• March 5, 2024

    The Untrolling Project

    I saw fellow sojourners, compatriots—tens of millions of “normal” high-functioning, “successful” Americans across our partisan divides and cultural-battle warfare lines—who were injured souls, just like me. Our personal histories differed but not what all of us had in common: our brains working overtime to ensure our survival.

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  • August 30, 2020

    ‘Connection As Spiritual Practice’ – A Free Online Course

    A Love Beyond Belief Experience with the Rev. Dr. Thandeka is offered by First Unitarian Church of Dallas. An online 4-week course • Starting next week • Free and open to all • Three day/time options • Register Now!

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  • August 26, 2020

    Sermon ‘Love After Love’

    Sermon “Love After Love” delivered at First Unitarian Church of Dallas.

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  • December 13, 2019

    Cerberus | Appendix C: The Anatomy of LBB Groups

    What distinguishes Love Beyond Belief small groups from other forms of small group ministry? The inclusion of embodied practices and the deep awareness of emotion within the spiritual context.

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  • December 7, 2019

    Cerberus | Appendix B: The Cerberus Syndrome

    The Cerberus Syndrome is a mental health disorder triggered by business strategies devised to amass and endlessly increase extreme wealth.

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  • November 30, 2019

    Cerberus | Appendix A: Cerberus and the Current Unitarian Universalist Racial Crisis

    The current racial crisis in the Unitarian Universalist movement is a Cerberus event. Cerberus tactics are front and center, namely, rancor and anger, divisive strategies and devastating conquests.

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  • November 25, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 15: Love

    Cerberus egos are not born but made. They are emotionally undernourished, damaged selves. We then, as decimated selves, decimate the wellbeing of others using reason, bullying tactics, and if all else fails, Uzis.

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  • November 15, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 14: The Love Revolution

    Love is a tasteless emotion for pod people. In 1970, Cerberus sent me into the streets as a black woman mad as hell. I was suffering inside me but hadn’t the words, the ideas, or the temperament to face my suffering and acknowledge it.

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  • November 9, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 13: Racking Focus

    The racking focus thought-experiment began with a favorite story I loved to recount about my life. After recounting the story, I racked focus to see what got overlooked.

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  • November 1, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 12: Cerberus Suffering

    The role and function of my ego kept changing like a single story with many endings. My ego began as the rule maker, then became my guardian, and finally my prosecutor.

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  • October 22, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 11: Chew On This

    For most of my life I could not tell the difference between my thoughts, emotions, and sensations for one basic reason: my ego refused to help me out. The details of my experiences and discovery follow but with a traveler’s advisory note. Proceed with caution.

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  • October 13, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 10: Cerberus Speaks

    I had spent years studying Western philosophers who described what happened when they turned their attention in on itself. Now I had to become the active agent rather than the passive reader. So I created my own exercise.

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  • October 6, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 9: St. Paul A.M.E.

    Thanks to these ongoing experiences in this church, I found what I didn’t know I was looking for until it showed up inside me, namely, an inner sense of being an adored and deeply communal self.

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  • September 28, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 8: The Glades

    I easily identified Pastor Hughes’ elegantly simple formula for creating feel-good emotions in us. He had stoked and then quelled our anxiety in the name of God.

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  • September 21, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 7: Cerberus at Church

    Had I trained my students to cut out feelings until the heart went numb? Were my faculty colleagues doing the same thing to their students? Were we manufacturing ministers who created corpse cold Sunday services?

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  • September 14, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 6: The Door

    I had spent most of my life learning how to avoid feelings of empathy, compassion, and caring because they were neglected or attacked. Then I cried for six months.

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  • September 7, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 5: Loveable?

    “I was born in New Jersey,” I said. “I am American, and so are my parents. But I have always known that `Sue’ is not my real name. See that tree over there? We could refer to that tree as `Sue’ if we wanted to. But that’s not its real name.”

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  • August 30, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 4: Mom’s Cerberus

    I seemed to have found a door, opened it, and entered into a part of herself never before disclosed to me. I had entered the place where she spent most of her life: the room guarded by the sculptured, mourning bodies she carved to block the dark entranceway to her heart. 

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  • August 23, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 3: Mr. C

    Within a very short time, I was booking hundreds of Hollywood celebrities and celebrity intelligentsia for my show because of the way I set it up: as a glimpse into their emotional heart.

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  • August 16, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 2: The High Priest of Anxiety

    I spent most of my free time holed up in Dad’s booklined study. This dense space is where I first met the pagan beast. I felt free as a monk in his cell after the day’s duties were completed. The dark matter of the universe was now as close to the monk as his thoughts.

