Showing results by author "Amanda Held Opelt" in All Categories

Amanda Held Opelt search for a way to process her grief led her to seek wisdom about how other people have made it through, and she found that generations past embraced rituals that served as vessels for pain and aided in the process of grieving and healing. Today, many of these traditions have been lost as religious practice declines, cultures amalgamate, death is sanitized, and pain is averted. In this raw and authentic memoir of bereavement, Opelt explores the history of human grief practices and how previous generations have journeyed through periods of suffering.

Many Christians rightly deny the prosperity gospel—the idea that God wants you to be healthy and wealthy— but instead embrace its more subtle spin-off, the emotional prosperity gospel, or the belief that happiness and spiritual euphoria will inevitably follow if you believe all the right things and make all the right choices. In this view, frustration is deemed unholy, fear is seen as a failure of faith, and sadness is a sign of God’s disfavor. Amanda Held Opelt grapples with her own experience of disillusionment when life with God didn’t always feel the way she expected it to feel.

Conversations about the expectations we have of what the life of faith will feel like. Each week Amanda Held Opelt (author of the book Holy Unhappiness: God, Goodness, and the Myth of the Blessed Life) will interview writers, pastors, artists, and friends about the myths we believe about "the good life." Together, we'll reimagine what blessing can look like when we are willing to look beyond our culture's definitions of happiness and success. Here we make space for grief, lament, weariness, and restlessness, trusting that even our unhappiness has something to teach us about ourselves, about ...