The Arsenal Church

Which feelings were you allowed to show growing up? Not which ones you felt. Which ones got you comfort, and which ones got you "stop that"? Week two of Be Quiet. Last week was how the church built the old story. This week is the other half: how do we raise great human beings without handing them that baggage? It starts in the car, with a four-year-old's question about where babies come from, and the very Christian answer Chad had loaded and ready. The questions it leans into: babies cry, laug

How does a 19-year-old learn to see a woman as less than him? Nobody is born with that. Somebody hands it to him. This is week one of Be Quiet, a two-week conversation on patriarchy, the manosphere, and the part the church has played. It starts with Chad's 12-year-old son, and with research showing how fast a brand-new phone starts feeding boys the manosphere. Then it asks this year's question of the oldest story there is: who told us this was just the way things are? The questions it leans in

What if the thing your faith trained you to pay attention to is the thing that quietly made you who you are? Chad closes the Unforced series with two weeks in Costa Rica — a trauma retreat with 50 veterans, an ant hauling a pink flower petal across a path, and six tattooed men standing in a row staring up into a tree at a macaw. None of that is the point. What happened in his body while he watched is. The questions he's chasing: attention is love's raw material — you start to love what you loo

What if confession was never about getting back into God's good graces — and was never supposed to cost you your dignity? Chad's back from two weeks away, and the distance made something obvious: every practice in this series has been the same practice wearing different clothes. Noticing. Lament. The table. Rest. All of them are coming out of hiding. This is the week that says it out loud. The questions underneath it: NASA scheduled the course-correction burns before the rocket ever left the g

You don't have to believe what I believe to belong in this space. Eric Villalpando tells his story, and it starts in two rooms on the same morning — a Catholic church and this one. He grew up fully Catholic: Catholic school, every sacrament, a theology degree from St. Mary's. He's careful about what happened next. He didn't deconstruct, exactly. He demystified. The hinge is a summer at Deer Creek Camp — forty counselors from wildly different backgrounds in one room with an open Bible, led by a

Rest isn't the reward at the end of the design. Rest is the design. Britney Carrasco teaches on Sabbath — and opens by admitting she might be the last person who should. She's a nurse and an Enneagram two, wired to earn love by doing things for people. Hand her a to-do list for rest and she'd dominate it. Two things she won't let you skip. Humans arrive on day six, which makes the first full day of human existence a day off — we rested before we worked, before anyone had done anything to deser