My latest: No one stands alone

Dear friends,

When United Methodists get together, you can almost always expect a brawl. In 1972, America’s largest mainline Protestant denomination declared homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching,” and they’ve been fighting about it ever since. There have been protests, arrests, investigations, and church trials, and more recently a mass exodus of churches.

They just met in Charlotte, N.C. for their first worldwide legislative gathering since 2019—and this time, the tone was dramatically different. I followed four North Carolina delegates who had a lot at stake, and wrote about them for The Assembly.

You can read one Assembly story a month before hitting a paywall. Make it this one! Better yet, subscribe.

If you like it, I hope you will share it. You can retweet this post.

Thanks to Travis Dove for his fine photography and Kate Sheppard for ace editing.

Here’s a bonus video that’s not in the article: the scene outside the convention center just after the Methodists repealed the incompatibility language. The speaker is Bishop Karen Oliveto, a lesbian whose election was a flashpoint for traditionalists.

Plus, five things I’m reading:

1. Phoebe Zerwick’s article about deathbed visions. It’s lyrical and rigorous, and should change the conversation about what we value at the end of life.

2. This wild story by Lachlan Cartwright about working for The National Enquirer during the notorious “catch and kill” campaign that stands at the heart of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial.

3. Latria Graham on the Black caddies of Augusta National, “talented prognosticators who turned a racist policy, rooted in subjugation, into a livelihood and a source of esteem—one that, ironically, first added diversity to the game of golf.”

4. Mark Warren’s chronicle of the harm caused by one sensationalist blogger to a beloved Alabama pastor. "The story of the Internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure," Warren writes.

5. Finally, my friend Sarah Van Name’s YA novel These Bodies Between Us. The four teenage girls at its center have a lot to want to disappear from: an abusive boyfriend, itinerant parents, racist comments by strangers. When they converge one summer on a North Carolina beach, they set their minds to learning how to disappear. This is a wise and haunting book, and I promise that you’ll appreciate it at any age.

What I’ve been listening to (podcast edition): Latif Nasser’s Radiolab episodes about Zoozve, a moon of Venus, or maybe not a moon.

And what I’m listening to (music edition): “Kau Ka Pe'a,” which combines Hawaiian folk music with classic R&B and soul. It’s the title track of a Grammy-winning album by Kalani Pe'a, and it honors his great-great-grandfather and other Hawaiian historic figures. The album’s theme, he said, is “to hoist your sail, create your own sailboat and voyage; navigate the world.” Hat tip to radio station KUCB in Unalaska, Alaska, where I first heard it. 

I have another story coming out in a month or so. See you then.

All best,
Barry Yeoman