Category: Uncategorized
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Get up, this train is out of service. Don’t be left behind
by Justin Marquis There have been turning points in my life that seem so small and trivial that I barely know what to do with them at the time, but as they linger for months and years, fermenting and aging, they become guidepost memories that orient everything that comes after them and reinterpret everything that…
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The Death of God and the Open Sea
The morning of September 11, 2001 when planes were flown into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, Psalm 20 was on my lips “Some trust in chariots…, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” I was in the process of pulling away from the Evangelical church, but the last straw was…
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Escape! How I left Evangelicalism
In my last entry, I wrote that I would post about the three types of reasons I left the evangelical* campus church I attended while in university—intellectual reasons, moral-political reasons, and reasons having to do with sexuality and lifestyle. I’ve decided to forgo that post and go a slightly different direction. You, the reader, can…
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My So-Called Faith
by Justin Marquis Previous Post – How Could I not Be Grateful for My Whole Life? Everyone, I believe, has those memories of youth that are difficult to remember because of how embarrassed we are of our younger selves, things we did that are so cringe-worthy in their immaturity, their naivety, even their stupidity that…
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How Could I Not Be Grateful for My Whole Life?
by Justin Marquis These words of Nietzsche reverberate around in my head, words he spoke as he convalesced from a long illness. “How could I not be grateful for my whole life?” because that is what I feel, immense gratitude for where I am, for who I am, and where I’ve been, the experiences that…
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Why bikes?
“What topic can you not shut up about?” The question was posed to me while I was filling out a profile for a dating site the other day. “Something you can’t shut up about”—when I hear this, I think of the things you obsess about that no one else around really cares about; when you…
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It’s all just Matter and Energy Arranged in Various Ways
I am a strict “it’s all just matter and energy arranged in various ways” kind of materialist, not the vulgar reductionist kind that skips the “various ways” part of the equation, but completely unwilling to countenance the existence of a separate transcendent plane of being that influences, interacts with, directs, or gives meaning to our…
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The Three Books that Ruined Me
Three books ruined me for living a comfortably boring middle-class life among the petty bourgeois. Before I tell you what those books are, I have to confide that it tickles my sappy romantic soul that books can still ruin people. How many people are ripe for being completely molded by a book? I cannot say.…
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If it wasn’t for the Wabash River…
I grew up in a Midwestern river town. There are dozens of these towns scattered throughout the middle of the country. Until modernity allowed us to colonized deserts and mountains, virtually all dense human settlements were founded by rivers, lakes, or seas, water being our only way to live in an otherwise inhospitable world. With…
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Dionysus on a Bike and Apollo on a Train
Dionysus, the god of wine, dance, intoxicated and feral wisdom, and Apollo, clear sited, wise, all-seeing, rational god of the sun. Living as though I am a devotee of these gods, their initiate, and their protege, this blog is a documentation of living under their signs. Part travel blog—I’ll record journeys by bike across continents…
Dionysus on a Bike 