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  • August 10, 2019

    Cerberus | Chapter 1

    Cerberus is the “hound of Hades,” the multi-headed dog in Greek mythology that guards the gates of the Underworld and prevents the shades of deadened feelings, like compassion, caring, and empathy, from taking permanent leave, lest they get slaughtered again.

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  • May 18, 2019

    Deep Soul Diving

    Each stillpoint between my inhalation and exhalation of breath becomes the portal to infinite, unending life. This open, eternal timeless place of infinite life embraces me and I feel held, loved, cherished by life itself.

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  • March 16, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Part 10: Love Beyond Belief

    The demand for economic justice isn’t enough to unite America’s niggers for common cause. The broken, ravaged, and terrified parts of our souls must be healed. Spiritual practices can comfort and heal terrified souls.

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  • March 9, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Part 9: The Luminous Darkness

    America creates dark feelings in whites. These dark feelings can be transformed into a luminous darkness that can mend racially-ravaged hearts. The shining light of this luminous darkness is unconditional love.

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  • March 2, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Part 8: Why White Niggers Are Abandoning Conservative and Mainline Churches

    Liberal clergy today by their own admission are not strong spiritual leaders. Could they create new congregations in underused mainline sanctuaries? Yes. But only if they avoid the “sin of anti-blackness” discourse, which self-perpetuates and reaffirms what it ostensibly proscribes: white racism against African Americans.

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  • February 23, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Part 7: White Niggers and The Tea Party Religion

    Religion, race, and God are tightly bound together in Tea Party political tactics. The religious power of The Tea Party movement is its attention to the aggrieved feelings of … broken, angry, enraged, and despairing white hearts as a religious practice.

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  • February 16, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Part 6: Poor Whites as Cannon Fodder for the Slave Powers

    Today’s militarized white hate groups, with their pervasive sense of being threatened by the American government, are right but for the wrong reason. They sense that something is radically wrong with a governance system that allows the top one-tenth of 1% to own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Niggers of all colors unite.

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  • February 9, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Part 5: The Philadelphia Convention of 1787; The Coup

    The Framers of the U. S. Constitution diminished the voting power of non-slaveholding whites, but made it look like an attack against blacks. The voter suppression became a founding principle of the American system of governance. The narrative begins with greed…

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  • February 6, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Discussion A: Black-Faced Feelings

    Reflection and Discussion. An exercise in practicing love beyond belief as the heart of compassion for ourselves, others, and the world. 

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  • blackface history
    February 2, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Part 4: The White Skin Privilege Scam in the North

    In the 19th century, at least three-quarters of the country’s northern industrial workers were immigrants or the children of immigrants. These workers got trashed. The message was clear: assimilate. Abandon ethnic identities and become lower-class whites. They got the message and black-faced their ethnic feelings, creating America’s first national cultural institution: the blackface minstrel show.

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  • January 26, 2019

    Thandeka’s Interview with Westar Institute: Paul’s Brain Science of Emotions

    Modern science may reveal things that Paul understood at an instinctive level—things that we can see now with much greater clarity. Using the tools of affective neuroscience, Thandeka examines Paul’s first-century attempt to teach selfless love, demonstrating how this love relates to human psychology, and asking if selfless love is the true value and future of religion.

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  • January 26, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Part 3: White Suicide

    White people are killing themselves at a higher rising rate than members of any other racial group in America today. What’s going on? And for those of us who are not white, why should we give a damn?

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  • January 21, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Part 2: “White-Skin Privilege” Exposed

    The concept of white privilege was created to hide white suffering. The story begins 400 years ago when jobs weren’t shipped abroad, people were.

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  • January 21, 2019

    Today’s White Niggers | Part 1: The N-Word Redefined

    After a great deal of research, I have come to the conclusion that niggers were invented in America as a scam to tank the political hopes and economic dreams of most whites. Most whites are niggers, too. They’re the white ones.

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  • October 2, 2018

    Why Love Beyond Belief Today?

    Progressives lack the intensity, resources, and infrastructure. We suffer from this deficit disorder because most of us treat religion like good or bad ideas. Religion is really about feelings.

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  • March 21, 2018

    Watch the Blackbird

    The brain science behind this “new science of political emotions” was invented by political scientists who argued that voters may forget the information they initially learned about the candidate, but they will hold onto their emotional attitudes.

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  • March 17, 2018

    It Takes a Community

    Meet up and form a Love Beyond Belief™ community where music and words combine to rock souls, nurture hearts, and clarify minds.

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