves and other Black people are left to clean up the mess we’ve made, the ways we’ve made fools of Black folk, and the harmful ways we’ve learned to think, and to preach, and to be around us. It is profoundly depressing.

Being Black and POC in white spaces do not simply form us to individualize our racial identity, not connected to our race while white people stay connected to theirs, but we take on the theological, political, and social commitments of white Christianity which re-enforces it.

Black people and people of color are told to give up their connection, all in the name of "unity" and the "gospel", and see symbols of their culture deeply steeped in whiteness while white Christians rarely give up anything. This is white supremacy. This is white Christianity.

Because of access to whiteness and connection to it, as social capital and meaning, Blacks and people of color become more distant, we learn to devalue our people, and decenter their stories, histories, and knowledge. It erases us. Literally. Erasure. Is that really good news?

Now, these churches appropriate non-white cultural practices and aesthetics while never centering the forms of knowledge, history, or concerns of non-whites. For example, Black culture is in the church but the church is doing nothing to change the world that Black people live.

Black literature, Womanist, and Black theologies are not just an academic endeavor, a way of resisting whiteness, or reproductions of white theology. They are a way Black people show the deepest love, embrace God’s image on Black bodies, and say: the Black world is a real world.

Theologian James Cone said he didn’t discard white theology, "but black theology began with deconstruction—that is, dismantling the oppressive, white theologies I was taught.” These theologies not only ignored black people but “blinded me to the treasure in the black tradition."

Christians must take seriously the Black experience and make room for Black people to speak of and for God, and faith, and Jesus,and love, and hope out of our experience. Any theology that devalues, dismisses, or destroys the voice of Black people is not a theology of Jesus.

Christians, we have to liberate ourselves from the idea that those who are legitimate voices for faith and life are white Christian conservative men and that true Christian faith is simply about using their language and logic. These two realities have harmed us in so many ways.

Too many of us are thinking about faith and life as well as doing theology as ourselves but with language and histories and traditions that show that in practice we believe that orthodox = white Christian conservative man. We believe they are the final authority and goal.

Mangottu Bhagavathi Temple
#Palakkad #Kerala
#keralatemples 🚩

Mangottu Bhagavathi Temple is situated in Athipotta near Alathur of palakkad district. Devi is kshipraprasadi here and grants relief to those who worship with full faith.
Mookken Chathen, situated on the Northern 👇

side of the temple, is guarding Devi here.
Story says that, once there lived a weaver named Kuttan who was a Devi Bhaktan. During one festival time Kuttan was so pleased by the Devi Vigraham that he requested her to come along with him. At that time wind blew heavily and Cloths

in Vigraham flew. Kuttan immediately decorated Devi with his cloth which stuck to Vigraham and returned to his village and with his Umbrella. Devi came with him in that Umbrella and stayed in his place. This place is Mangottu Bhagavathi temple now.

Amme Narayana
🙏🕉🙏

I worked in bank liquidity and treasury for the better part of the last decade, and there is one very interesting risk factor from the SVB collapse that I do not think we have ever witnessed before in modern finance, a 🧵:

First, some context. Following the 2008 financial crisis where a massive driver of stress was caused by low quality assets littering the balance sheets of massive institutions, the regulators sought to create a framework to ensure all banks were verifiably sound.

This meant forcing Federally registered banks to conform to capital and liquidity ratios. If they did not comply, they would not be allowed to issue dividends or buy back stocks, hurting the value of their enterprise.

There was the introduction of the concept of RWA, or risk weighted assets. A simple way to think of these ratios is, the riskier your asset base on a weighted basis, the more high quality capital (think cash) you would need to hold to stay in compliance.

Not only were banks required to regularly be in compliance with these ratios as a going concern, but needed to prove they could maintain certain limits when met with a time of stress across a number of incrementally adverse scenarios.

@SaveToBookmarks Hello! There you go! Original tweet by @AchuthArora: "@Artofphysique_ @buzz_chronicles @rattibha @SaveToBookmarks save as Workouts". Cheers! 👌

Hi! Saving all night and all day :) Original tweet by @SaveToBookmarks: "@AchuthArora @Artofphysique_ @buzz_chronicles @rattibha Aye aye, captain👮‍♀️!

I...". See You soon! 👉