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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya)

@alexdemarco.bsky.social
440 followers 364 following 297 posts

academic book editor • occasional author • appreciator of scholarship & elegant writing • interested in religion, esp. (post)modernist versions of Christianity & Buddhism • also a fan of trees, cats, and movies • all views strictly my own • he/him/his 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🌿

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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
"The true shunyata ["emptiness"] empties itself as well as everything else. Through its self-emptying it makes everything else exist as it is and work as it does." —Masao Abe
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
"I asked him about God. 'If you don't believe God is real, why would God help you?' "'God is a story,' he said. 'I believe in stories, and God knows this. Stories are real, my boy. They matter.'" —Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness, 538
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
"We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not possess." —Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Prudence"
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
"The rise of AI . . . poses an existential danger to humankind not because of the malevolence of computers but because of our own shortcomings." —Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus, chap. 11
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
The issue isn't how religious you are; it's how you are religious.
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
"Inside? Outside? What is the difference and how can you tell? When a sound enters your body through your ears and merges with your mind, what happens to it? Is it still a sound then, or has it become something else?" —Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness, 51
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
"Her faith allowed her to see beyond *what exists*, because she saw what *could* and *ought* to exist." —Tourmaline, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson. 249.
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
"'God told me to do it,' Marsha explained to the police. She had painted her whole body white and was wearing only a pink slip and a feather boa." —Tourmaline, Marsha, 201
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
What if we stopped thinking of revelation as the conveyance of divine authority in one place, or a limited number of places, and thought of it instead as the promise of divine presence in every place?
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
"Christian exceptionalism relies on conjuring a history that did not exist." religiondispatches.org/2026/02/23/d...
religiondispatches.org
Donald Trump's Violent Mentality is Quite Literally Biblical
One could be forgiven for coming away from Leighton Woodhouse’s “Donald Trump, Pagan King” op-ed in the New York Times with the nagging suspicion that he hasn’t actually read the biblical or ‘Pagan’ w...
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
My article, "How I Became Religiously Multiple," made Christian Century's "Top 25 of 2025"! 😊 See the link for it, and the other top articles, here: www.christiancentury.org/editor-s-pos...
christiancentury.org
Our top 25 of 2025
Here are the Century articles from last year that enjoyed the most online...
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
"But the universe would not turn backward. It was a great engine . . . inviting humankind to attempt other forms of order and disorder." —Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (1976)
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
For this #MLKday, some timely selections from Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermon "A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart": . . .
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
"What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?" —Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah (1969)
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
"There wasn’t even clear evidence that those drug traffickers were from Venezuela, let alone that they were governed by Maduro in any sense." —Susan Breau, prof. of international law and senior associate research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...
theguardian.com
Is there any legal justification for the US attack on Venezuela?
International law experts expect Washington to claim self-defence and face little serious pushback
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Reposted by Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya)
David W. Congdon @dwcongdon.com · 17/12/2025
My old college classmate Brett McCracken has frustrated me many times in the past with his Gospel Coalition conservatism, but this review of Wake Up Dead Man seems targeted to upset me. He twice uses the term “true Christianity.” The headline itself is outrageous bothsidesism.
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
I'm tempted to say that I like Everybody Scream even more than I like Dance Fever. Maybe that's just the charm of the new. But maybe not?
media.tenor.com
a man sitting in front of a microphone with the nbc logo on the bottom right
ALT: a man sitting in front of a microphone with the nbc logo on the bottom right
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Literal eschatology—the expectation that an outside power will one day swoop in and "set everything right"—is a recipe for tragically unconstructive discontentment. It discourages both working to change present circumstances and looking for happiness in the present.
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
"Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible; without emptiness, nothing is possible." —Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.14
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
"Many . . . are drawn into thinking that emptiness is the ground of being, the ontological ground of everything. But emptiness, when understood rightly, is the absence of *any* ontological ground. . . . It is not any kind of absolute or ultimate reality." —Thich Nhat Hanh, The Other Shore, chap. 4
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
"The results show that urgent action is needed to stop forest loss or the world risks losing one of its most important natural carbon buffers. . . ." www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
Africa’s forests transformed from carbon sink to carbon source, study finds
Alarming shift since 2010 means planet’s three main rainforest regions now contribute to climate breakdown
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
Check out my article from the August 2025 issue of the Christian Century. 😊🙏
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
"The name (of) 'God' is not the name of an assured presence but of a tremulous coming-to-presence, of a soft voice that disturbs the peace of the present and pries it open to the prospect of what is coming." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 175
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
"God's existence, like ours, is contingent, fragile, unstable, and uncertain, because it is dependent upon the extent to which *we* manage to make this event [God] come true." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 143
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
"Revelation [is not] a special delivery from on high that has disclosed information beyond the reach of human wit. Revelation is the self-revelation of the Spirit, & it arises from the bowels of being, revealing the inner essence of the forces with which we resonate." —Caputo, What to Believe?, 70
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
I'm looking forward to #AARSBL2025 this weekend. I'm especially excited to celebrate with Greg and Edwin their new books, The Essential "City of God" and The Incarnation as God's First Intention, which I had the pleasure of working on with them this past year.
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
"This is the greatest honor that the soul can pay to God, to leave God to himself and to be free of him." —Meister Eckhart
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
Apophasis for the masses:
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
God is neither a man nor upstairs.
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
"Artworks and religious symbols are not fictions that some primitive intelligence arbitrarily made up. They are reverberations from the ground of being recorded in what we call art and religion." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 69
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
"The best way to conserve a tradition is not to be a conservative." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 13
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
"If orthodoxy always wins, the Spirit will expire. It will be impossible to make all things new, to announce good news that actually will be new." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 12
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
"Radicals are traditionalists, and traditionalists have to be radicals if they want to take the process of transmission seriously, instead of using it as an alibi to cling to the past." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, xv
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Reposted by Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya)
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 24/10/2025
Stephen Miller on Fox threatens to arrest JB Pritzker for "seditious conspiracy" and says, "to all ICE officers: you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop or obstruct you is committing a felony."
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
One person's feeling of absolute dependence is another's perception of emptiness. And some of us might perceive our emptiness as we feel our absolute dependence and feel our absolute dependence as we perceive our emptiness. #Buddhism #Christianity #Schleiermacher
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
As Charlie Kirk is hailed by many as a missionary-martyr, @dwcongdon.com helps us see "the history of Christian mission and the sordid legacy of Christian imperialism" with fresh eyes. www.christiancentury.org/features/yes...
christiancentury.org
Yes, Charlie Kirk was a missionary
Trump is right about this—but not for the reasons he...
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
"This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military," National Press Club President Mike Balsamo said in a statement. www.npr.org/2025/09/20/g...
npr.org
Defense Secretary Hegseth requires new 'pledge' for reporters at the Pentagon
The Pentagon is implementing new guidelines that will require journalists to sign a pledge and agree to report only approved and officially released information.
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Reposted by Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya)
Lee Madgwick @leemadgwick.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...
theguardian.com
‘Direct evidence of genocidal intent’: the UN commission of inquiry’s report on Israel’s actions in Gaza
Legal analysis has accused Israel of committing genocide in four out of five categories as defined by 1948 convention
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
What if Christians today who insist on a final state up ahead somewhere in which all will be set right forevermore are making the same misstep as those of the first generation of Jesus followers who insisted that Jesus would return imminently to finally set everything right?
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Reposted by Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya)
Philip Gourevitch @pgourevitch.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
He could not be less interested in finding out who killed him or why — and his message to his apparatus is clear that that is not a priority — when the killing creates such an opportune pretext to stoke attacks on whoever he feels like.
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
"When we say, 'God is love,' is 'love' our best name for God, or is 'God' our best name for love?" —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 154
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
"God does not exist; God insists. . . . God leaves existence up to us." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 150
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Reposted by Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya)
Diana Butler Bass @dianabutlerbass.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
“Prove me wrong” will never create the America of our hopes and dreams. “I will listen” might.
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
"God is the name of an event, of a dream for which we are to provide the reality, of a promise on which we are expected to make good." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 141
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Reposted by Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya)
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
This is very much extremely the thing. "You stupid SHEEP! There's no invisible MAN on a MOUNTAIN!" "No shit, Sherlock." "And no Magic SkyDaddy is gonna just FIX things if you pray hard enough!!" "That's correct." "And people don't get sick because they were bad!!" "Did... you think they did??"
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
"Panentheism must nowadays face the verdict of the stars, that the being of God is finite and mortal." —John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 109
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They-Ra @xanindigo.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
roses are red violets are blue singular they predates singular you
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Alex DeMarco (Dvesatya) @alexdemarco.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
Self-reliance gets into trouble not because of the direction of the reliance but because of the concept of the self.
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